Statements
Statements From The SP-USA:
Statement of Principles (pdf) A Century of Struggle: Socialist Party USA -- 1901-2001 ( pdf) The Israel/Palestine Crisis (pdf) Repeal the Hyde Amendment (pdf) Democratic Socialism and Lesbian and Gay Liberation (pdf)
Martin Luther King, Jr., and Democratic Socialism (pdf)
Socialist Summer 2005
Feed the People Not The Pentagon (pdf)
Repeal the Hyde Amendment flyer(pdf)
Fight The Taylor Law.
The Greater New York Local of the Socialist Party - USA calls for an immediate end to New York State's anti-union Taylor Law.
The 1967 'Public Employees-Fair Employment Act' made it illegal for any public employee or organization of public employees to go on strike, or even to " instigate, encourage, or condone a strike." That's right. Individual working people can be fined for so much as saying a strike is OK.
Even under capitalism, workers are SUPPOSED to have a right to bargin. How can they bargin when they have nothing to threaten? Doesn't that explain why so many NYC public employees go years without contracts? No limits are put on the coercive power of bosses, but public workers in this city can be forced to go to work by the police, forced to accept any pay and conditions the bosses demand. The 1967 law is just a retread of a 1947 law that was dumped after upstate millionare Governor Nelson Rockefeller found city officials wouldn't throw striking Transit Workers in jail as the law demanded, probably because the mayor knew the cops would have put HIM in jail if he tried.
It's time New York State recognizes that one of a working person's most basic human rights, the right to withold your own labor, can't be made a crime. When our rights are a crime against the state, then it's the bosses who should be in jail.
-- SPNYC 1/3/2006
spnyc(at)newyorksocialists.org
http://www.newyorksocialists.org.
On the NYU Graduate Student Strike: 11/05
The Socialist Party of Greater New York whole-heartedly supports the Graduate Student Union [GSOC/Local 2110 UAW] of New York University in their strike for fair union recognition. We ask that every New Yorker honor their picket lines and join the students and faculty at their rallies and meetings.
The graduate students are asking for nothing more than that the NYU administration recognize reality. There is a union of graduate students workers, the GSOC, formed and recognized in 2004. Even under the laws of this capitalist government, the administration must negotiate with that union. The administration flatly refuses to do so, safe in the knowledge the state will support them.
The real struggle of the graduate teaching assistants at NYU and every other university in this country is to reform institutions of higher learning that are, at their core, large corporations. For too long university students, staff, and faculty have bought the propaganda that they NEED corporate boards, sponsorship, bureaucracy and the tactics that come with it. They do not. The faculty can teach and the students can study without administration and ownership. All that the students have gotten from the business model of education is spiraling fees and fewer services. All the faculty have received are staffing cutbacks, lower pay, and the creation of poverty-wage 'adjunct' positions crowding out any chance for job security. Where is the money going? Where it always goes under a capitalist system: to the idle rich.
Students staff and faculty! Move your classes off campus, respect the picket lines, and you will find that your education could be cheaper, more accessable and more democratic. Only you can build an educational system that belongs to you, not some corporate board of millionares and bureaucrats.
NYU! You have nothing to lose but your chains!
--The Socialist Party of Greater New York, Local chapter of the Socialist Party-USA.