Workers and farmers need to mobilize around demands that can help strengthen and protect our class and our allies on the land, in the United States and around the world, against the ravages of the capitalist system in its decline.

Workers should demand a massive government-funded public works program to create jobs at union-scale wages. Such a program would provide both jobs and needed housing, schools, hospitals, day-care centers, transportation, swimming pools, and other social infrastructure that the rulers are allowing to crumble.

Labor must demand a shorter workweek with no cut in pay to spread the available work around. We must demand a substantial increase in the minimum wage. Today, the buying power of the minimum wage is lower than it was in 1960. This minimum wage must be universal--whether in a factory or in a prison, whether earned by native-born or immigrant workers--with guaranteed full health and pension benefits.

We must demand that all wages be covered by full cost-of-living protection against sudden and unexpected inflationary explosions that can devastate the living standards of workers and farmers overnight. Labor needs to reach out to working farmers and join with them in their demand to stop all farm foreclosures.

Workers and farmers in this country must join in the fight to demand that Washington and other imperialist powers cancel the Third World debt imposed on the semicolonial countries to the tune of more than $2 trillion. We must call for lifting all tariffs and other obstacles to trade and travel erected by the U.S. rulers, with the purpose of wresting more profits from the superexploitation of the toilers of countries oppressed by imperialism. Waging this fight will strengthen the unity of the international working class against our common oppressors--the imperialist ruling families in Washington, London, Paris, and elsewhere.  
 
 
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