http://themilitant.com/2018/8215/821501.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 82/No. 15 April 16, 2018
(lead article, editorial)
Join the protests — Build, fight for labor solidarity!
The walkout by teachers in Oklahoma is part of a rising wave of school
workers strikes and protests across the country that point the way
forward for the entire labor movement.
Inspired by the social movement union members built in West Virginia,
teachers in Oklahoma were confident to reject the state’s pay raise and
small increase in funding as insufficient and walk out. When Kentucky’s
legislature slashed teachers’ pensions last week, they didn’t hesitate
to walk out and march on the Capitol. Thousands of teachers in Arizona
rallied March 28 and plan to step up their protests if the state doesn’t
meet their demand for a pay raise.
Get in your car, book a flight, get on a bus — make your way to these
fights. Join the picket lines and rallies teachers and their allies are
organizing in Oklahoma and elsewhere. Stand with them. And use what you
learn to get your union and co-workers to send messages of solidarity
and contribute to their strike funds.
Solidarity is needed. Like the bosses in mines, mills and factories,
state government officials are determined to make working people pay for
the economic, political and moral crisis of their capitalist system, and
are going after workers’ pay, pensions, health care and dignity.
Workers solidarity is even more important for teachers and other public
workers. They confront the capitalist rulers only indirectly. Whether
their bosses are a school board or state government, they aren’t
capitalists themselves, but government bodies that represent the class
interests of the bosses.
Autoworkers, coal miners and other private-employed workers can use
their collective power on the shop floor and the picket line to fight
boss attacks, and can strike and shut production, cutting off the
bosses’ profits.
Members of the Socialist Workers Party are organizing to get to these
battles, and seek to bring co-workers, others we work with and youth to
go with us. Join us! Contact the party branch nearest you listed in the
directory.
We’ll use the Militant and books by SWP leaders to deepen the
discussions we have with strikers and others about the class divide
between workers on one side and bosses and their government on the
other. We explain that everything that breaks down the divisions they
try to push on us — employed vs. unemployed, native-born vs. immigrant,
men vs. women, Black vs. Caucasian — is in our interest. On this road we
can chart a course to independent working-class political action and the
fight to take political power into our own hands.
Let’s get going!
Related articles:
Teachers rise up, press fight for wages, dignity
Tens of thousands walk out, rally in Oklahoma, Kentucky
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