Other big U.S. companies have announced massive layoffs, plant closings, and other retrenchment measures. While Ford and Boeing have not gone bankrupt, tens of thousands of workers face the same fate as their brothers and sisters at Enron.

Especially during the boom years of the 1990s, the bosses tried to make workers believe that being employed by a "big" and "strong" company equaled a lifetime of security. But it was a cruel illusion. This situation argues volumes for the need for the labor movement to fight to end the deadly trap working people face when their pensions and health coverage are tied to their employers, and to combat the assault on the social wage by the bosses.

In Capitalism's World Disorder, Jack Barnes writes that for working people, "Social Security was the beginning of the attempt to moderate the dog-eat-dog competition imposed on the working class under capitalism. Social Security was an initial step by our class--by those who produce wealth--toward conquering social organization of conditions necessary for life, such as education and health care, for a lifetime. Workers think of each other in terms of a lifetime. We cannot think of each other the way capitalists think of us. We cannot make ourselves think of other human beings as though they do not exist up to the age of thirteen or after the age of sixty-five. That is not how workers function. We have a different class view, a different moral view of society. Elementary human solidarity is in our interests, not in conflict with them."

The battle for Social Security is the battle to bring all welfare payments, all medical claims, all supplemental payments for education and child care into a comprehensive, nationwide, government-guaranteed entitlement. This must include old-age pensions at a level that allows a person an adequate standard of living, not the measly starvation pittance most working people now receive.

The crisis of today is not primarily an economic crisis, although there is a deep crisis in the capitalist economy. Look at the owners of Enron, of Ford, of Boeing, and other companies--as well as the government that represents them. The great crisis of our time is a political and moral crisis, one that only the working class has a chance to resolve by transforming society in a truly human way. Unlike the capitalists, the working class has no interest in turning on any victims of the crisis-ridden capitalist system.
 
 
Related article:
Enron debacle: big firms don't shield workers from crisis  
 
 
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