In campaign speeches around the country, President George Bush has been pushing for voluntary “individual retirement accounts.” Other capitalist politicians and financiers propose raising the retirement age, cutting benefits for future retirees, increasing Social Security taxes, or cutting cost-of-living adjustments in benefits. (See “U.S. rulers press attack on Social Security” in September 21 Militant).

All these proposals are aimed at undermining the character of Social Security as a right for all—a social right that ties the working class together—and at shifting more of the responsibility for retirement and health care onto individual workers and farmers.

The Clinton administration opened the breach by pushing through the bipartisan Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, which eliminated Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the main federally guaranteed welfare program. It got away with this assault by playing on divisions between employed and unemployed workers and scapegoating sections of working class, especially women living alone with children.

The elimination of “welfare as we know it” has paved the way for more sweeping attacks on Social Security and other gains. Because these were conquered in struggle, the ruling class knows that rolling them back will generate resistance. But the ruling families are forced to carry out this offensive out of economic necessity in order to reverse the long-term crisis of declining profit rates that began in the early 1970s.

Social Security and other entitlements were the by-product of two historic waves of struggles by working people. Under the pressure of the rising labor battles of the 1930s, workers and farmers won a number of conquests codified in the Social Security Act of 1935. This included social insurance for the elderly, which is funded by payroll taxes and taxes paid by employers. It provides benefits to workers after they reach retirement age (originally set at 65, and currently being increased to 67). It also included unemployment benefits, disability insurance, and aid to families with dependent children.

As a result of the mass struggles for Black freedom in the 1950s and early 1960s, the provisions of the Social Security Act were consolidated and expanded to include Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, cost-of-living protections, and other programs.Working people fought for and won a measure of social protection—a safety net—from the ravages of the capitalist system and the dog-eat-dog competition it fosters among our class. These gains constitute the social wage, that is, the extension of wages that the labor movement fights to establish as a social right for all, and thus for the entire working class. They are not a “handout,” as capitalist spokespeople claim, but part of the wealth produced by working people through our labor.

The October 1929 stock market crash announced the opening of a deep-going depression in the United States. Between 1929 and 1933 industrial production plunged nearly 50 percent. Bosses drove down wages and millions were thrown into the ranks of the unemployed—the reserve army of labor. By 1933, one out of four workers was jobless. An estimated 1.5 million homeless wandered the roads of the country in search of work. Working farmers were driven off the land as farm foreclosures skyrocketed.  
 
Fruits of 1930s labor upsurge
Until the 1930s there was no government-guaranteed retirement pension system, unemployment insurance, or other minimal social protection in the United States. Jobless and pauperized workers had to rely on private charities and stingy public relief on a local level.

After the initial shock of the economic crisis, unemployed workers began to organize. National hunger marches were organized in 1931 and 1932 to demand unemployment compensation, a shorter workweek with no cut in pay to create jobs, and social insurance for old age, illness, accidents, and maternity. In March 1932 some 4,000 workers seeking jobs demonstrated at the Ford River Rouge plant in Detroit. Cops and Ford company thugs fired on them, killing four and wounding many. Four months later 25,000 unemployed veterans of World War I and their families marched on Washington seeking payment of their bonuses. On orders from the Herbert Hoover administration, Gen. Douglas MacArthur led U.S. troops to drive out the veterans with tear gas, fire, and bayonets.

Liberals and union officials have peddled the myth that Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, out of humanitarianism and “love for the little man,” gave jobs to the unemployed, granted labor the right to organize, and established the Social Security system as part of the administration’s “New Deal” policies. In reality, Roosevelt, who was elected in 1932 on a platform advocating cuts in federal spending and a balanced budget, was forced to make concessions to the working class in response to a huge labor upsurge. His administration made the smallest possible compromises to stave off a deeper working-class radicalization and save capitalism.

Labor resistance accelerated in 1933 and exploded in 1934. In 1929 there had been 921 strikes involving 289,000 workers. By the end of 1934, more than 1.4 million workers had struck across the country. The story of this upsurge is recounted in detail by Art Preis in Labor’s Giant Step—The First Twenty Years of the CIO: 1936-55 (see ad below).

The strike wave of 1934 was marked by three decisive battles: the strikes by the auto parts workers at the Electric Auto-Lite Co. in Toledo, the Teamsters in Minneapolis, and the longshore workers in San Francisco.

In the spring of 1934 the country was electrified by the Toledo Auto-Lite strike. The auto workers turned for leadership to the Lucas County Unemployed League. This group, led by what became the American Workers Party, had won respect among the working class in Toledo for its effective mass actions by jobless workers. With up to 10,000 on the picket line, workers confronted the bosses, scabs, cops, and courts. They fought a six-day pitched battle with the National Guard and prevailed, winning a raise and their first union contract.

In Minneapolis, workers in the trucking industry carried out three combative strikes, using mass pickets to defeat assaults by the police. The workers, led by members of the Communist League (forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party), shut down the industry through the use of “flying squads”—pickets on wheels. They then set out to organize every truck driver and inside warehouse worker in Minneapolis. The leadership instilled in the ranks a healthy distrust of capitalist politicians, government mediators, and the courts, fostering reliance on their own mobilized power against the bosses. They produced a daily strike newspaper, organized a women’s auxiliary, forged an alliance with farmers groups, and extended solidarity to other workers. The bosses finally capitulated, recognizing the union and signing a contract. A vivid account of the Teamsters battles can be found in Teamster Rebellion and three subsequent volumes by Farrell Dobbs, one of its central leaders (see ad on page 7).

In San Francisco, a strike by more than 10,000 members of the International Longshoremen’s Association became a cause for the entire working class in the city, which carried out a two-day general strike in response to a murderous crackdown by the cops and National Guard. The dockworkers won a contract. Within a year they had won the union hiring hall up and down the West Coast.

The Roosevelt administration began to enact legislation in response to this labor upsurge. But the much-touted New Deal of 1933 was actually a “raw deal,” many workers said. The government’s works programs never provided jobs for more than 25 percent of the jobless. Hundreds of thousands of workers would periodically get thrown off the relief programs. Some 400,000 were fired from Works Progress Administration jobs right after Roosevelt was reelected in 1936, for example.

The payments to workers on the relief projects, as the Unemployed League put it, were “not enough to live on and just too much to die on.” They received as little as $40 a month in the North and $19 a month in the South. Instead of real jobs they were given make-work projects, which sometimes literally meant one group of workers digging a hole and another group filling it up.  
 
Jobless protest indignities of relief setup
The unemployed hated the relief setup and protested the indignities they were subjected to by investigators prying into their lives to determine their eligibility. In Teamster Power, Farrell Dobbs explains that in Minneapolis a woman receiving Aid to Dependent Children would be cut off if she worked or if there was any evidence of a man living with her. Government investigators would sometimes show up at her home in the middle of the night, trying to catch a man in her bed.

In Minneapolis, Local 574 of the Teamsters took the lead in organizing the unemployed into a union auxiliary known as the Federal Workers Section. Setting an example for the entire labor movement, Local 574 championed the struggles of jobless workers in their fights with the authorities for improved relief payments, and organized those on the federal government’s Emergency Relief Administration (ERA) projects. This union-sponsored organization helped protect workers from the deliberate confusion that the Roosevelt administration sowed among the unemployed groups by reorganizing the federal relief system from the ERA into a new setup called the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

It was under pressure from the deepening of these labor struggles that the ruling class gave bigger concessions in the form of the Social Security Act of 1935, in an effort to placate and undermine this movement.

A new, even bigger strike wave rolled across the United States in 1936-37. During this period workers carried out more than 1,000 sit-down strikes. In 1937 workers organized a sit-down strike at three General Motors auto plants in Flint, Michigan, demanding recognition of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union. For six weeks the workers stopped production and refused to leave the plants. They faced tear gas attacks and heat shutoffs, battled cops and company thugs, and stood up to the National Guard. In a decisive victory for the labor movement, the GM bosses gave in, signing a one-page agreement to bargain with the UAW.

These battles began to transform the labor movement in the United States, opening the process that forged the industrial union movement, which took the form of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), launched in 1936.

The CIO became a powerful social movement as workers poured into the unions, seeking not only the right to organize on the job but to improve broader conditions of life.

The most class-conscious workers fought for extending basic social protection to all working people. For example, the National Unemployed League called for a 30-hour workweek and public works, libraries and recreational centers, rural electrification, union-scale wages for those on relief, and unemployment insurance without discrimination.

This working-class upsurge was ended, however, by the class-collaborationist course of the CIO and AFL officialdom, which tied the labor movement politically to supporting the Democratic Party and blocked any action toward organizing a labor party based on the unions and independent of the capitalist parties. As the U.S. ruling class began its preparations for entering the second imperialist world war and whipped up a patriotic propaganda campaign, the labor bureaucracy buckled to Washington’s demands for “sacrifice.” It agreed to compulsory wage controls and signed a “no-strike” pledge.

As the imperialist slaughter unfolded, labor resistance resumed. The most outstanding example was the 1943 strike by 530,000 coal miners. When Roosevelt threatened to send in the army if they didn’t return to work, the miners defiantly responded: “You can’t dig coal with bayonets.” They subsequently won their demands for an acceptable pay increase.

Following World War II, a massive labor upsurge held off the attempts by the employer class to deal major blows to the labor movement and roll back the social conquests of the 1930s. The post-war strike wave involved a total of 5 million workers.  
 
Black rights battles of 1950s and ‘60s
The U.S. rulers had tried to keep the concessions made to the working class in the 1930s as limited as possible. Social Security was not intended to be something that workers and farmers could live on after retirement—and it was not, until the 1960s. Workers who retired had to find other sources of income. What’s more, the system was designed so that most workers would die before receiving many benefits. At that time average life expectancy was 59, and the “normal retirement age” for receiving full benefits was 65.

Working people extracted further concessions from the ruling class, however, as a result of the massive movement by Blacks to bring down the Jim Crow system of racist segregation in the 1950s and early 1960s. This social movement exposed and denounced the miserable living conditions—in terms of health, housing, education, and other areas of life—faced not only by Blacks but millions of working people throughout the United States. This forced the government—under both Republican and Democratic administrations—to enact a series of measures that expanded the Social Security Act.

In 1957 a national Disability Insurance program was established, providing cash payments to workers over 50 who were totally and permanently disabled; the age limit was lifted in 1960. During the 1950s, Social Security benefits were extended to state and local government employees, members of the armed forces, some farm workers, domestic workers, and the self-employed.

As Black rights battles were in full swing, Medicare and Medicaid were introduced in 1965. Medicare provides health-care benefits to all those over 65. Medicaid provides means-tested medical benefits for those with very low incomes. Means-tested programs require that eligibility be proven by investigating a person’s financial situation—often enforced by social workers prying into every aspect of one’s life

In 1972 U.S. Congress passed a law that for the first time pegged Social Security and other benefits to a cost-of-living index, automatically increasing payments to compensate for inflation. In 1974 the federal government established the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program, a means-tested cash program for those who have disabilities.

Other federally guaranteed programs instituted in the 1960s and 1970s include food stamps, housing subsidies, school lunches, the Low-Income Energy Assistance program, and Supplemental Food Programs for Women, Infants, and Children.

As a result of the civil rights struggles, Social Security and related programs became a social wage that, however inadequate, working people could expect to more or less live on when they were out of a job, disabled, or retired.

During the 25-year post-war economic boom, however, the labor misleadership institutionalized policies that weakened the unions’ fighting capacity. The officialdom focused attention on the gradual improvements in wages of those sections of the working class already in the strongest unions. It traded off these narrow gains for class-collaborationist polices that tangled the unions in red tape. It refused to lead an effort to organize the unorganized majority and to champion the demands of Blacks and other oppressed nationalities.

The labor officialdom allowed lawyers to write contracts that were long and complicated. It focused on company-specific benefits rather than fighting to improve wages and working conditions and simultaneously campaigning to extend the social wage for all workers. This was the opposite of the example set by the class-struggle leadership of the Minneapolis Teamsters in the 1930s. At that time, short contracts written in plain English, which usually lasted a year or so and often covered wages and working conditions across several companies and states, became a hallmark of the victories by labor. At the same time, the Teamster militants fought for a government-sponsored safety net that would protect the entire working class.

“The bureaucracy turned its back on any fight for nationwide government health care and improved retirement and unemployment benefits for the working population as a whole. Instead, it sought to negotiate industry-by-industry ‘fringe benefits,’ more and more tied to the profits of individual industries and companies,” Jack Barnes notes in The Changing Face of U.S. Politics (see ad on page 7).

Today, the employers and their government are seizing on these weaknesses of the labor movement to renew their assault on the social wage. Under the cover of bankruptcy proceedings, companies such as United Airlines and Horizon Natural Resources are pushing to tear up pension plans for thousands of workers. The White House is pointing to this reality to argue for proposals that would move further in the direction of individual workers having to fend for themselves.

Millions of workers and farmers, however, regard Social Security and other gains as part of their rightful living standards. The political vanguard of the working class not only calls for opposing the government’s attacks on these entitlements. It champions the demand to bring all retirement pensions, medical claims, welfare payments, child care, and other social guarantees into a comprehensive, nationwide, federally guaranteed entitlement for all. This is part of the battle to prevent the rulers from tearing up the class solidarity of working people.  
 
 
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