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Vol. 72/No. 28      July 14, 2008

 
For cost-of-living raises for workers
(feature article / editorial)
 
Democratic and Republican candidates all decry the relentless price increases for essential goods that are affecting millions. Republican presidential contender John McCain talks about helping “Americans hurting from high gasoline and food costs.” Democrat Barack Obama asserts, “We are in this together … from financiers to factory workers.”

Their rhetoric covers up the reality. There is no “American” crisis of fuel and food prices. There is no “we” that includes both capitalists and workers.

When the price of milk rises above $4 a gallon, it’s different for a sewing-machine operator than for an auto company magnate. As medical costs shoot up, the impact on a retired coal miner and on a Wall Street broker are like night and day. Capitalists have a credit crisis—workers have a housing crisis, as rents eat up wages.

Internationally, the skyrocketing prices of staples such as rice have an even more devastating impact on workers and farmers in the semicolonial countries of Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

Capitalist politicians offer phony solutions. Obama and McCain propose tax rebates and cuts that benefit the wealthy but do nothing to ease the squeeze of rising prices and stagnant wages on working people.

They propose “American” trade policies, whether protectionism or “free trade,” to get workers to identify with the owners of industry who exploit us at home, while scapegoating “foreign countries.”

Inflation is inherent in the capitalist system—in the fact that production and distribution of food, energy, and other essentials is in the hands of a tiny class of billionaires who buy and sell for profit, at the expense of working people worldwide. Integral to that system is capitalist hoarding, speculation, and price rigging of grain, oil, and other commodities.

Despite what we’re told by the bosses’ spokespeople, wage increases don’t cause inflation. Higher wages come out of the employers’ profits, all of which is value produced by workers’ labor. The proportion of wages and profits depends to a large degree on what workers are able to wrest from bosses in struggle.

To combat rising prices, working people need to rely on our own collective capacity to fight. The labor movement should demand cost-of-living increases in wages, Social Security, pensions, unemployment pay, and other benefits, so that when prices rise, workers’ income increases accordingly.

In response to the government’s rigging of the Consumer Price Index to understate the costs of food, fuel, health care, and housing, the unions should initiate committees of workers and farmers to determine the real increases that working people pay. We must also fight for an increase in the federal minimum wage to benefit the most exploited layers of the working class.

When the monopolies make excuses for their price hikes, we should assert the right to know the facts and demand: Open the books! Nationalize the energy industry, and run it under workers control, with elected committees of working people to inspect their accounts and expose their contrived shortages and price rigging!

To win these demands, working people need to break with the twin capitalist parties—the Democrats and Republicans—and organize a labor party, based on a mobilized union movement, to take our fight effectively into the political arena.  
 
 
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