the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
May 12, 2014
“This is not some distant problem of the future. This is a problem that is affecting Americans right now. Whether it means increased flooding, greater vulnerability to drought, more severe wildfires–all these things are having an impact on Americans as we speak.”
These are the words of President Barack Obama, sounding the alarm bells, and echoing the words of scientists in the latest government-sponsored report on climate change.
No one can say that any particular weather event was directly caused by climate change. But evidence of climate change is gathering. Heavy rains and floods on one side of the country, droughts and wildfires on the other. This is our reality, just as predicted by scientists for decades–and ignored for decades by public officials!
And ignored today still. Republicans pretend there is no problem. Democrats, who pretend to do something, offer only another weak law to regulate carbon dioxide emissions that will in fact allow more emissions.
But along with the big-scale, long-term threat of climate change, there is an immediate threat to working people in this country today–which scientists and politicians don’t even mention. It’s the everyday pollution–the constant poisoning of the soil, water and air around us. And government officials, Republican or Democrat, aid and abet those who poison us, that is, Big Business.
In recent decades, capitalists have been allowed to radically increase pollution levels. In the Chesapeake Bay area, for example, the state of Maryland ordered Bethlehem Steel in 1997 to stop releasing toxic chemicals into the soil and water, and to start to clean up. Ten years later, it was found that no cleanup whatsoever had been done–not by Bethlehem nor Severstal, the company that had bought the steel works later on. At one location near the Patapsco River, benzene, a carcinogen, was found in groundwater at levels 100,000 times the legal limit. And the state did nothing!
Speaking of limits, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality is currently proposing to increase the existing air pollution limits, for some pollutants up to 50 and even 70 times, for the Dearborn steel mill operated by ... Severstal!
Dozens of other examples of severe pollution under the complicity of capitalists and government officials, both Republican and Democrat, can be found across the country.
These same politicians and officials try to use the threat of climate change to distract us. They blame us, the population, for increased carbon dioxide emissions. “You set your thermostat too low in the summer,” they admonish us with a wagging finger–when electricity grids collapse every summer because the utility companies have neglected maintenance for so long. “You drive too much” they say–when, in most big cities of this country, there simply is no decent public transportation system capable of taking a worker to work within a reasonable amount of time, and when it’s impossible for a worker to find any affordable housing near work.
When disaster hits, people are left alone to fend for themselves. There certainly were things government could have done–first and foremost, to reinforce the infrastructure–to help the population better deal with the effects of natural disasters such as storms and floods. But federal and state governments, under both parties’ direction, have done the opposite. They have allowed the existing infrastructure to crumble, while shoveling taxpayer money from their treasuries to private interests in the form of subsidies, overblown contracts, bailouts, etc. And they have allowed private companies to ignore infrastructure repairs.
In the climate report, scientists warn that within the next several decades millions of people may have to move inland to escape the effects of natural disasters. Will there be jobs for them? And housing, schools, basic infrastructure? If recent disasters are any measure, the answer is one big no–just look at the victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and last year’s Superstorm Sandy.
Leaving the management of this problem in the hands of those who have been in charge–the Republican and Democratic Parties–means leaving it in the hands of the capitalist class, the bourgeoisie. And the bourgeoisie has proven, time and again, that it will let the worst disaster befall millions of people rather than give up one cent of its profits.
Allowing bourgeois politicians to tackle the problems of climate change and pollution is the surest way to condemn our children and grandchildren to an uninhabitable world.
May 12, 2014
On April 30th, a train carrying oil tank cars derailed in Lynchburg, Virginia. This train of more than 100 tank cars was carrying crude oil from the Bakken Shale deposit in North Dakota, where the latest oil boom is occurring. A few cars caught fire, with flames shooting up 100 feet. The derailment occurred next to a children’s museum with visitors and a popular lunch spot.
This wasn’t the first derailment of oil tank cars coming from North Dakota. In July 2013, an unmanned train exploded in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, Canada and killed 47 people. Last December 30th, a derailment occurred near Casselton, North Dakota, that led to an explosion of several tank cars.
This oil from North Dakota is more volatile than oil originating elsewhere. Much of it is being shipped in trains more than 100 tank cars long. And these tank cars are of a type that the National Transportation Safety Board called “subject to damage and catastrophic loss of hazardous materials.”
These tank cars often go through many small towns and big cities like Chicago on their way to markets across the continent. The only rational way to handle this oil would be to figure out a safe way to transport it before it’s moved, which could certainly be done.
Until then, not one drop should be taken out of the ground. But in this irrational capitalist society, the rush for profit puts anyone near a train track in danger, all so oil companies and railroads can make their enormous profits in a hurry. The oil bonanza is a disaster on wheels waiting to explode in any town or city, large or small.
May 12, 2014
As residents watched in horror, the side of 26th Street in north Baltimore collapsed, carrying eight cars and tons of dirt onto the CSX rail tracks below. Luckily no one was hurt.
Residents of the block were told to evacuate their homes for up to 40 days, to give engineers time to check the safety of their homes. But nothing says these homes will be safe to occupy in 40 days.
Torrential rains had put heavy pressure on the retaining wall that overlooks the CSX railroad tracks. This wall was originally built in 1912 as part of the rail system carrying freight through Baltimore. It was partially repaired in 1998, but residents have been complaining to the city and the railroad about the crumbling of the road and the danger it presented for the past few years.
The city has now hired contractors to put in pilings to stabilize the street before rebuilding the retaining wall. CSX, the current rail owners, is not hurrying to accept responsibility.
But one thing the rail system was quick to do: within days CSX had cleared the track of cars and dirt so that freight–and revenues–could roll again.
Baltimore is not alone in facing this infrastructure problem. Storms are increasing and rail tracks go through the older parts of many cities. It’s another example of a capitalist society in which resources are used to enrich the capitalists, not to assist the population.
May 12, 2014
Last year in Sun Valley, a working class part of Los Angeles, the Navshadyan family signed a one year lease on a house from Invitation Homes, the arm of private equity giant, the Blackstone Group. Invitation Homes claimed that the house had been newly remodeled. But when the family moved in they discovered water leaks and an infestation of cockroaches. The air conditioner failed. Tap water turned brown and a bathroom flooded.
The family moved out while repairs were arranged. It turned out the house also had an asbestos problem and extensive mold. When the family decided not to return, the company refused to let them get out their belongings and kept trying to collect their rent.
In other words, from the start, Invitation Homes has been trying to squeeze the Navshadyan family for every penny it can. This is the same kind of thing that is happening throughout the country to people renting from many other huge companies controlled by Wall Street.
And no wonder. Invitation Homes is trying to make a quick killing out of their home rental empire. Over the last three years, Invitation Homes had bought up more than 44,000 homes nationwide, mostly cheap, foreclosed houses in cities hardest hit by the economic meltdown. The company claimed that it was just out to “professionalize” the home rental market. In fact, its main aim was to repackage thousands of these houses together into financial securities that it calls rental bonds. The monthly rent checks on each of the houses are being used to service the debt on these bonds.
According to Business Week, rental bonds constitute a potentially huge, new financial market that can grow to almost one trillion dollars over the next decade! In other words, Wall Street banks are looking to pull a stunt similar to what they did with subprime mortgages–turn rental homes into a financial profit machine–until the bubble bursts.
Of course, caught in the squeeze are tenants like the Navshadyan family, who thought they were just renting a home–but in fact found themselves caught in a trap set by Wall Street.
May 12, 2014
Seventeen major league baseball pitchers and a number of minor league pitchers have needed surgery for torn elbow ligaments since the start of spring training this year, more than in recent whole seasons. All were 30 years old or younger.
The number of elbow ligament tears is going up because players are abusing their arms in the hopes of making it into the majors. Teen players are throwing more pitches per year without giving their arms time to recover. While 20 years ago, aspiring baseball players focused on playing other sports throughout the year, now there is pressure to stay in the one sport; to attend showcases, travel tournaments, and college camps, and to get private indoor lessons after baseball season.
On top of that, there is more and more focus on pitch speed, which adds to the stress on pitchers’ arms. Also, Tommy John elbow surgery is increasingly widespread and accepted, especially since it can sometimes allow pitchers to throw even harder than before.
The whole sport is set up for a very small number of owners to make enormous sums, and for a few stars to make not so enormous sums. Given the few prospects for young people and the high salaries dangled out for a few, it’s no surprise that so many young people would be willing to destroy their arms for a chance to make it to the big leagues.
Destroying young players’ arms, then turning them into “bionic ballplayers” through surgery, is just part of the profit game.
May 12, 2014
Matt Taibbi’s new book, The Divide, vividly shows the gap between the poor, who can be jailed for anything or nothing, and the rich, who cannot be jailed, no matter how much money they steal, and no matter how blatantly they lie. By comparing the criminal bankers with the ordinary “criminals” who fill the jails, Taibbi shows how the American “justice” system is a cynical, brutal, and well-organized setup for perpetuating the wealth of the rich and the poverty of the poor.
Taibbi describes how the giant bank HSBC paid a fine for laundering tens of billions of dollars in Mexican drug money, but no one went to jail. He shows how the top executives of the investment bank Lehman Brothers stole billions of dollars from creditors and handed it to the British bank Barclays as Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. These execs got multi-million dollar payoffs for themselves, in an elaborate scheme that cost pension funds and other investors across the country—and they got away with it. He explains how the Obama administration has developed an almost official policy of not jailing bankers, and of instead going after fines that are just slaps on the wrist for these enormous banks.
On the other side of town, Taibbi shows how tens of thousands of mostly black and Latino New Yorkers go to jail every year for possession of tiny quantities of marijuana, a story which could be repeated in every city in the country. He shows how police arrest thousands of young men in poor neighborhoods, mostly for suspicion, and charge them with crimes as petty as blocking the sidewalk, often over and over again.
He sheds a light on the “gulag” of detention centers around the country for working class undocumented immigrants. These immigrants are then ripped off again and again in the centers, from high charges for phone cards, to being deported into the hands of Mexican cartels that kidnap many and extort money from their families.
One of the most striking parts is Taibbi’s comparison of welfare fraud and bank fraud. J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup, and the other big banks forged millions of mortgage documents, helping to spark the economic collapse and allowing them to steal more billions of dollars. But not one person from any of those banks went to jail. Meanwhile, a woman receiving public aid in Riverside County, California, can get her name in the newspaper as a welfare fraud thief, and be thrown in jail, for not reporting that she has a boyfriend who helps her with groceries.
They say there’s one law in this country that applies equally to everyone. This book shows just how much that statement is a cynical lie. There is one law for the rich, and one for the poor. And that’s a big part of how the rich keep control over the population.
May 12, 2014
This article is from the May 9th, 2014 edition of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
Day after day, Ukraine plunges deeper into civil war. The Ukrainian far-right militias and the pro-Russian militias have between the two of them taken the population hostage, made worse by the Ukrainian army’s operations.
Where is this deadly cycle leading? Toward punitive actions against those who don’t speak the “right language” or who raise the “wrong” national flag? Toward dividing up Ukraine by drawing a border across the country, separating cities, families, and friends? Toward a total bloodbath, like what happened in Yugoslavia twenty years ago?
The population of Ukraine has everything to lose by tearing itself apart in these nationalist clashes.
The Russian government’s propaganda is disgusting, but that of the European media is just as dangerous. The media denounces “Putin’s shadowy hand,” but have little to say about Washington, which has operated under the table for years to bring Ukraine into its economic, political, and military orbit.
Today, both the U.S. and European politicians support a provisional government in Kiev that includes pro-Nazi ministers. They have no qualms about relying on the most reactionary forces in society. Like Putin, the imperialist leaders are war criminals responsible for what is happening in the Ukraine.
The Ukrainian situation also mirrors the reactionary and nationalist wave that is sweeping the entire European continent. At the same time the elections to the European Union parliament are under way, the parties are playing the card of nationalist withdrawal. Some parties appeal to regionalist or xenophobic feelings. They gleefully see these elections as a chance to launch outrageous assaults of chauvinism and nationalism.
The different populations of Europe have plenty of reasons not to feel themselves represented by the European Union in its current form. Since the earliest formation of Europe, the Greeks and Hungarians have been preyed on by the French and German banks and multinational corporations. They have seen E.U. bureaucrats compel them to abandon even the weak social protections they had in place. They have seen an international economic crisis condemn them to massive unemployment. Their respective national governments, their own banks and bosses, haven’t treated them any better.
The working class is in a good position to see that it can expect no benefit from European Union institutions. In more than 60 years, the only law passed to promote equality between the sexes has granted women the right to work overnight, while the right to have an abortion is still not guaranteed in all E.U. countries. And a Europe-wide minimum wage set at the level of the highest current national minimum has never even been on the table.
But yet again, the national governments have not done any better! Whenever they bring up the rights of workers or the unemployed, they always aim to bring everyone to the same level—as low as possible.
…
The nationalists make scapegoats out of the European Union, foreigners, and immigrants. They distract the working class from the fight that it is in their own interest to make, the one against the bosses, their greed, and their profits. Besides changing nothing about the bosses’ exploitation, nationalism adds arbitrary attacks to the mix, against those who happen to have the wrong nationality, who don’t speak the right language, or who observe a different religion than others.
The events taking place in Ukraine show that nationalism is a fatal trap that can quickly turn against the population. All of those, from Odessa to Paris, who seek to pit workers against one another, are our enemies. We must not let this poison of division sink in!
May 12, 2014
This article is from the May 9th, 2014 edition of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
The Indian legislative elections began on April 7th and will end on May 12th. The upcoming elections will be the largest election in the world in “the world’s largest democracy.” But a great deal more needs to be said about this so-called “democracy.”
India is a country where the extreme concentration of wealth—with more total billionaires than Japan or Great Britain—exists right alongside an ocean of poverty. More than two thirds of its inhabitants survive on less than $2 per day. Hunger affects an enormous part of the population, particularly children, more than 40% of whom are chronically underweight. One third of the population is illiterate, and the majority of dwellings lack electricity or running water. This enormous social misery drives tens of thousands of peasants to suicide every year.
For the poor, violence is a part of daily life. This violence targets the religious minorities who fall victim to bloody pogroms. It strikes the members of the lower castes who are treated like subhumans. It targets women, who are reduced to servitude, sold in arranged marriages, abused by everyone, even raped with impunity by landowners or by the sons of wealthy families. Workers in thousands of workshops scattered throughout the slums and the countryside face ferocious violence, exploited in a manner resembling slavery. Striking workers are roughed up by the police or by the bosses’ private thugs. Union activists are condemned to long prison sentences under frivolous pretexts by a justice system under the thumb of the bosses.
Since the slowdown of economic activity in India in 2008 when the crisis worsened, there has been a brutal degradation of living standards. Inflation has risen, especially for basic foods. The most indispensable support programs for the population have been cut. There have been massive layoffs in the auto and textile industries, while workers’ already miserable wages have fallen farther. Two thirds of all workers lack job security, even in the country’s largest companies, and the immense majority of the poor have no regular source of work. This is what democracy means in the “world’s largest democracy.”
The political rights of the population are worth very little in reality. Bribes are needed to obtain even the most minor official paperwork. Government programs are riddled with massive embezzlement, from the construction of infrastructure to food aid for starving peasants.
In terms of the parliamentary candidates, the spectacle is just as bad. On average, the net worth of an elected deputy triples during their time in the legislature. One third of all members of parliament leave office accused of crimes, ranging from electoral fraud to murder. Among all of the candidates currently running, one tenth have been accused of crimes on the level of rape or murder. The practice of buying votes is standard, systematic, and organized by the parties in more or less broad daylight. For many of the poor, the elections are an occasion to get a hot meal, some whiskey, or a small sum of money in exchange for the desired vote.
The two major parties who are now fighting for votes have both been in power for a long time. One of these, the far-right Hindu party called the BJP, currently governs hundreds of regions, while the Congress Party, which has more or less ruled the country since independence, runs the central government. For the party leaders, the results of the legislative elections will no doubt have an effect on the amount of the riches they can each pocket and on the speed with which they can do so. However, these elections have no chance of improving the lot of the Indian population.
May 12, 2014
In a mountainous region of Northeast Afghanistan, more than 2,000 villagers were buried under 300 feet of mud on May 2nd. After a torrential rainfall, two consecutive mudslides washed away hundreds of houses built from dried-earth bricks. Emergency relief teams tried to locate survivors, equipped only with shovels and one mechanical digger to search among the rubble.
These men and women were victims not only of a natural catastrophe, but also of Afghanistan’s total under-development. The country is without roads allowing help to arrive quickly, without houses built from resistant materials, and without any system to warn of dangers such as landslides.
These conditions are disgusting since the Western powers–the United States first and foremost–present themselves as the champions of civilization. They have spent billions of dollars in this country on bombs and other weapons of destruction for more than ten years. Just a tiny fraction of this money would have been enough to build roads, hospitals, schools, and houses worthy of the name, capable of dealing with the harshness of the territory.
So, there is nothing natural about this catastrophe that has befallen Afghanistan!
May 12, 2014
Egyptian worker militants sent the following letter that was published in the April 11th, 2014 edition of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
“For four months, 84 workers of the National Vegetable Oil Company, the Egyptian branch of the U.S. company Cargill, have carried out a sit-in at the company’s headquarters in the industrial city of Borg El Arab. Management has been sending security guards with attack dogs to harass them.
Ever since the new director assumed his position last August—one month after the coup that brought General Al-Sisi to power—he has declared that he will not cede an inch to union rights. He put an end to meetings with union representatives and suspended the collective bargaining agreements. A series of arbitrary actions against the workers followed, violating the agreements. The director blocked labor inspectors from access to the plant; meanwhile, complaints addressed to the government minister are ignored.
During an assembly, the workers decided to react with a sit-in, a form of protest often adopted in Egypt in order to try to force local authorities and a company’s foreign owners to react. In response to this sit-in, which started on December 15th, the management placed the workforce on unpaid leave, using a delay of material needed in production as a pretext. When the sit-in continued, the management extended this decision week after week. Next, they recruited gangs of thugs accompanied by wild dogs to attack the demonstrators during the night. Finally, starting in January, workers were fired one after the other, now reaching a total of 75.
Four months have passed, and these thugs with their attack dogs continue to harass the workers. The management has escalated its tactics, cutting off electricity and water to the demonstrators and preventing the delivery of food and medicine. They replaced the security company with a different one with even more ferocious attack dogs. On February 6th, the company attempted to use a crane to remove the trailers used by the oldest workers, who are sometimes ill, to sleep protected from the cold. To prevent this maneuver, these workers attached themselves to the trailers using ropes wrapped around their necks. The crane operator refused the director’s order to lift up the trailers.
All this shows the relentlessness with which the company bosses act to deny workers their rights. Now management is trying to starve out the workers by interrupting the payment of their wages as well as the healthcare pensions to which some of them are entitled. The government authorities have been totally indifferent.
The workers of the National Vegetable Oil Company call on all workers, unions and parties in Egypt and abroad to support their fight for their rights, especially by putting pressure on Cargill’s central office in Geneva.”
May 12, 2014
Detroit city workers and retirees are being asked to vote on whether to accept new cuts to their pensions. But don’t mistake this vote for democracy. They are being told that if they vote “yes” on the new attack, their pensions will be cut. And if they vote “no” on the new attack, their pensions will be cut even more.
If they vote “yes,” general city workers will take a 4.5 percent reduction to their pension payouts, and even worse, they face total elimination of cost-of-living increases. This means that as prices increase, their pensions will pay for less and less. The average pension for these retirees is already only $19,123 a year, meaning a yes vote would guarantee a retirement of poverty.
Police and firefighters face smaller cuts if they vote yes: their cost of living increases would be reduced from 2.25 percent a year to a little over one percent. Their average pension is $30,607, but police and firefighters don’t get Social Security unless they held another job for ten years, so that is their entire retirement income.
But if workers and retirees vote no, the city is threatening to cut pensions for general workers by 27 percent and still eliminate the cost of living increases, and to completely eliminate cost of living for police and firefighters. Legally, they say, the bankruptcy judge can simply impose these cuts. So what kind of “choice” is this?
On top of that, workers who paid into an annuity savings account are having the interest they earned over the years “clawed back.” For current retirees who paid into the annuity fund, the average cuts amount to a loss of 8.8 percent per month.
And all this comes after the city unilaterally dropped retiree health benefits on March 1, replacing them with a stipend of less than $175 a month–a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of buying health insurance. Retired police lieutenant David Mallory estimated that this cost him an extra $500 a month–just for his wife’s insurance, since she’s not old enough to qualify for Medicare.
Michigan’s state legislature just introduced a bill that would allow it to oversee Detroit’s finances for 20 years, and even worse, would make the city stop offering any pensions to new hires.
The legal bankruptcy process is just a cover-up for this reality: city workers are being destroyed. This fake vote makes that clear. No matter that Detroit city workers paid into their retirement funds their whole working lives, no matter that these benefits were promised in return for a lifetime of work. The bosses want workers to pay for the crisis.
And unless the working class finds a way to break out of this legal trap and mobilize our forces on a massive scale, the fate of the Detroit retirees is waiting for all of us.
May 12, 2014
The top 10 chief executives in the U.S. got 30 million dollars apiece last year. But that’s nothing compared to the top 10 Hedge Fund managers. They averaged 1.8 BILLION each–which comes to $856,000 per hour.
A worker making $40,000 a year would have to work 21 years to make what one of these guys made in one hour.
Surely this is proof, if any more were needed, that this system must be gotten rid of.
May 12, 2014
Last month, California’s Attorney General upheld her previous approval of a corporate partnership between Hoag Hospital in Orange County and St. Joseph, a Catholic hospital chain, despite the fact that Hoag doctors had publicly condemned the hospital’s decision to stop providing abortions.
Hoag administrators don’t hide the fact that St. Joseph pressured them to stop abortion services. Catholic hospital bosses say they don’t allow “direct abortions,” whatever that means (it’s not a medical term but one invented by the Catholic Church). In other words, medical decisions are being made according to so-called “religious principles,” rather than the physical well-being of a person–just like in the Middle Ages.
In fact, Catholic hospitals have been a major force behind the push toward restricting women’s access to safe abortions in this country. And Catholic hospital chains have been buying up hospitals and expanding their reach: they already serve 1 in 6 patients in the U.S.
When state legislatures pass laws to restrict access to abortion services, commentators usually say conservative Republicans are behind it. But in California, the Democratic Party dominates state politics. And California’s Democratic Attorney General, Kamala Harris, approved the partnership between Hoag and St. Joseph, not once but twice, even though she had the authority to block it.
Restricting abortion services affects primarily working-class and poor women, who don’t have the means to travel and find a hospital or clinic that provides the services.
Working-class women can’t count on politicians from the Republican or Democratic Parties to defend the right to a safe abortion. We will have to fight to re-win these rights, and the more we allow them to be taken away, the harder it will be to win them back.
May 12, 2014
The following remarks came from a public meeting in Detroit, Michigan in April 2014:
Productivity means “pressure” for most workers. The word is used in the most negative way against us every working hour of every day. Which of us hasn’t heard a supervisor or manager say, “Your productivity has to increase.” It means “you have to work harder,” that is, speed-up!
Well U.S. workers have been working harder. Harder, longer, under worse conditions and they have been producing at higher levels.
In Michigan, the leaders of the race for productivity have been the auto companies. They are the clear winners in the game. In 2013, they produced 11.1 million vehicles in the U.S. compared to 4.7 million produced here in 2009. They more than doubled the number of cars they put out.
This should be good news, right? But the fact of the matter is they produced over twice the number of vehicles with barely ANY increase in the number of workers in these same plants.
Sergio Marchionne, Fiat-Chrysler’s head executive, laid it out clearly when he said, “We will never build bricks and mortar again. I think we need to use what we’ve got and take it to the wall, run more shifts, run overtime.”
Twenty-seven North American assembly plants were closed during the recession and the first years of this so-called recovery. Despite the enormous increase in production, no plant has been reopened, none replaced. Marchionne meant what he said and he and his management group have been “taking it to the wall” successfully.
At the end of last year, 25 of the remaining 80 assembly plants either had three shifts or three crews working on a two-shift schedule. All three American auto companies have been running half their plants on these schedules.
In addition to closing plants and running killer schedules, the bosses have been paying less and getting more for it.
With the introduction of two-tier and three-tier, the bosses have been able to replace their old workforce with a new one that is much cheaper per hour and in benefit payout. Today 21 percent of all Big Three workers are second tier; the number is nearly 40 percent at Chrysler. The bosses have effectively cut the working wage in half, and in fact, more than half.
More than six years after two-tier was introduced not one second tier worker has moved up into the first tier, even though that was the original promise.
On the national level, when the U.S. economy is examined, it’s the same story. Total production of goods is as high as it was in 2008 before the collapse. But there are 1,600,000 fewer production workers putting out the work. Manufacturing production has doubled since the 1970s. But there are 40 percent fewer production workers. That’s part of why there are still almost 30 million people without jobs.
Yes, the bosses have taken the working class to the wall, making it very clear that their recovery has nothing to do with creating jobs. Workers have created more goods and services, more wealth than we ever imagined. But the workers’ share of that wealth has shrunk rapidly.
All that wealth is going to profit, that is, it is all going to the top tiny percent of the ruling class, the bourgeoisie.
The huge increases in productivity and profit could make it possible for millions of U.S. workers to have higher incomes and shorter hours if the work and resulting profits were shared around.
A working class policy would be to demand that no corporation could lay off a single worker more; that the existing work be shared among workers so that everyone could have a job. Shorter hours would not mean shorter pay: there is enough money to raise the standard of living of workers across the board and still work shorter hours. Workers could be put back to work on public services, to repair roads, fix electrical problems, fix transit problems.
In addition we would demand to index any rise in the cost of living to increases in the wage rate: simply put, if the cost of products, food and so on goes up, wages would have to automatically rise with them, immediately.
A working class policy would demand that the bosses open their books and show their money. Let the workers audit their books and we would find even more profit than they talk about.
But who will force the bosses to hire and to share the wealth? Democrats, Republicans, none of them have solutions for the working class.
For the population to have jobs and a decent standard of living, the working class is going to have to fight for it. Most workers will agree with our program: but they will also say that workers are not ready for the fight it would take to make these things happen.
We know that. But we also know that if nobody dares to hold out a different policy, to speak with a different voice, nothing will happen.
We want to start a fight to move the money in the other direction, back to our families, to our neighborhoods, to our cities. In order to do that, we need a way to have working class voices heard; voices that speak out for a working class policy, for the real interests of the workers.
Running candidates in the November elections opens up an opportunity for us to do that. We want to run a campaign to put forward candidates who run on a working class policy, promoting a working class fight.