BY MEGAN ARNEY
In his second term, U.S. president William Jefferson Clinton has made clear he intends to lead the bipartisan effort to dismantle Social Security. In fighting to defend the gains that are codified in the Social Security Act, it's useful to look at how working people won these measures, which offer some minimal protection from the ravages of the capitalist system.

The Social Security Act - first adopted in 1935 - encompasses several different programs. The most well known program is social insurance for the elderly. This program is funded by both payroll taxes and taxes on employers. It provides benefits to workers after they reach the age of 65, as well as federal grants for the disabled. Unemployment insurance was initiated under the Social Security Act, but is currently administered separately by state governments. Aid for Families with Dependent Children had been part of the 1935 Social Security Act, but was eliminated last year as part of the "welfare reform" signed by Clinton. Other federal social programs also run by the Social Security Administration include supplemental security income, which augments Social Security payments, and the Medicare and Medicaid programs, which provide health coverage to the elderly and poor, respectively. The medical portions were added to the original act in the 1960s.

Depression leaves millions unemployed
The October 1929 stock market crash signaled the opening of an economic depression. Between 1929 and 1933, industrial production in the United States dropped nearly 50 percent. The national income spiraled downward by one- half, and unemployment soared.

By December 1930 there were between 4.5 and 5 million unemployed, though President Herbert Hoover claimed there were only 2.5 million. At its peak in 1933, unemployment ranged between 13.3 and nearly 18 million workers, according to government agencies. The symbol of the depression became the "Hoovervilles" - the tarpaper-and-tin shack communities that grew up in the dumps of the cities and towns where families who were evicted were forced to live. An estimated 1.5 million homeless people wandered the roads in search of work. Between 1920 and 1933, one farm in every four was sold for debt or taxes, while tenancy increased from 25 percent of all farmers in 1880 to 42 percent in 1935.

Many of those who did have jobs worked for starvation wages. The Feb. 15, 1929, Militant reported that already there was "a standing army of unemployed workers numbering several millions" and a "growing series of wage cuts." Between March 1930 and March 1931, nearly 3 million workers in manufacturing industries suffered average wage cuts of 9.4 percent.

After the initial shock of the economic catastrophe, working people began to respond. From Albany, New York, across the Midwest to the West Coast, local organizations popped up and there were many demonstrations demanding work and relief. National hunger marches took place in 1931 and 1932, demanding unemployment payments, a shorter workweek, social insurance for illness, accident, old age, and maternity, and other measures. Many working people began to organize to combat the depression conditions, both in trade unions and in unemployed organizations. These groups fought for unemployment compensation and other social security measures to protect those most affected by the capitalist depression.

An Associated Press dispatch dated Dec. 7, 1931, reported: "Fifteen hundred demonstrators marched back and forth on Pennsylvania avenue today [in Washington, D.C.] and found both the White House and Capitol doors barred against them. Singing the 'Internationalé and chanting slogans calling for unemployed insurance they paraded under a police escort."

Workers' protests were often met by resistance from the employers and the police. In Detroit, 3,000 laid-off Ford auto workers rallied in March 1932 to demand jobs. Four demonstrators were killed by police and Ford security guards.

The government was forced to concede crumb-like relief, but the federal funds and private relief were inadequate and humiliating for those who were forced to rely on them. President Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" of 1933, with its "made work" relief programs, known as the WPA, was in fact more like a "raw deal" for workers. Workers were paid barely livable wages of as low as $40 a month in the North and as low as $19 a month in the South.

In his book, Teamster Politics, Farrell Dobbs, a leader of the Teamsters union in the 1930s and longtime leader of the Socialist Workers Party, interviewed Max Geldman, a leader of the Federal Workers Section of Minneapolis Teamsters Local 574. This union auxiliary organized unemployed workers, including those in the WPA programs. Geldman recalled, "Considering the billions spent that could have been used to creative ends, it was like dumping products to maintain high prices and fat profits. The labor power of millions was wasted, so as not to upset the balance of the capitalist system. No wonder the symbol of the WPA was a worker leaning on a shovel." Roosevelt's works program never provided jobs for more than 25 percent of the jobless. His historically touted WPA project would lay off workers just after presidential elections. In 1936, for example, 400,000 WPA workers were fired en masse.

Labor battles explode
Labor resistance to the depression conditions exploded in a strike wave in 1934. In 1929, there had been 921 strikes, involving 289,000 workers for a loss of over 5.3 million workdays. In 1933, an average of 603,000 workdays per month were lost to strikes in the first half of the year. The number reached nearly 1.4 million in July 1933, and in August it was over 2.3 million. Overall, 1933 saw the largest number of work stoppages since 1921.

In 1934, three major strikes and numerous smaller ones set the stage for workers to force concessions from the bosses and their lackeys in Washington. These working-class struggles transformed the labor movement, opening the process that forged the industrial unions of the CIO. The June 2, 1934, front page headline of the Militant read: "Strike Wave Sweeps Country," with subheadings on the two main strikes at that time.

One headline read, "General Strike Looms in Toledo." The fight there started with the Electric Auto-Lite strike. In his book, Labor's Giant Step: The First Twenty Years of the CIO: 1936-55, Art Preis explains that this strike by auto parts workers "blazed forth to illuminate the whole horizon of the American class struggle. The American workers were to be given an unforgettable lesson in how to confront all the agencies of the capitalist government -courts, labor boards and armed troops - and win."

One out of three people living in Toledo were on relief. In 1933, the Unemployed League, led by followers of A.J. Muste, head of the American Workers Party, had organized militant mass actions of the unemployed and won cash relief. When the company hired 1,800 strikebreakers, the union had reached out to the Unemployed League.

In a letter to Louis Howe in the White House, newspaper reporter Roy Howard wrote, "The point about Toledo was this: that it is nothing new to see organized unemployed appear on the streets, fight police, and raise hell in general. But usually they do this for their own ends, to protest against unemployment or relief conditions. At Toledo they appeared on the picket lines to help striking employees win a strike, though you would expect their interest would lie the other way - that is, in going in and getting the jobs the other men had laid down."

On June 1, 1934, some 40,000 workers turned out for a solidarity rally in Toledo. By then, 98 of the 99 AFL union locals in the city had voted for a general strike. On June 4, the company capitulated and signed a six-month contract, including a wage raise and union recognition.

Another Militant headline in 1934 read: "Union Recognition Gained By Militant Minneapolis Battles, Victory is an Inspiration to Workers Everywhere." As the Auto-Lite strike was reaching its height, truckers in Minneapolis were waging the second of a series of strikes that year. Over 30 percent of the population of Hennepin County, Minnesota, consisted of unemployed workers and their families at the time. From the very beginning the most militant of the unemployed organizations were involved in the strike.

On August 22, after a third strike and several rounds of street battles against the forces of the employers and the government, the strikers won. The bosses capitulated and gave the Teamsters their main demands, including union representation for all workers employed by the trucking bosses. The successful battles in Minneapolis laid the ground for efforts to organize the trucking industry throughout the Midwest.

The third major industrial struggle in 1934 started on May 9, 1934. Between 10,000 and 15,000 West Coast members of the AFL International Longshoremen's Association went on an "unauthorized" strike. Soon it included 25,000 workers. After battles with police in which over 100 were wounded, San Francisco labor answered with a two-day general strike. On July 31, the strike ended with an agreement to arbitrate. It took repeated job actions before the union won its main demand: a union hiring hall. The strike gave impetus to the maritime organizations on the East Coast and the 1937 establishment of the CIO National Maritime Union, as well as opening the way for organization of West Coast industrial labor.

Before the year was out, more than 1.4 million workers had struck across the United States. The labor battles did not stop once the Social Security Act was passed, but actually increased in the following years. More than 1,000 sit-down strikes were reported in the press in 1936 and 1937.

By 1938 Roosevelt had fired 1.5 unemployed from the WPA work-relief programs - he would cut 2 million by 1940. At the same time, Washington spent over $6.3 billion in war preparations. According to the June 20, 1939, Socialist Appeal (the name under which the Militant was published at that time), the total number of persons dependent on one or another form of public relief was 23 million. Aid they received was about 22 cents a day.

Workers on the WPA struck that year for less hours worked, higher pay, back pay, and more jobs - and many were won. In 1939 the July 13 Northwest Organizer, the Midwest Teamster newspaper, reported, "The strike of WPA workers continued to mount and roll across the country like a tidal wave this week, as fresh thousands of desperate and disgusted workers downed tools and brought the number of men and women on strike close to 500,000 with still more to come out."

Social Security a byproduct of fights
The Social Security Act came at a time when the most class-conscious workers were pushing for a broader political agenda. For example, a "workers security bill" drafted by the National Unemployed League in 1934 called for a 30-hour workweek and a public works program to provide "an up to date, fully equipped county hospital in every county; modern libraries and recreational centers in every city and country." The document also called for other social needs, including "rural electrification" those employed by the "relief" program be paid the standing union wage. The Unemployed League demanded unemployment and social insurance to be "extended to workers and farmers without discrimination because of age, sex, race, or color, religious or political opinion or affiliations - for all time lost."

Under the pressure of the strikes and unemployed mobilizations, Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act in August 1935. Far from being a gift, the Social Security Act was an attempt to placate the every-increasing mobilization of a radicalizing, working-class and unemployment movement.

In subsequent years, workers fought to extend unemployment compensation and other provisions of the Social Security Act to more layers of the working class. As the CIO grew in the 1930s and 40s, unionists continued to fight for social programs for all workers. What ended the working class upsurge was World War II, and the capitulation of the labor bureaucracy to Washington with a "no-strike" pledge and persecution against those who spoke out against the impending imperialist slaughter.

These social gains expanded in the 1960s, including with Medicare and Medicaid, also as a product of working-class struggle, this time in the form of the advancing civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home