The New York City administration has launched a stepped-up offensive against public employees and needed city services. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has implemented a hiring freeze and cuts in city funding for social services; he projects layoffs and cuts in wages and health-care benefits. And the city fathers are just warming up. Local and state governments across the country are preparing similar assaults.

The big-business politicians use the argument of a "budget deficit" to convince working people to accept these attacks on our living standards. We are supposed to worry about how the government is going to "reduce the deficit."

Bloomberg declares that "everything is on the table" for potential budget cuts--an argument for going after the transit workers, teachers, and other public employees with a meat cleaver. But of course he never even considers putting on the table the billions in interest payments to wealthy bondholders. Just the opposite--the rich coupon-clippers are first in line to get paid.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is pleading poverty too. But transit workers, thousands of whom have turned out for several union rallies, are not buying the propaganda. They are setting an example by fighting to defend advances won in previous struggles. Their fight points to the need for workers to start from the needs of our class, not the profit demands of our exploiters.

Capitalist politicians try to convince us there is a fixed pool of money called a city budget and that when this budget runs into the red they must cut. But there are plenty of resources available. Workers and farmers produce all the immense wealth of society, which is pocketed directly by the billionaire families.

The capitalist economic crisis is fueled by a built-in problem in capitalism--the tendency for the bosses’ rates of profits to decline, which breeds sharper competition between the employers, domestic and international. They try to shore up their profit rates by going after the jobs and social wage of working people at home as they launch wars for greater control of natural resources abroad.

The interests of working people and those of the ruling families are completely counterposed. What is good for them--expanding profits--is at our expense as workers. And when working people fight for and win better work conditions, wages, or medical care, it just means the ruling rich take in slightly less profits. That’s their problem. It’s their government and their budget.

One of the demands of the New York transit workers is to defend their medical benefits. This issue points to a broader social question for all working people: the need for universal, free health care, nationwide.

In face of layoff threats, the labor movement needs to organize a fight to guarantee jobs for all by shortening the workweek with no cut in pay. A massive public works program funded by the government will also create jobs by building housing, schools, gyms, parks and other social needs of working people.

Rather than the regressive tax system that falls hardest on workers, labor should call for a steeply graduated income tax on the income from profits, dividends, interest, and rents of the capitalists and other wealthy layers.

Instead of having to constantly resist the employers’ government and its cops, courts, and armed forces, we need a government of our own--a workers and farmers government. To bring that about will require forging a revolutionary movement by millions that can replace the rule of the billionaire class with the rule of working people and join with other toilers in the worldwide struggle for socialism.
 
 
Related articles:
Transit workers confront New York City’s real ‘rats’
Bloomberg cries ‘budget crisis,’ targets workers  
 
 
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