A sample of what lies ahead.

Colorado Springs is a city which, like most others, has a serious budget crisis. City officials say that a 10% cut in the city budget is immediately necessary. This city is a home to mega- churches including the New Life Church, the Christian ministry Focus on the Family and it has five military installations. There is an extreme right wing culture in the city. It is evident. What is going on there is also a sign of things that can come in the cities across the land.

After firing firefighters and cops and stopping buses running at night or the weekend, and still having a budget deficit the city has now moved on to a new phase in its attacks on working people. It is increasingly cutting jobs by getting the religious and charity organizations and individuals to do the work of formerly paid workers for nothing. These strike breaking outfits and individuals take workers jobs and leave working families with nothing. Taxi drivers are being asked to keep their eyes open in place of the cops who have been fired. Residents pay $100 a year to adopt a street light. Volunteers are organizing to empty garbage cans in the parks. One of the four community centers in the city is to be run on a voluntary basis by a church.

This is a vicious attack on workers, especially low paid workers. Who needs buses most, the low paid? Who has no garden of their own and wants the peace of a park, the low paid. Who needs a job with benefits rather than seeing their job taken over by some right wing religious strike breaker? The unemployed.

This is a stepping up of the process in US society over the past decades where the bosses have been getting workers to work work for nothing. It used to be that when you went to a cafe or restaurant or coffee shop or bank or airport or supermarket, you were approached by staff and they saw to your needs. They were paid for this. This was their job. Now you go to a coffee shop or cafe nine times out of ten they expect you to bus your own dishes or serve yourself. I never bus my dishes. This would be scabbing. I would be doing somebody out of a job. There are millions of people out there with no work who should be hired. I explain this to the workers. Now the bosses are trying to get us to fill out the forms in banks that the cashiers used to fill out, they are trying to get us to self check out in the supermarkets, they are trying to get us to self check in at the airport, it never ends. They do not have to pay workers for this work, jobs are not available in these sectors as they used to be, we should not let ourselves be used as scabs.

The union leaders should get off they back sides and organize all workers, fight for a thirty five hour week with no loss of pay to create jobs and a program of public works to create jobs for all. They should appeal to all workers not to do the work or other workers.

Instead these union leaders are going along with the scabbing and job destroying policies such as those in Colorado Springs. This has to stop. If the union leaders do not organize to stop it, do not lay out a program as explained above and mobilize its tens of millions of members to fight then it will be ended by an explosive movement of the working class from below. While demanding that the union leaders lead we must organize fighting caucuses of activists and workers in the workplaces, the unions, the neighborhoods, the schools and colleges, the communities. Things will only get worse until the rich and their right wing politicians and policies are given a good whipping and driven back, until they are taught a lesson which threatens their entire capitalist system.

Sean.