Vol. 75/No. 23      June 13, 2011

Communist workers and others turn the tables on the bosses by contributing this blood money to the Socialist Workers Party’s Capital Fund, which helps finance long-range plans of the party.

For the last 25 years, the rail bosses have been cutting crew sizes in their drive for profits. Prior to 1985 most train crews had four workers: an engineer, a conductor, and two brakemen. In 1985 the bosses got top union officials to agree to contracts that included slashing crew size. Today most crews have only an engineer and conductor—some trains are operated with only one! Crew size cutbacks have also been imposed on passenger trains.

The fatality rate for railroad brake, signal, and switch operators—among the most dangerous jobs in the United States—has been climbing.

Jim Altenberg, an Amtrak worker in the San Francisco Bay area, contributed his $1,000 bonus to the Capital Fund.

“This represents an annual bit of blood money that some conductors on Amtrak get after the union agreed a few years ago to cut the number of conductors on many passenger trains from three to two,” Altenberg explains.

“Everyone now works with a two-person crew every day. You just hope nothing happens along the way.”
 

Dan Fein in New York contributed $118.32 to the fund.

“After my employer, Perrigo, fired me last month for missing work to go to Egypt, they mailed me this ‘bonus’ check!” Fein says.

Fein was one of several communist workers who participated in a book fair in April across the street from Egypt’s Tahrir Square, selling subscriptions to the Militant along with books on revolutionary, working-class politics published by Pathfinder Press. The team also joined a demonstration by working people in the square.

“I gladly turn over this bonus check to the communist movement,” Fein writes. “On my firing—what job could be worth saving at the expense of not going to the book fair in Cairo to meet fighting workers and youth who overthrew Mubarak and are now looking for the way forward—some of them along revolutionary lines? Building the revolutionary workers movement in Tahrir Square, as I now do in New York, was truly a ‘bonus.’”
 

Workers who want to contribute blood money to the party’s Capital Fund can do so by writing or calling distributors of the Militant listed on page 8.  
 
 
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