UNITE—which these workers succeeded in bringing in as their union four years ago after a 25-year struggle—and other unions need to fight for government measures to provide immediate relief to these workers and protect them from the brutal consequences of the normal operations of the capitalist economy.

Demands must be placed on the state and federal governments to provide cash relief to supplement existing unemployment benefits for as long as workers stay jobless—without the indignities of “means testing” requirements policed by social investigators—and to extend the workers’ medical coverage for the same period.

A look at the broader picture reveals that this is not a problem unique to Pillowtex or the Carolinas. Hundreds of thousands of workers have been losing their jobs in recent years, especially in industry. Since January 2001, some 2.6 million manufacturing jobs have been eliminated in the United States, including nearly 300,000 in garment and textile. Under these conditions, working people face two basic economic afflictions of declining capitalism—unemployment and high prices—that need to be addressed through struggles for demands that protect the interests of the working class as a whole.

At the heart of the fight for jobs for all is the demand for a sliding scale of hours—a shorter workweek with no cut in pay—to spread the available work around and tie together both those employed and jobless in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. At the same time, public works programs are needed to create jobs as well as to fix the deteriorating infrastructure and meet other pressing social needs such as child care, housing, and improved public education.

As a measure to defend incomes against rising prices, which can become devastating as Washington’s predatory wars abroad multiply and the economic crisis deepens, working people need a sliding scale of wages—cost-of-living adjustments to make up for increased prices of consumer goods and other necessities that eat up a greater portion of meager paychecks.

Affirmative action programs are also needed to combat racist and sex discrimination in hiring and layoffs and minimize divisions in the working class fostered by the employers.

One shining example from working-class history of how the unions can lead such a course with great success is the Federal Workers Section of Teamsters Local 574 during the Minneapolis strikes of the 1930s, described vividly in the Pathfinder book Teamster Politics by Farrell Dobbs, one of the main protagonists of those struggles. It points to how unions solidly backed and organized the unemployed, countering the bosses’ use of joblessness to divide our class. Unemployed workers helped staff Teamsters pickets during walkouts while unionized truck drivers helped the unemployed organizations.

Labor militants must also take on arguments by bosses and capitalist politicians—often echoed by the top labor officialdom—that seek to confuse workers about the causes of the Pillowtex failure and what to do about it. The textile barons say the main problem is “foreign imports” and “unfair competition” from cheap fabrics and clothing—especially from the U.S. employers’ competitors in China, Vietnam, and countries of the Third World.

The U.S. capitalists thus seek to justify their own protectionist barriers and get workers and farmers to support our exploiters, the employers. In reality, working people in city and countryside face the same enemy around the world: the owners of Pillowtex, Cargill, Dupont, and other capitalist monopolies. Workers at Pillowtex and exploited farmers in this country have common interests with Vietnamese catfish farmers and small cotton producers in Burkina Faso devastated by protectionist U.S. tariffs—as well as with garment and textile workers in Thailand or the Dominican Republic who are fighting against starvation wages.

Bosses and capitalist politicians also argue that immigrants from Mexico and elsewhere are taking “American jobs.” This is another part of the divide-and-rule tactic. There is much broader understanding among the U.S. working class today, however, that anti-immigrant prejudice is deadly for labor. That is why protests against assaults on immigrant workers, like the recent rightist-backed firebombing of the house of a family of Mexican day laborers in Long Island, New York, strike a chord of solidarity among wider layers of working people.

The same understanding of the need for class solidarity can be extended across borders. That’s why unions must demand canceling the foreign debt of Third World countries that are chained to debt bondage by finance capital.

Plant shutdowns and rising joblessness are endemic to capitalism, which is in the midst of a worldwide crisis that has its roots in the declining average rate of industrial profit that started in the early 1970s. In their drive for profits, the bosses worldwide have used “too much” productive capacity—too much, that is, according to what they can sell at a sufficient profit for them. Now they are slashing that capacity and competing more fiercely among themselves around the globe to divide and redivide the world’s markets. That’s the source of the problem at Pillowtex.

Demands such as the ones presented above will be met by property owners and their accountants with cries of being “unrealistic,” especially at times of economic contraction. But what is realizable or not depends ultimately on the relationship of forces. The question posed sharply by mass layoffs is the defense of the proletariat from decay, demoralization, and ruin. If capitalism is unable to meet the demands that inevitably arise from the calamities it generates, then let it perish. More working-class militants can be aided today to perceive the essence of an outlived capitalism—they can learn that the existing problems, like the Pillowtex layoffs, are not incidental or episodic, but rather the consequence of a deep structural crisis of the system. They can then see why labor and its allies must take governmental power away from the capitalists and place it in our own hands.
 
 
Related article:
North Carolina textile giant closes, 7,500 out of a job  
 
 
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