BY MEGAN ARNEY
What is exactly included in Social Security and the other entitlements that President William Clinton and the U.S. Congress are so determined to cut? Why does the Militant keep describing these programs as a social wage? What is an entitlement, and what does "means testing" refer to? Those are some of the questions this article will address.

The first article in this series described how the 1935 Social Security Act was won as a product of big class battles -strikes, unemployed marches, and other actions -as working people in their millions demanded some measure of social relief from the devastation of the world economic depression. Between the late 19th century and the period following World War II, workers in other advanced capitalist countries around the world won similar kinds of programs -always through struggle - that protected working people to some degree from the ravages of the capitalist system.

The Social Security Act of 1935 provided minimal pensions for most retired wage and salaried workers in the private sector over the age of 65. At the same time the law established a joint federal-state system of unemployment insurance. It was passed under the administration of Franklin Roosevelt as a small concession in hopes of stemming a rising working-class movement. It's worth noting that at the time the average life expectancy was lower than the retirement age; most workers were never supposed to actually collect.

The 1935 law provided retirement benefits only to retired workers themselves. In 1939, before any benefits had actually been paid out, the first of many extensions of the initial measure was won by providing benefits to workers' survivors and dependents. Later extensions in the 1950s included benefits to state and local government employees, members of the armed forces, some farmworkers, domestic workers, and the self-employed.

Today Social Security covers about 95 percent of workers in the United States -some 141 million - and pays benefits to about 45 million people. This program is supposedly funded by deductions from workers' paychecks and payments from employers to what is now the Social Security Administration and the Health Care Financing Administration. For most workers retirement benefits are based on average indexed earnings over a maximum of 35 years. Partial benefits can be claimed for women at age 62, and both men and women can collect full benefits at the age of 65.

Unemployment and workers' comp
Unemployment insurance was also part of the Social Security Act. This was one of the main demands by many of the 18 million jobless in the 1930s. Unemployment insurance is cash relief against loss of pay when a worker loses his or her job. The program covers more than 85 percent of the entire work force. Payments, based on wages earned, differ from state to state, but in general they amount to only about half the worker's previous salary.

Unlike Social Security, unemployment benefits may be denied, if a worker "quits a job without good cause or is fired because of misconduct." A worker can be denied unemployment if they are involved in a labor dispute that has brought about a work stoppage or if he or she refuses a "suitable" job without "good cause."

One example of this is the current strike of 4,500 steelworkers in Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania against Wheeling-Pittsburgh Corp. The company campaigned against the strikers' claim to unemployment benefits, and the courts sided with the boss in all three states.

Work-injury or workers' compensation is the oldest type of social security measure. It provides workers or their dependents compensation for injury, disease, or death occurring in the course of employment. This includes hospital and other medical payments, and compensation for loss of income. It is an important victory for the working class. During the 19th century U.S. employers - based on traditional English law -claimed that the hazards of a particular job were a risk that the worker assumed when he or she went to work. The "fellow servant" rule, which held that an employee could not sue an employer for negligence if the injury was caused by a co-worker, supported this. This law was smashed in 1908 after a series of major strikes, when Washington was forced to pass a National Employers' Liability Act for railroad workers. The first workers' compensation law in the United States was approved in 1911. Today, all 50 states have workers' compensation statutes.

Cash assistance programs
Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), Emergency Assistance (EA), General Assistance (GA), and Supplemental Security Income (SSI), are the major cash assistance programs. AFDC, EA, and GA are what the term "welfare" usually refers to. AFDC, the largest of these programs, provided payments for poor families with children.

AFDC was ended as a federal entitlement in the Welfare Reform Act signed by Clinton last August. Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), the forerunner to AFDC, was included in the Social Security Act of 1935. The president recently bragged about the 15 percent drop in the welfare rolls since his election in 1992. Some 2.25 million people have stopped receiving welfare payments over the last four years.

Today, a large proportion of those living below the official poverty line are women and children. In 1991, the poverty rate for the entire U.S. population was 14.2 percent, but one in five children under 18 years of age lived in poverty. Six million of these children are considered "extremely poor," meaning they live on less than half the poverty level. During one recent recession the AFDC rolls expanded by 24 percent. In 1992, more than 4.6 million families received AFDC assistance. Monthly payments averaged $390, or $4,680 per year - well below the government standard poverty line of $11,280 for a family of three.

GA is provided by 32 states by state and local governments. As an entitlement from the federal government, the local governments receive "block grants" to distribute in a means-tested way. Payments are low and last for short periods. The form of payment ranges from cash to groceries and shelter. During 1990, an average 1.2 million people per month received GA benefits.

In addition to the aforementioned programs, the public assistance system includes public and subsidized housing; Medicaid; food stamps; school lunches; an earned-income tax credit for low-income workers with a child; the Supplemental Food Programs for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC); the Low-Income Energy Assistance program, and other social services.

What about means testing?
Means testing has been widely used in the existing welfare programs as part of humiliating and demoralizing low-paid workers who depend on relief. It is enforced by bureaucrats and snoops staffing these programs who pry into every aspect of a person's life, including through home visits. They arrogantly inquire how you spend your money, who you live with, and whether you decide or not to have a child.

Social Security is an entitlement that is not means- tested. Anyone over the age of 65 is eligible. This is an important conquest because it means it is a social right for all human beings. The most class-conscious workers have historically opposed means testing. In the 1930s for example, demands against the abusive and degrading means testing for relief were part of the fight by the unemployed.

Means testing - when one part of the population is subjected to proving their "need" - weakens working-class solidarity. It undermines the idea of social rights and reinforces competition between workers for jobs. Furthermore, once means testing is established it is easier for the ruling class to expand it, making it harder to qualify for social benefits.

Welfare and SSI are means-tested programs. They are entitlements in the sense that anyone below a certain income level is eligible. They are among the first social gains to come under attack by the rulers, as an attempt to lay the groundwork to go after the larger portion of the social wage codified in Social Security.

Struggles win extension of benefits
In his book, Labor's Giant Step: The first twenty years of the CIO: 1936-55, Art Preis explained that "Strikes, next to social revolutions, are the most overt expression of the class struggle. From 1936 through 1955, during the 20 years of the CIO's independent existence, there was a staggering total of 78,798 strikes in the United States, involving 42,366,000 strikers."

A huge 116-day national steel strike took place in 1959. These hard-fought working-class battles forced the bosses and Washington to concede extending the initial gains registered in the Social Security Act.

In 1957, a national Disability Insurance program was established providing cash payments to workers over 50 years of age who had been totally and permanently disabled. The age limit was lifted in 1960. More than 4 million disabled workers under 65 and 1.6 million dependents - including more than a million children - receive Social Security Disability Insurance. The average monthly payment runs between $660 for one person and $1,100 for four.

Today, the principle programs are Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) and Medicare, which includes Supplemental Medical Insurance.

Introduced in 1965 in the midst of the struggles of the civil rights movement, Medicare provides medical benefits for those over 65. Medicaid was established the same year, providing means-tested medical benefits for those with extremely low incomes, including children, their caretakers, the elderly, and the disabled.

In 1974, the Social Security Administration was forced to establish the federal Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program, a means-tested cash program for those who have a disability. It was one of the two major cash assistance programs, along with AFDC. In 1992, there were 6.5 million recipients of SSI, with a monthly federal payment of $422 for one person and $633 for two.

Today, while SSI has not been dismantled, the ruling class - with Clinton as their pointman - is trying to slash it. On February 6, the Clinton administration issued rules that it said would end disability payments for 135,000 children - 14 percent of all children who now receive them under this program. Additionally, $51 billion was cut from SSI under the Welfare Reform law, mostly affecting documented immigrants.

In 1972, U.S. Congress passed a law that pegged Social Security and other benefits to a cost of living index, automatically increasing payments under these programs to make up for general cost of living rises.

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is the basis for annual increases in Social Security payments, as well as adjustments in alimony and child support payments, federal pensions, food stamps, the poverty line, and the pay raises in many union contracts.

The recent plans floated by capitalist politicians to lower the CPI would have a direct affect on the working class. For example, Social Security and Social Security disability payments increased in January based on a 2.9 percent increase in the CPI from last year. The average monthly payment went up $21, to $745. If the CPI were lowered one point, as some in the ruling class now push for, these payments would decrease to $737.

What is a social wage?
Winning these social gains as entitlements was a historic gain of the working class that reinforced human solidarity and undercut the dog-eat-dog competition imposed on workers by capitalism.

According to Webster's dictionary, an entitlement is: 1) the state or condition of being entitled to something; 2) a right to benefits specified, especially by law or contract; 3) a government program providing benefits to members of a specified group, also funds supporting or distributed by such a program. Entitlements are not "the dole," "handouts," or "charity." They are the socialized part of workers' wages - universal social rights for a class.

Workers and working farmers produce all value through hard work, applying their labor power to the wealth of nature.

Along with wages received directly from an employer, the social wage is one part of the value workers produce - that is the portion of value workers create through their labor that the working class receives. The remaining portion is surplus value, or profit, which the boss pockets.

In the pamphlet Value, Price and Profit, Karl Marx explained that a boss buys a worker's ability to work, and then a worker toils for, say, eight hours a day, for a wage. Marx writes that, "over and above the hours required to replace his wages, [for example two hours] or the value of his labor power, he will, therefore, have to work six other hours, which I shall call hours of surplus labor, which surplus labor will realize itself in a surplus value and a surplus produce." At the end of a workday, a worker has added new value to the commodity he labored on.

"This given value," Marx continues, "determined by the time of his labor, is the only fund from which both he [the worker] and the capitalist have to draw their respective shares and dividends, the only value to be divided into wages and profits.... Since the capitalist and the workman have only to divide this limited value, that is, the value measured by the total labor of the working man, the most the one gets the less will the other get, and vice versa."

The proportion of this division registers the social relations between bosses and workers established through the class struggle.

When workers won Social Security as an entitlement in 1935, the bosses as a class lost part of their surplus value to the workers as a class. Since the mid-1970s, the capitalists' average profit rates have been declining. In response, big business and its political representatives in Washington and state and local legislatures are pushing to take a greater portion of the value produced by workers' labor for their class, to fatten their thinning profit rates. That's the driving force behind both the employers' assault on workers' wages and working conditions, and the government offensive against social entitlements.  
 
 
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