While Ford workers in North America prepare to weather a new round of plant closings and layoffs, their bosses in Detroit have unveiled plans for new plants in China, a country with the world’s fastest growing car market along with rock-bottom wages. Meanwhile, Russian Ford workers have won an important victory not only against the company but against the new, repressive Russian Labor Code.

The big corporations in North America, Western Europe and Japan are moving more of their factories abroad in search of lower wages. But in the process they are tying the interests of the international working class more closely together. In global companies like Ford, the interests of a section of workers on almost every continent are directly linked. The answer to capitalist globalization is to link up workers’ struggle worldwide.

It is frustrating that the American working class has no party that represents their interests.  The vast majority of the 300 million people in this country are workers and their families.  They are people who sell their labor power to the boss and depend on the wages and benefits to feed their families.  If they are unemployed for a stretch, they can lose everything.  However, we must be clear: the working class has tremendous potential power.  Not one item would be produced in a factory, not a street would be cleaned, electricity would not be generated and communication could not function as it does, without the labor of the workers. 

Just as workers have learned that if we band together at work into a union, where our strength is united into a single force, we can more effectively fight the boss, if we band together into a political party, created by and under the democratic control of the labor movement, we can better fight the government of the employers.