Build the labor movement’s fight against oppression!

By Hannah Swoboda, Workers Strike Back. Published May 16, 2023

End caste discrimination from British Columbia to California!

In February, Workers Strike Back led a movement alongside anti-caste activists and socialist Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant to win the world’s first ban on caste discrimination outside South Asia. Caste is a system of oppression that affects over 250 million worldwide, particularly in South Asia and in heavily South Asian communities and workplaces, including in the United States.

This ban was a historic victory for South Asians and working people the world over. In the hands of the bosses under capitalism, caste is yet another way to divide working people against each other in order to exploit them, just like race, gender, nationality and religion. Caste discrimination is especially prevalent in the U.S. tech industry because of its relatively larger number of South Asian immigrant workers. An injury to one is an injury to all: that’s why we built a powerful movement of working people and union members across caste and nationality to win this much-needed protection. 

Workers Strike Back is committed to fighting against all forms of oppression and spreading the lessons of our victories far and wide. We don’t rest on our laurels. Workers Strike Back is helping to take the fight forward in every union, in every city, in every state. In early April, Workers Strike Back activists from Seattle and Councilmember Kshama Sawant traveled to Surrey, British Columbia to help launch a campaign to ban caste discrimination in the province with one of the largest populations of South Asians in Canada. 

Today, the anti-caste coalition initiated by South Asian activists and working people, Workers Strike Back and Socialist Alternative Canada has collected thousands of signatures in support of a province-wide ban on caste discrimination. The coalition has won the support of unions like the New Westminster Teachers Union (NWTU) in British Columbia, which has passed a resolution in support of the campaign and even made a $200 donation to fund this historic battle!

Our breakthrough victory in Seattle has paved the way for similar laws around the country, like SB403 in California, which would ban caste discrimination statewide. On Thursday, May 11th, this bill cleared a significant hurdle and passed the State Senate with a nearly unanimous vote. Workers Strike Back activists supported the effort on the ground in the Bay Area and Sacramento, and Kshama Sawant spoke in a May 5th public meeting in Oakland on the lessons of our Seattle victory and the path forward for striking Oakland teachers. 

What the fight of Oakland teachers for a living wage and the struggle to ban caste discrimination in California have in common is that both require a class-struggle, movement-building approach that rejects backroom dealmaking with Democratic officials and relies instead on grassroots mobilization of union members, rank-and-file activists and working class people across racial, gender and cultural lines. 

In Seattle, our grassroots campaign had to overcome the opposition of the Democratic Party City Councilmembers. Now, the worldwide imprint of our Seattle victory is forcing Democrats nationally to acknowledge it and attempt to put forward a narrative that points away from building fighting movements independent of the establishment. In California, a state with over half a million South Asian Americans, many of whom have been greatly inspired by our Seattle breakthrough, it seems that the Democratic establishment has decided to support SB403 and preempt any grassroots movement. We saw a similar dynamic unfold in the months and years following the 15 Now movement’s landmark $15/hour minimum wage victory in Seattle in 2014, where Democratic politicians in some of the cities across the nation were forced to concede to the momentum as the “lesser evil” to a mass movement of rank-and-file union members and working people. Unfortunately, some of the NGO leaders in California’s anti-caste campaign have also mainly relied on private meetings with Democratic politicians, rather than mobilizing rank-and-file workers and union members. 

Workers Strike Back does not agree with the approach of relying on private meetings with establishment politicians. If SB403 is approved by the California State Legislature, it will be a huge step forward, building on what we achieved in Seattle. But history also shows that we cannot rely on establishment politicians, and that winning further victories against oppression and economic inequality will not be possible without an independent, fighting strategy that activates working people. 

In fact, at a Senate Judiciary Committee vote on SB403, Hindu fundamentalist right-wing groups turned out over twice as many people as anti-caste groups did, because the Democrats and the NGO leaders aligned with them did not want to mobilize a fighting movement. We will need working people to get mobilized to defeat such right-wing forces.

Furthermore, we can’t forget that last year the California State Legislature, which has an overwhelming Democrat majority (by nearly 80 percent), refused to bring a single-payer healthcare bill to a vote. It was a betrayal of the millions of working-class people in California who are falling deeper and deeper into medical debt or going without medical care at all in one of the richest countries in the history of humanity, in order to protect the billions in profits for the health insurance lobby. In fact, it was Assemblymember Ash Kalra, the first Indian American member of the California Legislature, who led the charge on this betrayal.

If we want to spread our victories, we need movements with teeth. We need to build Workers Strike Back into a vehicle to take the fight forward where Democratic and Republican politicians can’t and won’t.

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