In addition, working people today confront a huge jump in the price of milk and other dairy products. This is on top of increased rents for apartments, and rising costs for health care, public transportation, and other necessities. Inflation is not just a passing problem; we’ve only seen the beginning. As the worldwide economic crisis worsens, we can expect sudden inflationary surges that will devastate the living standards and any savings of workers and farmers.

Truck drivers in California who are owner-operators have carried out work stoppages to demand compensation for the rising price of diesel, which shipping companies have tried to shift onto their backs.

To protect our class from this scourge of capitalism, labor should campaign for federal legislation guaranteeing automatic cost-of-living adjustments for all wages, as well as pensions, health care, unemployment benefits, workers comp, and welfare payments. This must apply to all union contracts.

Capitalist politicians scapegoat semicolonial nations that are members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) for rising oil costs. OPEC members, however, produce only 40 percent of the world’s oil. A handful of monopolies such as ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch/Shell, ChevronTexaco, and British Petroleum are the ones that control the refining and distribution of oil as well as the sale of gasoline and other petroleum products around the world.

The energy giants make decisions based on their profit prerogatives, such as their long-term freeze on building refineries in the United States, which ensures that supplies will be tight when demand increases and therefore prices will soar. Today these companies are taking advantage of the instability accelerated by the imperialist war in Iraq, as well as Washington’s drive to remove the government of Venezuela, to justify hiking the price of oil. Prices are increasing more than the worldwide demand because the oil barons, through their monopoly, can simply jack up prices.

The labor movement needs to demand: open the books of the energy monopolies to inspection by elected committees of workers and farmers. Only such a step can expose to public view the contrived shortages, price-gouging, and the true financial situation of these corporations. The recent revelations of taped conversations of Enron energy traders, who boasted about how they ripped off working people by manipulating the electrical power market and hiking prices during the California energy crisis in 2000-2001, simply show how capitalists function on a normal basis.

The oil monopolies control a resource vital to society. But they are in the business of making money, not of providing energy. Their decisions, designed to enrich a few, have a disastrous impact on the lives of millions. The labor movement should demand the nationalization of the energy industry. That means that the industry must be taken out of private hands and be run as a public utility for the benefit of working people. This goes hand in hand with establishing workers’ control of production—control over the pace of work, job safety, and how the work is organized. Workers in oil refineries, power plants, and related industries can use their knowledge on the job to bring to light the bosses’ record of exploitation, swindles, and threats to safety and health. Workers can show that we can run the industry better and more safely than the bosses—in the interests of the vast majority.
 
 
Related article:
What’s behind the soaring price of fuel?  
 
 
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