LOS ANGELES, October 12 — After a bus driver’s nephew, Darrick Collins, a young black worker, was murdered by a racist county Sheriff (see CHALLENGE, 10/14), we asked the driver to speak at our union meeting of mechanics about this racist terror. When we talked to the family at the funeral, they called the uncle, and after a long phone conversation he said he’d be glad to speak to other union members. He related a dozen other recent police killings, news of which we distributed in our PLP flyers, “Wanted for Mass Murder: LA Sheriffs and Capitalism.”

We told the driver we wanted to introduce a motion to condemn the Sheriff’s Dept. for this brutal racist murder and call for a five-minute work-stoppage in protest. “But,” we said, “we know the union leadership will do everything they can to prevent the motion.” The driver was unfazed, saying “I’ll have to get time off from work to make the meeting, but I‘m coming.”

When the driver arrived at the meeting, the union president said, “You’ll have to wait outside. You’re in the driver’s union. This is a mechanic’s union.” This “warm show of unity” toward another transit worker brought by a mechanic was followed by the divisive union hack’s warning the membership, “Watch your pockets!” (In other words, “he’s just here looking for money.”)

But the rank-and-filers at the meeting rejected the mis-leadership’s motion to exclude the driver, saying they wanted to hear the brother. The Party, through CHALLENGE readers and friends, fought to make sure workers supported this fight in the union and at work.

‘We’re the ones they come down on…’

After waiting half-an-hour in the lobby, the driver was received and spoke humbly but urgently for us to take a stand against the killings. “I didn’t come here for pity or charity. I came to raise your awareness. I’m no one special; I’m just a blue-collar worker like all of you,” but he warned, “We are the ones they come down on, the ones they kill, like this young man in my family.”

Then there was a long discussion where workers talked angrily about experiences of racist police terror and jailings, while the union president sat numbly at the back. But soon he resumed his real role by ruling a job-action motion “out of order.” “We have contracts,” he cried. “We would get huge fines like New York City’s transit union [in 2005].” A service attendant asked sarcastically if we could now expect cops to shoot us with picket signs in our hands, when we go on strike, recalling a cop killing of a man with a stick in his front yard. “We won’t be going on strike,” the president told him.  But another worker said, “We need to go on strike!” Another worker said that everyone should wear red arm bands in protest of the racist murder of Darrick Collins.

Afterwards, in discussions in the parking lot, a black technician thanked a worker for inviting him and “for staying on my ass to make sure I came.” One mechanic was disappointed in himself for not “shoving the president’s words down his own throat. It crossed my mind to make a motion to give a thousand dollars to the family since the driver never even thought about money. “He [the president] insulted all of us.”

For The Future

As U.S. capitalism declines, it increasingly unleashes racist terror. Workers plan to take this motion to the drivers’ union as well. Even though we didn’t win the motion, more workers are reading and distributing CHALLENGE. The confidence of newer and older PLP members in the workers and the Party is growing.

Our leaflet, distributed outside and inside bus divisions, declared that these racist, cold-blooded murders by the bosses’ death squads are aimed at instilling terror in all workers, to accept passively the bosses’ economy of sacrifice and their genocidal wars for oil. It called for revolution to destroy racist capitalism.