After toiling in the nation's steel mills for decades with a contractual promise from the steel bosses that they would be provided with health and pension benefits for the rest of their lives, steelworkers are finding out that this supposed guarantee is really nothing more than a promise that isn't even worth the paper its written on. And the Bush administration, along with most Democrats in Congress, have simply washed their hands of the matter.

The steel bosses in their drive to make profits are aiming to gut the benefits owed to some 600,000 retirees from the steel plants and their dependents. This is just the latest example of what the capitalist rulers have in store for working people as their system sinks deeper into crisis. For millions of workers--those currently employed as well as retirees--health and pension funds that were supposed to be set aside for them are simply being gambled away on the stock market by the employers and the government.

The bosses seek to use all the legal loopholes available to them to shed what's owed to the retirees, which they consider to be nothing more than a "debt burden," a drain on their profits. Bethlehem Steel, for example, the nation's third-largest steelmaker and one of 33 companies currently in bankruptcy, is planning to contract out its steelmaking, declaring itself to be a holding company, and informing these workers that they'll have to get in line for payment behind the bondholders.

For the boss class, working people have no value as far as they're concerned unless they're at work producing surplus value. The fact that working people, thanks to social and medical advances, are now living years past the age of retirement is for the bosses a growing economic problem. But what this really points to is the social and political bankruptcy of the capitalist system.

We're also seeing the fruits of the disastrous policy that had been embraced by the union officialdom of tying workers benefits to the well-being of a particular industry, instead of fighting for government-guaranteed lifetime entitlements for all, regardless of the profitability prospects of a particular capitalist company.

Hand in hand with the rulers' assault on retirees' benefits is the rulers' drive to pass a newly revamped welfare bill that builds on the attacks made upon entitlement programs undertaken by the Clinton administration six years earlier. Their move to create more subminimum wage workfare jobs is aimed at further assaulting union rights and the dignity of those forced into these make-work assignments.

All working people should condemn both the steel bosses and the bipartisan gang in Washington for placing the lives and well-being of tens of thousands of steelworkers and their families on the line. What's needed to defend working people--and to keep the bosses from imposing devastating conditions on sections of the working class--is for the labor movement to take its place in the vanguard of a battle to demand the government provide jobs for all at decent union-scale wages, along with nationwide cradle-to-grave health care, retirement benefits, coverage for disabled workers and their families, government-funded child care, and national unemployment insurance at a livable level.
 
 
Related article:
Steel bosses deny health and pension benefits to retirees  
 
 
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