Andrea Kirby:
Workers Need to Organize as a Class

Oct 28, 2024

The following is the text of a speech given at a Working Class Party rally in Detroit on October 6^th.

It is so exciting to be a part of a political party that really stands on a true foundation that is created around you, the working class. As we push this party forward, we are often confronted with the same questions or push back. I was talking with a worker the other day and she loved the idea of what we were doing with the Working Class Party. She took a couple flyers, said she was going to talk to her family and friends. Then she asked me why we weren’t more tied to the unions. My quick reply to her was, workers make up unions, we are tying ourselves to workers; they are the ones that are supposed to run the unions and they are the ones that vote.

Unions are a wonderful means to unify workers to fight for their rights, but they can also be very limiting. Union contracts restrict workers from striking when necessary, limiting strikes to occur only at the expiration of the contracts. Some union contracts prohibit workers from striking at all. The problem is that union fights are limited to just those groups of union workers; the fight is not inclusive to the entire working class.

2023 was considered historic for labor—we were seeing strike updates on the news every evening. A CNN headline said, “2023 was the year of the strike.” The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) headline said, “Major strike activity increased by 280% in 2023.”

If we look back to the strikes in 2023, workers all over were excited about all of the wonderful possibilities these strikes could do to affect the working class. Many saw the strikes as the answer to bringing up the living standards of the working class. The Big Three, Teamsters, UPS, Blue Cross Blue Shield of MI, casino workers, housekeepers, hotel workers. There were strikes in different industries, different unions, and in multiple places all over the country. These were workers fighting for the same things in many different battlegrounds.

In 2024, workers have continued the strike waves. Thirty-two thousand workers walked out of Boeing plants in Washington and Oregon. It was the biggest strike since last fall’s auto strike. Seventeen thousand workers at AT&T in nine southeastern states went on strike, with 8,500 workers set to join them in Nevada and California, and are now awaiting worker approval of their tentative agreement. Hotel workers in Boston carried out several waves of three-day “rolling strikes,” focused on Labor Day. Workers at the Marathon refinery in Detroit went out, and they were soon followed by workers at Eaton Aerospace in Jackson, Michigan. Flight attendants were threatening to strike at American Airlines, as were port workers in East and Gulf Coast ports.

Workers are fighting, but they are fighting within the different companies, in different industries, organized in different unions, going out separately. They nonetheless shared common grievances.

There has been a steady decrease in our standard of living with wages falling further behind inflation for years now. We are seeing constant push for speed-up across all industries and sectors. Workers are asked to do more with less, or work schedules that the bosses call “alternative” but used to squeeze every bit they can out of workers. The big guns of the capitalist class have been carrying out a brutal offensive against the whole working class, for decades now.

Regardless of what union may be fighting, the fight is the same; better wages, pensions, healthcare benefits, workplace safety, job security. Each union fighting in their own little bubble. Each union fighting entire systems, capitalism and government.

We saw how the government intervened back in 2022 when the rail workers took a stand and attempted to strike. Washington jumped right in to break up any thoughts of rail traffic disruption, telling workers they couldn’t show their force and strike. Even more recently with the three-day longshoremen strike. This is a situation that is not yet over, only postponed after government intervention.

If we continue to keep our fights within the union structure, we will continue to lose as a class. Union membership is declining. Laws are being passed to make it harder to be in a union in some states. Most workers aren’t even in a union. Unions can be busted. We need to unify ourselves on a different level, a class level.

We need something that bands us together beyond unions. We need our own mass political party, the Working Class Party. We need a party that will fight against inflation. A party that fights for everyone that wants a job to have a job. We need a party that believes that the working class, who creates the wealth in society, the class that sits at the very heart of the economy, should be the ones in control of that wealth. We need a party that will fight to unite us as one class. Black, white, native born, immigrant, women, men; all of us. Division is the power the bosses use to keep us fighting each other and focused on the crumbs on the ground.

This is the program of the Working Class Party. The party we are trying to build, it is not what we have, yet. We have grown from three candidates to fifteen here in Michigan. We also have active campaigns in Illinois, Maryland and California. This is something to be proud of, but it is a drop in the bucket for what we really need. We need our message to spread to all 50 states. We need working class people all over this country to begin to unite as a class, because that is what the rich do. And they don’t just wait for election cycles to do it. Elections are a means to have our voices heard, but it will be the unity of our people, working class people all over this nation and the world, that will change our situations.