EDITORIAL
The Bosses Are Cutting Jobs Across the Board

Dec 2, 2024

All this propaganda about low unemployment and strong economic growth! What workers actually believe it?! The biggest and richest companies in the U.S. have been cutting staff and carrying out widespread layoffs throughout the year.

The list of companies laying off thousands of workers is very, very long. It includes the top automakers, aerospace giants, high tech companies, telecommunication companies, retail chains, entertainment conglomerates, and the biggest banking and investment companies in the country.

Leading the way in slashing jobs have been the darlings of the stock market, worth hundreds of billions and trillions of dollars, such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Meta (Facebook), Amazon and Tesla.

So, like at the movies, “it’s coming to a theatre near you.”

Millions of jobs have been cut this year, with many more job cuts planned for next year. And don’t for a second believe that the holiday season will slow the cuts. These cuts devastate and lay waste not just to the workers, employees and their families, but to entire communities.

No job is safe, no matter how skilled or technically proficient the worker is. Nor does it matter how rich your employer is, how profitable they are, and how supposedly great the economy is. In fact, corporate layoffs, “reductions in force”—or RIF’s, as they call them—are an enormous weapon that the bosses use in their ongoing war against the working class.

Of course, all these companies use the same justification, or excuse, for slashing jobs. They all claim they have no choice; they have to cut jobs in order to “focus on efficiency,” which really means increasing their profits by paying fewer workers. Then they hand over these “savings” to their big stockholders and owners—that is, the capitalist class.

Whatever profits these companies make, it is never enough. Over the last five years, U.S. corporate profits have almost doubled to more than three trillion dollars, after taxes, a new record. Each year these companies use those increased profits to boost dividends, boost stock buybacks. In fact, these companies are in a giant race, not only to survive, but to pay out the most money to their capitalist owners. In other words, they are competing to make the most profits and recycling the most money and wealth into the investment accounts of their capitalist owners.

So, the entire economy is like a giant suction pump that takes the wealth produced by the working class and hands it over to the biggest stockholders. The entire economy is structured to make a tiny minority, the capitalist class, much richer. That’s what workers are sacrificing and killing themselves for, so that every year, a few billionaires at the top of the heap, like Musk, Buffett, Bezos or Gates, can grow even richer than the entire economy of a medium-sized country, like New Zealand, Hungary or Greece!

It’s been a little more than a month since the presidential campaign finally ended, a campaign during which both parties, Democrats and Republicans, led by Harris and Trump, promised workers more jobs, higher incomes … and all that other pie in the sky.

In fact, the only security, the only protection that workers have ever had has been in our own organizations and struggles. Certainly, it was through these struggles in the past that workers were able to push back the capitalists’ attacks and made important gains.

But those gains were never permanent. There has never been a lasting peace or even a truce in the capitalists’ class war against the working class. The capitalists’ competition for ever more profits drove them to take back whatever the workers gained … and more.

The only alternative for the working class is to take the power away from the capitalist class. Certainly, the working class is in the position to do that right now. It already does all the work. It already produces everything and makes everything run. The working class doesn’t need the capitalist class at all! Taking the capitalists’ power away would represent a giant leap forward for all of humanity.

What is lacking for the working class is the consciousness and understanding of what its real power, its real potential is. One step in gaining this understanding is for the working class to build its own party, to unite workers as a class with the goal of finally ridding humanity of the capitalist scourge.