I work for a non-union auto subcontractor in the South. As car sales have fallen, the company has cut about half its workforce. Recently, the rest of us have been put on half-time. We work forty hours every two weeks and collect some unemployment. Many have had to pick up extra minimum-wage, under-the-table jobs.

Recently we received another reminder of what capitalism is when we lost eight of our 40 hours to a company “maintenance day.” Managers and supervisors were paid to plan how to get even more work out of us, while the production workers were given an unpaid day off and left with a big hole in their paychecks. This became an opportunity to move my friends in the factory to higher levels of class consciousness.

I expressed my anger to another auto worker who works a part-time job with me. I suggested that we stop work, stage a kind of sit-down protest, to force the bosses to give us back our hours. After all, I pointed out, they still have a market for the trucks we make, and they can’t make them without us. My friend agreed, and argued that at this point “we might as well go out fighting.” So we made a plan, and the next day we both talked to others at the factory to see where they stood.

People’s opinions were quite divided. Many were down for doing something. Some worried that if too few people agreed to the action that the managers would just step in and run the line. They pointed out that it had to be all of us or none of us.

Another close friend, who had helped write a letter of support for the Boeing strikers, criticized me for being “ungrateful” for the hours that we still had. I told her that “we can’t just be passive and let things get worse.” Since she and I talk a lot about relationships, I used marriage as an analogy. When things are wrong there, she doesn’t just say, “Well, at least I have a relationship.” For the same reason, we can’t just say “well at least we have jobs” since if we took such a passive approach, the problems for the working class would get worse.

A day later, the bosses announced that everyone who had gotten cut would be able to make up the lost days. We don’t know if they had heard of our plans, but that isn’t the main point.

Key were the discussions about how one can fight, about our role as workers, all of which are part of the struggle to build up a fighting class-consciousness. Some of my friends receive CHALLENGE, and this struggle helped me understand and push the limits of their understanding of what we mean by worker’s power, of a communist society without bosses. We still have a ways to go. Many of these workers were invited to May Day. Two came to a study group to consider our ideas more, and then came to May Day and helped prepare food. These are small steps, but they are the essential first steps on the road to communism.

As we fight for the loaves of bread to eat today

We can’t forget who built the factory,

Grew the grain and who bakes the loaves of bread for tomorrow,

The workers do.

Subcontractor Comrade