US Railroad strike here ♦ Great Britain strike here ♦
Turn the Might of Railway and Other Industrial Workers to Communist Revolution, Not Trade Unionism
USA, September 14— Some 150,000 railroad workers might go on strike Friday, Sept. 16, when the second 60-day “cooling off period” imposed by the Biden administration ends. It would be the first national strike by railroad workers in 30 years.
The workers welcome the strike as a chance to vent their anger and hatred of the bosses and gain some meaningful reforms. Their lives on the job are unbearable. Over 40,000 have been laid off recently – 20,000 in 2019 alone. Despite automation, the workload and hours for the remaining workers increased tremendously. The bosses impose these slave-like conditions with vicious, fascist discipline. Workers lose their jobs for getting sick, attending routine medical visits. or even taking time off for a loved one’s funeral.
These conditions demand not a strike for reforms but a revolution for communist workers’ power to put an end to capitalism’s horrors. We need to destroy this system that works us to the bone while making billionaires richer. While railroad workers struggle to make ends meet with an average wage of $24 an hour, capitalists like Warren Buffet—owner of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad which employs 41,000 workers – increased their fortunes by $196 billion from 2010-2019.
We need communism, where our lives and our needs at work, at home, and everywhere take precedence over everything. This will never happen under capitalism: money is its whole purpose of being. Money to buy our labor power to enslave us to produce more money for the capitalists! Money that condemns our class to go homeless, hungry, and sick because if we do not have money the capitalists will not let us have what we need – even though we produce everything!
Collectively producing and distributing the products of our labor according to need will end our dependence on a wage to survive. It will end capitalism’s wage slavery and money, the chain that binds us to the capitalists. It will end markets – no more buying or selling of anything, especially our labor power. Ending wage slavery and the competition it forces on us will end the basis of racism, sexism, and xenophobia.
Communism will create a world without borders and nations. A world where humanity – composed only of workers and our families – will eradicate the scourge of war and all capitalism’s profit-first policies that are destroying our planet.
For this we need an armed revolution to destroy the capitalists-imperialists and their system. Our so-called union leaders work for the bosses. There might not even be a strike: eight of the twelve unions have already reached tentative agreements with the companies.
The bosses do not want a strike which will cost them $2 billion a day. It will disrupt their transportation of passengers and goods. But most important, it can inspire millions of other workers to fight against the bosses’ attacks. When workers are in motion, we can win them to fight for communism. This is the biggest fear the capitalists have and the biggest service the union leaders render them: they build anticommunism!
One of the two largest unions still holding out is the IBEW. Capitalists organized this union during the 1930s to counter the communist led UE. The communists mistakenly did not try to win the workers to fight for communism, only for reforms. The bosses offered a twenty-five-cent wage increase to all UE workers who would switch to IBEW: tens of thousands did.
However, we still face the same problems. We cannot reform capitalism to meet our needs. We must destroy it. The US Communist Party in the 1930s ignored this fact and became reformist themselves, ending up in irrelevancy. The UE became another capitalist union guaranteeing the capitalists’ profits.
The International Communist Workers’ Party has learned from this history. We mobilize masses directly for communism, nothing less. Join us to fight for the communist world we need!
Great Britain, September 14— Over 40,000 workers walked out of their jobs last spring in Britain’s largest rail strike since 1989. A series of rolling 24-hour strikes continues. Workers are demanding a pay raise in response to skyrocketing inflation. Railway bosses are threatening thousands of layoffs and the government is letting them hire replacement workers (scabs). Militant strikers carry signs demanding cuts in profits, not in pay or jobs. But the logic of their anti-capitalist struggle requires, not demands on the bosses, but communist revolution to overthrow their profit system.
Canadian Rail Strike, 2022