Socialist Workers Party

Socialist Workers Party members, and members of the Communist Leagues in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, are using the Militant to discuss with working people the big political questions facing our class worldwide.

They are taking the paper to workers on their doorsteps, at strike picket lines and at political protest actions, and telling them about the program and activities of the parties.

Communist League members Beverly Bernardo and Katy LeRougetel spoke with some 40 participants in a weekly Bring Them Home march and rally in Montreal Jan. 5. The protests demand Hamas return the hostages it has held since its murderous Oct. 7, 2023, pogrom against Jews in Israel. Two Syrians took part, carrying the three-starred Syrian flag popular in the mass celebrations that have taken place since the fall of the Bashir al-Assad dictatorship.

“Some people say they’re worried about what will replace Assad,” one of the Syrians told LeRougetel. “But I tell them, it’s two different things. First, Assad has gone. Now it’s up to us what comes next.” He gave a $5 donation to get a copy of the Militant.

LeRougetel and Joe Young attended a rally in downtown Montreal Jan. 11 calling for the repressive government in Iran to free all political prisoners. The 50 participants also commemorated the 176 people killed when the Iranian military shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 on Jan. 8, 2020.

“We used to think it wasn’t possible to do anything against the government,” Leyla Fakhari, as she helped organize the “Woman, Life, Freedom” banner in French, Farsi and English, told LeRougetel. “Now that Assad is gone, we have hope. But we’re watching what happens next.”

“Workers in Syria have won space to breathe and to organize in their own name. We have to do the same here,” said LeRougetel.

“Yes, in Iran, the retired workers, the nurses, the oil workers, they’re rallying for their wages, but also for freedom for political prisoners,” Fakhari said. Taking note of the Militant’s coverage of these struggles, she bought a copy.

“Hamas and the Iran government, they’re both terrorist,” Eli Givari, a day care worker, told LeRougetel. Givari pointed to the picture on a Militant Labor Forum flyer of 19-year-old Naama Levy being kidnapped by a Hamas thug during the Oct. 7 pogrom. “They do the same to women in Iran. Tehran and Hamas are good friends and they teach each other about what they can do,” she said.

Rally participants chanted the name of Zhina Amini, a young Kurdish woman who died Sept. 16, 2022, after being brutalized by Iranian police for not wearing proper head covering.

“It’s the blows delivered by Israel against Hamas and Hezbollah that helped topple Assad,” said LeRougetel. “Yes, Hamas started the war and the Israelis are just defending their country,” Givari replied.

As rally participants started chanting in Farsi, LeRougetel asked Bita Jalali, a kindergarten teacher, what they were saying. “Kurds, Baluchi, Turks, fraternity, equality,” she said. “Amini was Kurdish. And now people say the Kurdish revolution is happening in Balochistan. We are united.”

Jalali explained that the song being played at the rally was by Iranian rapper Toomaj Salehi, who was released from prison in December after being sentenced to death “for his music. He was held in isolation. Activists in Iran and around the world campaigned to free him. First his sentence was reduced, and now he’s out. It shows even little steps count!”

Communist League members Michel Prairie and LeRougetel spent an hour outside the huge Canada Post sorting center in Montreal’s St. Lawrence district Jan. 10 introducing workers to the Militant. Some 55,000 postal workers went on strike across Canada in November, until the government used a notorious anti-labor law to order them back to work. “Postal workers and others liked the sign we brought, saying ‘Union solidarity, for a party of labor, workers must take power. Read the Militant,’” Prairie told the paper.

“Some workers stopped to talk, asking if we would be back again since they didn’t have money on them. One postal worker bought a Militant and described company-spread rumors about work schedule changes,” he said. “Many are looking to the May deadline for a possible new strike. We will continue to get out the paper here and build solidarity with their ongoing fight.”

To join in getting out the Militant and program of the communist movement, contact the party branch nearest you.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/31165983

"Donu al ni la saman kondiĉon kiel en la aliaj hoteloj," kriegis la piketantoj antaŭ Virgin Hotels Las Vegas la 6-an de januaro. Ĉirkaŭ 700 membroj de la Sindikato de Kulinariaj Laboristoj Lokala 226 — ĉambro-servistoj, koktelo- kaj manĝservistoj, portistoj, portistoj, kuiristoj, barmenoj kaj lavadaroj kaj kuiraj laboristoj — estas en striko ekde la 15-a de novembro.

Per protestoj kaj intertraktadoj, la sindikato gajnis kontraktojn kovrantajn preskaŭ ĉiujn 50,000 membrojn, krom la 700 kiuj nun estas en striko, diris Bethany Kahn, komunikada direktoro de Lokala 226, al la Militant.

Tiuj novaj interkonsentoj inkluzivas 10%-an salajran pliiĝon en la unua jaro kaj 32% en pliiĝoj ĝenerale dum kvin jaroj. Antaŭ la novaj kontraktoj, la salajroj por sindikataj hotelaj laboristoj ĉi tie estis ĉirkaŭ $20 hore.

La posedantoj de Virgin Hotels Las Vegas proponis ofende malaltan pliiĝon, kio provokis la strikon. "Ili proponis al ni 30 cendojn, dum la normo en aliaj hoteloj estas $9 dum kvin jaroj," diris Rudy Royal, organizanto de Bartenders Union Local 165, al la Militant. Tiu loka sindikato, alia filio de UNITE HERE, ankaŭ estas en striko.

Virgin alportis anstataŭigajn laboristojn kaj pagas ilin generoze, diras la laboristoj. "Iuj homoj ricevas $300 tage, kaj tamen la kompanio rifuzas pagi al ni la pliiĝon, kiun ni meritas," diris hotelista laboristino Isabel Sanz al Channel 8 News la 4-an de januaro dum sindikate organizita "Noche Cubana" festo. Ĝi festas la kulturon de kelkaj el la membroj de UNITE HERE en Nevado, kiuj inkluzivas laboristojn el 178 landoj, kiuj parolas 40 lingvojn.

La posedantoj de Virgin rifuzis intertrakti, postulis anstataŭe ke la sindikato konsentu al deviga arbitracio. "Ni neniam solvis strikon aŭ kontrakton per arbitracio en la historio de Las Vegas," diris Ted Pappageorge, la sekretario-trezoristo de Lokala 226, la 29-an de decembro.

Virgin Hotels estas posedataj de tri kanadaj grupoj — Fengate Asset Management, Juniper Capital kaj la $8-miliardaj LiUNA Pensi-fondo de Orienta kaj Centra Kanado, administrata por la Sindikato de Laboristoj. La strikantoj apelaciis al LiUNA por subteno.

Dua kazino-portisto sur la piketlinio, Maria Gómez, 50, kaj Martha Violante, 49, kiuj ambaŭ purigas fendo-maŝinojn, banĉambrojn, restoraciojn kaj la naĝejon, diris al la Militant, ke ili estas optimismaj. "Ni aŭdas, ke la hotelo estas malpura, ĉiuj restoracioj estas fermitaj, kaj la bruo de la sindikataj tamburistoj ĝenas la gastojn," diris Violante. Gómez, kiu komencis ses monatojn antaŭe, foriris por striki tuj post kiam ŝi finis la provan periodon.

Sindikataj membroj el aliaj hoteloj kaj restoracioj volontulas sur la piketlinio, kiu estas aktiva 24/7. Ili invitas ĉiujn aliĝi. Mesajoj de solidareco kaj financaj kontribuoj povas esti senditaj al Culinary Workers Union Local 226, 1630 S. Commerce St., Las Vegas, NV 89102, aŭ retpoŝte al [email protected]. Rete eblas kontribui ĉe la retejo de la United Labor Agency of Nevada "Subteni la Virgin Las Vegas Strikan Solidarecan Fondon".

The American evolutionary biologist and historian of science Stephen Jay Gould’s column for Natural History magazine began as a way to balance the political convictions of his civil rights experiences with his desire to revolutionize evolutionary theory. As his career soared to new heights in later decades, his professional ambitions eventually eclipsed his leftist politics. But in the late 1970s, he was still using the column to address contemporary debates over science and politics. In the spring of 1976, he decided to weigh in on a controversy close to home with a column titled “Biological Potential vs. Biological Determinism,” which joined in the leftist criticism of the biologist Edward O. Wilson’s 1975 book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis.

By then, he and Wilson had been colleagues in Harvard’s biology department for several years. At first glance, Wilson’s book might not have appeared to be the most likely candidate to spark leftist outrage. It was a long academic volume that synthesized empirical work on a host of animal taxa with the aim of clarifying a new program for the evolutionary study of social behavior. Wilson was convinced that the qualities of social life — e.g., aggression, cooperation, and hierarchies — were as much a product of natural selection as were physical traits. And in what would become an infamous last chapter, he extended this argument to the study of human societies. The book was far more empirically grounded in its treatment of human evolution than the popular works of Robert Ardrey, Konrad Lorenz, and Desmond Morris, which had fed into narratives of inevitable race war at the height of civil rights activism. Nevertheless, Sociobiology was at the heart of the most consequential debate between the leftist and liberal perspectives on science and American democracy of the era.

Wilson’s writings became a flash point as a new set of evolutionary models of sex difference clashed with the political demands of an intense phase of the American women’s movement. New legal triumphs that guaranteed the right to contraception for married couples, the right to abortion, and protections against sex-based discrimination were counterbalanced by a ferociously energetic conservative Christian movement that fought against the Equal Rights Amendment and any possibility of changing women’s place in American society. Even as women across the country reimagined their roles at home, at work, and at church — and pushed for the legal protections to do so — reactionary politics continually insisted on limiting what women could do and be.

It was in the midst of this political tumult that Wilson’s book (alongside other texts on the evolution of social behavior, including Richard Dawkins’s 1976 The Selfish Gene) promoted a new evolutionary narrative that claimed that contemporary American gender roles were the products of prehistoric adaptations encoded in humanity’s genes. Sociobiologists like Wilson and Dawkins envisioned a prehistoric past in which women gathered food and lived in family camps, while men went out to hunt and seek new sexual partners. In subsequent decades, scientists and nonscientists alike would deploy this narrative in both scientific and popular settings to rationalize gender disparities in STEM fields and the workplace and to naturalize rape. Gould’s criticism of Wilson was joined by critiques developed by other leftists from the sciences and the humanities, who viewed sociobiology as reactionary politics rather than sound science. And the sustained protest against the sexism of sociobiology over the next two decades would be led by the leaders of feminist science collectives, including Ruth Hubbard, a biologist at Harvard, and Ethel Tobach, a psychologist at the American Museum of Natural History.

Before sending his column on sociobiology to Natural History for publication, Gould sent a draft of it to Wilson. Wilson’s outraged reply and the subsequent exchange between the two men reveals far more than just the contours of their personal animosity. As expressed in his letters to Gould and in later publications, Wilson had a more classically liberal view of science’s proper role in American democracy. Liberals view science as truthful knowledge that serves as a foundation for an enlightened society to guarantee equality and enact rational governance. Thus, they consider science essential for democracy, but they do not prioritize a democratic approach to the actual practice of science. As liberals see it, even when science is only done and understood by a few elite white men, the reliability of its knowledge of the natural world enables it to be the foundation of an equitable society.

This understanding of science and democracy was unacceptable to Gould, as well as to other leftists in the radical and feminist science circles that protested Wilson’s book. Although their understanding of science for the people was by no means consistent, members of these movements shared a conviction that the elitism of science impeded its capacity to support democracy. For leftists, the inclusion of women and minoritized racial groups in the professional practice of science was essential if science was to contribute to a progressive society. Wilson, for his part, characterized the attacks by Gould and others in what became known as the Sociobiology Study Group (SSG) as an attempt to restrict the freedom of scientific research and a worrisome sign of intellectual censorship.

By the end of the century, many public scientific liberals would castigate both Gould’s historical accounts of scientific racism and the feminist accounts of gender bias in science as “anti-scientific.” But the history of this late 1970s moment reveals that neither Gould nor feminist scientists saw their criticisms of sociobiology as anti-science. In fact, they understood the debate to be a conversation within the scientific community about the evidence for a new model within evolutionary science.

They believed that a better science, one that acknowledged the pitfalls of gender and racial bias, could be achieved through collective self-reflection on the motivations and practices of scientific work. And this better science could, in turn, be used to combat what these leftist academics feared were reactive and oppressive political actions. Their willingness to address the role of social influence in science and to publicly criticize current scientific research, however, set the stage for a new cultural divide. By the end of the century, sociobiology had claimed the mantle of scientific authority on human sexuality. And feminist and other leftist academics struggled to stave off accusations that their approach to scientific knowledge was itself anti-scientific.

December saw a number of important developments at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The month started well for unions but ended badly. Some observers complained of whiplash!

On December 10, the five-member board, still under Democratic control, issued a long-awaited decision freeing unions from the most deleterious features of management-rights clauses.

The case, Endurance Environmental Solutions, LLC, overruled MV Transportation, a 2019 decree from Donald Trump’s first term in office.

MV Transportation created an outrageous presumption that unions that agree to generally worded management-rights clauses intend to give employers a right to change work rules, hours, or other conditions of work without giving prior notice or extending an opportunity to bargain.

Since most labor agreements have broad management-rights language, MV Transportation had a devastating impact, allowing employers to cancel important rights and benefits without fear of legal challenge.

When Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020, union activists hoped that he would soon nullify MV Transportation by restoring activist Democratic control of the NLRB. They cheered when Biden’s first picks, Democratic SEIU lawyers David Prouty and Gwynne Wilcox, formed a majority along with incumbent Democratic chairperson Lauren McFerran.

Disappointment gradually followed, however, as for almost five years the Biden labor board failed to take aim at management rights. With only a few weeks left in Biden’s term, the board finally came through.

Endurance Solutions squarely reversed MV Transportation, stating that “management-rights clauses that are couched in general terms and make no reference to any particular subject area will not be construed as waivers of the statutory right to bargain over a specific subject.”

This holding reduced the legal significance of most management-rights clauses to little more than vague statements of philosophy.

It did not take long for Republicans to hit back with a vengeance. On December 11, without a legitimate basis in her record, the Senate rejected President Biden’s routine renomination of Chairperson McFerran to a second five-year slot on the board.

McFerran’s confirmation would have cemented a Democratic Board majority until at least 2026. Her rejection will give Trump the ability to nominate her replacement as well as fill an existing vacancy, giving the Republicans a decisive 3–2 majority.

To win the vote against McFerran, the Trump forces needed at least one independent or Democrat to vote with the forty-nine Republicans. Mavericks Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) and Joe Manchin (I-WV) quickly lent their support, quashing the nomination fifty to forty-nine (one Republican didn’t vote).

Once Trump’s next set of nominees are confirmed, we can expect them to try to reverse several pro-union precedents. These include:

Stericycle, which imposed strong standards against chilling employer rules and policies; Cemex, which in some cases compels employers to recognize union majorities without an election; Amazon, which largely bans captive-audience anti-union meetings; And, of course, the newly inked Endurance Environmental Solutions. From a union standpoint, the future of labor law has rarely looked so perilous.

Questions and Answers Q. We work for the state of California. Do changes in NLRB policies affect us?

A. Yes, but not directly. The National Labor Relations Act only has jurisdiction over private sector employers and employees. Federal and state agencies come under the supervision of public sector labor boards. Nonetheless, these bodies often look to the NLRB for direction.

Q. Could Donald Trump fire all the existing Democratic members of the Board as well as Democratic administrative law judges (ALJs)?

A. For years, the answer to such a question was a strong no, based on constitutional principles, free speech, and due process. Recent litigation, however, suggests that some federal judges may be receptive to granting the president new levels of control over personnel decisions. The issue is likely to bubble over in the years ahead.

Q. We hear that some employers are asking courts to rule that the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) — our fundamental federal labor law, passed in 1935, which gives workers the right to form unions and take collective action — is unconstitutional. Is there any strength to the argument?

A. Hard to say. The US Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the NLRA in 1937. Nonetheless, in recent years, Amazon, SpaceX, and Trader Joe’s have railed against it, contending that the NLRB has too much power. Most observers believe the argument lacks merit, even if a sympathetic Supreme Court hears the matter.

Moreover, the ruling class takes a chance by gutting the NLRA — workers and unions may press for their demands in the streets, a venue where they have the advantage.

Q. If the NLRB keeps turning to the right, should unions continue to file unfair labor practice charges and election petitions?

A. Yes — unless the NLRB goes completely over to the dark side. Even if the board becomes ultraconservative, hundreds of decent ALJs, hearing officers, and enforcement personnel will continue giving unions a fair shake.

Moreover, if the minority Democratic board members use stalling tactics, as can be expected, employers may not be able to reverse major labor principles for several years; it took five years before a Democratic majority was able to overturn MV Transportation.

In the meantime, unions may be able to win tactical victories while building a united front to save the labor agency from total capitulation.