The Local 1199 SEIU Healthcare Workers East Delegates’ Assembly unanimously passed a resolution to support the Stella D’Oro bakery strikers, as part of the PLP initiative to build working-class unity and support for striking workers. The Delegates’ Assembly agreed to send a contribution to the bakers’ local and encourage workers to visit their picket lines at the Bronx bakery.

After hearing that the bakery was employing scabs to break the strike, demanding huge wage-cuts, and is victimizing a group of largely Latino women and minority workers, several workers got up to second the resolution. The SEIU leadership had spent the previous hour and a half extolling the virtues of the Obama electoral campaign.

The PLP delegate introducing the Stella D’Oro resolution had been in Pennsylvania with the Obama campaign working to build ties with co-workers and other union delegates and to expose the dead-end of building capitalism to fight racism. He prefaced the resolution by stating that what struck him most during his time with the Obama campaign was when he saw a white working-class family in Chester, PA pulling up in a station wagon to a black family’s home to spend the day together. He remarked that “Change comes from the workers, not from the top.”

This resolution is only a first step. Building the close ties with co-workers and other union members is essential to advancing the basic truth that the only solution is communist revolution. We are in the process of building our CHALLENGE networks and having our readers become distributors of PLP’s ideas.