There are millions of people today in this City who are living in fear for their lives and safety. A devious and secretive group of enemies are daily hatching new schemes to ruin their way of live and to terrorize them into submission. Their enemies claim to be fighting for righteousness and are fanatical in pursuit of their goals. For many of its victims just to speak out against this enemy is to draw its anger and spite.
The millions who are so terrorized are the poor and working people of this City. The enemy is Bush, Pataki, Bloomberg and the rich and powerful whose paid servants they are. Their weapons of terror — budget cuts, elimination of programs, attacks on the standard of living, and ideological assault on their opponents (along with some political arm twisting as needed). Their ideology *#8212; tax cuts, the free market, a "healthy economy" — a masquerade for their real agenda, to enrich their friends even further and to disempower those who they deem unworthy.
But there are mean by which workers and the disempowered can defend themselves against this enemy. We can and must build real workplace organizations — call them unions, councils, or whatever — that can not only defend our rights and conditions on the job, but work toward a better world where these kinds of attacks are just a bad memory. We need mass organizations in our communities to express our needs and concerns on that level. And we need to link our struggles with those of poor and working people everywhere.
But what we don’t need are more self-serving leaders and bureaucrats to do our fighting for us — not that they really do any serious fighting. We don’t need more Dennis Riveras and Randi Weingartens to sell us on what a friend of labor George Pataki is, get us to come out and vote for him, and then be surprised when he turns around and cuts health care, worker safety and in general kicks us in the butt for our favors. Let’s send them back to their old workplaces and let them earn an honest living for a change.
What we need is a labor movement not tied down to political parties or the electoral system in general, with decisions made collectively by the membership and with delegates who carry out our mandates and are subject to immediate recall when they don’t. We need a movement that embraces the widest spectrum of the poor and disempowered and seeks to unify them instead of dividing them up into competing sectors. We need a movement with a vision of a new society where power, profit and privilege are truly a thing of the past.
We of the Workers Solidarity Alliance are men and women like yourself who have a vision of how things can be and are working to bring it about. To do so we not only give solidarity to on-going struggles but try to put forward our ideas and seek to engage other working people in dialogue about them. We don’t expect you to agree with everything we say, but we hope you will think about it and talk it over with ourselves and you fellow workers. By this sort of discussion we can hopefully find the way to real "homeland security" for the working people of this city and of the world.
Workers Solidarity Alliance
339 Lafayette Street — Room 202
New York, New York 10012
212-979-8353
wsany@hotmail.com
www.workersolidarity.org