CBTU – COMMUNIST PARTY OF MAINE

_{^{The CBTU convention in Houston. | Cameron Harrison / People’s World}}

_{Reposted from Peoples World}

HOUSTON—The full house at the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU) rose to their feet as April Verrett, the newly elected woman, and first African American, president of the two-million strong Service Employees International Union (SEIU) approached the microphone.

Verrett had come straight from the recent SEIU convention in Philadelphia on May 25 to celebrate with 1,200 delegates and guests at the 53rd International CBTU convention in Houston. The crowd included Black labor leaders from the United States, Canada, and different countries in Africa.

Speaking as one of the family of Black trade unionists, Verrett said, “We are building a powerful labor movement that unites us across race, place, and faith!” She backed this call for unity with a pledge to organize one million new members in the next ten years.

Verrett, talking about the challenges facing African American, Latino/a, and all working families in the U.S., linked the struggles for racial and economic justice with those for climate and immigrant justice. She urged organized labor and the whole working class to fully mobilize to deliver a necessary resounding defeat to the MAGA fascist forces in November.

“No single union can do this alone,” she exhorted the crowd. “It’s all of us together.”

SEIU is seeking, Verrett continued, to build a united front of workers to “usher in a new era of worker power. A new era of political power. A future where poverty wages are ended once and for all” and a society in which “racism and exploitation are ended.” The poverty wages paid to U.S. workers, most oppressively to women of color, is modern wage slavery with its roots in the chattel slavery that provided the foundational capital for U.S. economic development and wealth.

“It’s time to rise up from the ashes and keep on keepin’ on,” Verrett said. “It’s time to leave behind business as usual. It’s time to leave behind the status quo,” she continued, to cheers and a standing ovation.

In addition to Verrett, the SEIU convention also elected Rocio Saenz, who came to the U.S. at the age of 22 from Mexico, to be SEIU’s first Latina Secretary-Treasurer.

“SEIU demonstrated that we are committed to the leadership of women of color,” said Verrett. Service employees are striving to build an anti-racist, anti-sexist, pro-democratic union that puts the struggles against racism and exploitation front and center.

“The world needs us to be bold and to be innovative. It’s time for us to step up. Workers all over the world are courageous and taking action!” she said.

Speaking of the fascist threat MAGA forces pose if they win the 2024 elections, Verrett said “Black workers cannot fight this fight alone. It requires a united front” of all working-class people to block the ultra-right threat and build towards a more democratic, pro-worker society.

Continuing in the same vein, AFSCME President Lee Saunders stressed the need for “clarity and honesty” about the political situation facing the trade union movement and our country.

“We need to agitate, educate, and organize like democracy itself depends on it. Because democracy itself does depend on it,” he exclaimed. “We’re going to need an overwhelming force of the organized labor movement and Black people” if we stand any chance of blocking the fascist threat in November.

However, Saunders also spoke to the grievances felt by the working class, and particularly the Black working class. “There are important trade union issues not addressed,” like the PRO Act, “as well as Black issues not addressed…but to not vote is a serious mistake,” he said. “Our ancestors died for the right to vote, and we should never give that away. I’ll be damned if I give mine away.

“Trump is going to pay for stacking the Supreme Court. He’s going to pay for making the entire public workforce a so-called ‘right-to-work’ sector… I promise you that!” Saunders warned.

He acknowledged that “there’s a lot of apathy about this election… But if you think that Donald Trump will be good for working people, will be good for the labor movement… I want some of what you’re smoking.”

In order to effectively block the anti-union and anti-Black MAGA forces, Saunders said, we will need to “vote up and down the ballot”—from president to Congress, city councils to school boards.

“The choice is between democracy and autocracy,” Saunders pointed out. “The choice is between continuing the fight for racial justice or entering an era of racial animosity. We need to defend our unions, and we need to defend democracy!”

Verrett and Saunders were expanding on similar sentiments expressed at the CBTU convention last Thursday by Fred Redmond, Secretary-Treasurer of the AFL-CIO and the highest-ranking Black trade unionist in the U.S.

“Whether we like it or not, this election comes down to us: Black people and the labor movement,” Redmond had said. The upcoming election determines “the future of this country and the future of our labor movement.” What’s at stake in the 2024 election, according to Redmond, is the continued ability for the working class to fight for “worker’s rights, voting rights, civil rights, healthcare, water rights, the right to live and have a good-paying union job.”

In his keynote address on Thursday, Rev. Terrence Melvin, CBTU International President, said “We need to bury MAGA and defend our hard-earned gains. This is a game of inches…not a game of perfection. The stakes are just too high.”

_{We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!}

_{Cameron Harrison is a Labor Education Coordinator for the People Before Profits Education Fund. Based in Detroit, he was a grocery worker and a proud member of UFCW Local 876, where he was a shop steward. He writes about the labor and people’s movements and is a die-hard Detroit Lions fan.}

_{Eric Brooks is Co-convener of the African-American Equality Commission, CPUSA. He is organizing for an anti-racist society that puts the needs of working families over those of the rich.}

_{^{CBTU President Terry Melvin, keynoting CBTU’s 2023 Convention, called out the danger of a ‘racist, anti-democratic America’ that wants to see Black and Brown people ‘eradicated from stories about America’s less than perfect self.’ | via Machinists Union}}

_{Reposted from the People’s World}

WASHINGTON—The choice in the 2024 general election is between democracy and dictatorship, not just between Democratic President Joe Biden and presumed Republican nominee Donald Trump, the White House denizen whom Biden beat four years ago.

So says Terry Melvin, president of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists and the most outspoken speaker to address the Government Employees (AFGE) Legislative Conference in D.C. on February 12.

The key issue for attendees at the legislative conference was a 7.4% pay raise for federal workers in fiscal 2025, which begins October 1. All the speakers, led by union President Everett Kelley, pushed that cause. Delegates planned a February 13 rally plus lobbying on Capitol Hill about that. The outlook for it is murky.

“It’s getting really impossible to determine what this Congress would do,” Kelley admitted. “Now we’re listening to these little echoes” of Trump and Trumpite goals. Biden seeks a 5.2% hike.

Added veteran Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md.: “The Congress of the United States does not work. The Congress of the United States is deeply divided. The Congress of the United States is deeply divisive and dysfunctional.” That includes using federal workers as Republican political punching bags.

But, this being a presidential election year, that vote’s outcome was on everybody’s minds—including the menace of Trump, the serial misogynist and 91-count-indicted aider, abetter, and orderer of the Jan. 6, 2021, Trumpite U.S. Capitol invasion, insurrection and attempted coup d’etat.

And in 2022, Trump’s lawyers told Colorado courts he’d scrap sections of the U.S. Constitution. Just weeks ago Trump promised he’d become a dictator “but only on day one”—a limit virtually nobody else, including Trumpites, believes.

Which is what led to Melvin’s blunt analysis of the Trumpite, and Republican, threat. “The 2024 election is about the soul of this nation,” Melvin, said.

“The question on the ballot is whether we save democracy in the United States of America or do we go to a dictatorship?”

Taking us back

“Racism, white supremacy, and xenophobia are all taking us back to pre-civil rights days,” warned Melvin, without mentioning that Trump’s advocacy of such malignant ideas brought their and his adherents out of the woodwork.

Melvin’s latest example of Trump’s stranglehold on the Republicans—and, in turn, on the republic—was the recent bipartisan “deal” on immigration which senators of both parties reached, and which gave in to most GOP demands for strong anti-migrant measures.

“And then one on the Republican side, Trump said ‘Don’t sign (actually vote for) for that bill.’ And the Republicans turned around. The House Republicans called it dead on arrival.” Over 40 Senate Republicans voted not to even open debate on it, enough to stop it.

All because Trump wanted to preserve immigration bans at the U.S.-Mexico border as red meat for his legions and as a campaign issue to beat Biden with, as other Republicans admitted.

Melvin said that the way to beat Trump and other anti-worker Republicans is to emphasize Biden’s pro-worker record, point out that Republican-named Supreme Court justices and congressional Republicans stymied many of his plans, and to register increasing numbers of people of color to vote, get them to do so and ensure their ballots are counted.

Though Melvin was the most fiery Trump critic at the AFGE session, he wasn’t the only one. Union President Everett Kelley raked Trump over the coals for the Republican’s anti-union, anti-federal worker track record during Trump’s 2017-21 reign.

Kelley predicted even worse would occur for federal workers and all workers if Trump returns to the White House next January 20.

“Everybody knows our first priority is to elect a president who’s sensitive to the issues of federal employees,” Kelley told reporters after the speakers finished. “With the previous administration,” Trump’s, “we might have been dead.”

Kelley and Melvin weren’t the only Trump critics to proceed to the AFGE podium. Former House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., and longtime federal worker supporter Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., also took shots at the ex-Oval Office denizen. Connolly is the House sponsor of the pay raise bill and Hoyer supports it.

“In many ways, this election is about the pay and benefits of every American,” not just the nation’s 2.2 million federal workers, Hoyer warned. Trump’s right-wing think tank is working on schemes to emasculate 50,000 civil servants by making them subject to summary Trumpite firing, Connolly said. In other words, a return to the pre-1883 spoils system.

“The civil service system is under assault by Donald Trump and his allies. They’re planning to dismantle the civil service step by step. They’re going to look at your political backgrounds” and not just for hiring. “If they see you voted Democratic at the last election,” the installed Trumpites “will say ‘We’ll get to your claim at some point.’ But it’ll be at the bottom of the pile.”

“We gotta go home to tell people what’s going on,” Melvin warned.

_{Mark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People’s World. He is also the editor of the union news service Press Associates Inc. (PAI). Known for his reporting skills, sharp wit, and voluminous knowledge of history, Mark is a compassionate interviewer but tough when going after big corporations and their billionaire owners.}