By John Oliver
Photos: People’s World\YouTube Screenshot
DURHAM—“Who’s got your back? We got your back!” chanted Union of Southern Service Workers (USSW) worker-organizer and Communist Party USA labor organizer Erica Meade to a gathering of dozens of trade unionists and labor activists at the Peoples’ Solidarity Hub in North Carolina this past weekend.
This year, workers have been traumatized by the rapid decay of not only their rights in the workplace but in almost all areas of life—from health care and education to retirement. For immigrant workers, even the ability to work in this country is under threat.
The CPUSA’s Southern Labor Conference faced these threats head on, bringing together trade unionists and activists for a two-day session in Durham, May 31-June 1, to strategize for the struggles ahead.
As has been the case in the past, the South is a primary battleground for the billionaire-backed assaults on jobs, communities, living conditions, and workers’ hard-won, albeit limited, democratic gains.
“The South has a proud and unrecognized history of fighting for democracy under the most difficult conditions,” Roberta Wood of the CPUSA Labor Commission said in opening the conference.
Wood declared, “We workers, actually all of humanity, are living in a political moment when anyone paying attention is scared to death.” She pointed to the growing danger of fascism in the U.S. and said attacks on the labor movement should be seen in that context.
She emphasized that the threat of fascism “is not an expression of capitalism’s power and success,” but rather a “dangerous manifestation of its failure.” Whereas the economic system may have been seen free market competition in the past, today capitalism relies on “monopolizing markets, price-fixing, squeezing out competitors and extracting profit through government contracts and market manipulation.”
All these things are combining to put a tighter squeeze on workers’ living standards and pushing corporations and government to restrict the labor movement, Wood said. “Fascism,” she pointed out, “is the solution capital turns to when its old ways aren’t working anymore… READ MORE…
