These are among the demands that Socialist Workers candidates and their supporters are campaigning for to protect the living standards of working people in face of the economic crisis and the antilabor offensive by the bosses and their government.

Despite the fact that the United States is three years into an upturn in the business cycle, the level of unemployment remains officially at 5.6 percent—more than 8 million workers. The figure is much higher for workers who are Black, Latino, or young. It is even higher if one includes workers who are working only part-time or have become discouraged and stopped seeking work.

Bosses have used the relatively high levels of unemployment to keep wages down through competition for jobs. Real wages today are less than what they were when the recession ended in November 2001, and the gap has widened between the lowest-paid and better-paid sections of the workforce.

Millions of workers receive the federal minimum wage—an unlivable $5.15 an hour, which Congress has refused to raise in seven years. Because the minimum wage isn’t indexed to inflation, its real value has steadily dropped, and is now two dollars an hour below its 1968 level. This erosion not only devastates the incomes of the lowest-paid workers but drags down all wages.

For a three-person family, a minimum wage income is 27 percent below the official poverty line. But it’s not uncommon for workers making double that, $10 an hour or more, to find they are struggling to make ends meet and falling into debt. Millions are putting in many hours of overtime or working a second job just to get by. Growing numbers are working past retirement age because they cannot afford not to.

One out of three people below the age of 65 lacks medical insurance, and the numbers are even higher for workers who are Black or Latino. Many more have health coverage with so many deductibles and co-payments that, as medical costs soar, they have to think twice before seeking care.

At the same time, the bosses’ productivity drive is creating a pressure cooker on the job. Workers in many industries—from coal and ore mines to assembly lines, garment shops, and slaughterhouses—are being pushed to work faster, harder, and longer hours. As a result, on-the-job injuries and fatalities increase.

This economic grind is the result of the built-in contradictions of the capitalist system. The bosses are driven to push down wages and squeeze more labor out of fewer workers in order to reverse the long-term decline in the rate of industrial profit—a decline that began in the early 1970s with the exhaustion of the post-World War II economic expansion. The employer class carries out this offensive with the aid of its government—from the White House and Congress to the state courts and city police—and its two parties, the Democrats and Republicans.

To combat persistent unemployment, the Socialist Workers candidates demand that the government launch a massive, federally funded public works program, at union-scale wages that can put millions to work building badly needed schools, hospitals, housing, day-care centers, recreation facilities, roads, bridges, and tunnels. In addition, the workweek should be reduced to 30 hours’ work at 40 hours’ pay to create enough jobs to spread the available work around.

While there has not been a sharp rise in inflation, workers and small farmers have been hit by a jump in the price of fuel, housing, milk, transportation, and health-care costs. Working people need full and automatic cost-of-living protection for all wages—including the minimum wage—as well as for Social Security, Medicare, workers compensation, and unemployment benefits. This means that all union contracts should assure an automatic rise in wages and benefits at least as high as the increase in the price of consumer goods, and that the federal government should guarantee the same for all workers.

The labor movement needs to lead a fight to raise the minimum wage to union scale as an elementary affirmative action measure that starts with the needs of the most vulnerable sections of the working class. Raising the minimum wage—which serves as the floor on which the overall wage structure is built—will put all workers in a stronger position to fight for much-needed pay increases.

Labor should also demand that all social security, health care, unemployment, disability, welfare, and retirement payments be brought into a comprehensive, nationwide, government-guaranteed social security program for all.

It is in response to the bosses’ drive to slash wages and benefits, extend work hours, combine and eliminate jobs, and speed up production at the expense of safety that many workers are seeking to use their unions or to organize unions in self-defense. The Socialist Workers campaign backs these union struggles—from meat packers in Nebraska to coal miners in the West—which point the way forward for all working people.

When the wealthy property owners and their lawyers and politicians argue that these demands are not “realistic,” workers must answer that if capitalism is unable to satisfy the demands that inevitably arise from the calamities this system generates, then let it perish. Whether any of the above demands is realizable or not depends on the relationship of forces between workers and the capitalists, and can only be decided in struggle.

Through such struggles, no matter what their immediate practical successes may be, workers and farmers—if helped by fellow combatants—will best come to understand the necessity of charting a road independent from and in opposition to the bosses’ government and their twin parties, the Democrats and Republicans. This requires building a revolutionary workers party that can mobilize millions to remove the billionaire class from power and establish a government of workers and farmers. Such a government would organize working people to uproot capitalist wage slavery and join the worldwide struggle to build a socialist society, founded on human solidarity and dignity.
 
 
Related articles:
Workers face grinding pressures on wages, jobs
Real wages drop in U.S. over a year, as medical costs rise  
 
 
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