Vol. 73/No. 50      December 28, 2009

As they do so the rulers, their government, and their media outlets look for opportunities to divide working people, especially by blaming unionized city and state workers for the cutbacks. For two consecutive days the New York Post printed editorials vilifying transit workers and teachers, claiming that “taxpayers” are being ripped off by the workers’ “very-generous-for-a-recession raises.” The bourgeois mouthpiece said flat out that “the only real answer is to cut labor costs.”

The accusation that the paltry wage increases workers receive are responsible for cutbacks in social services is false. Higher wages don't come out of a "wage pool" that is drained by some workers to the detriment of other workers. It's a lie aimed at dividing working people. They want us to believe that fellow workers are getting ahead at our expense.

Higher wages do mean less profits for the boss class—those who own the factories, mines, railways, and exploit our labor. As the capitalist politicians push through measures to make working people pay for the economic crisis, they are making sure that the interests of the propertied families they serve are protected. While schools, health care, and public transportation are put on the chopping block, payments to the wealthy bondholders from California to New York remain untouched.

When the bosses and their governments around the world say “we have to make sacrifices, we have to tighten our belts,” they mean workers have to give up many of the things we’ve come to depend on every day. There is no “we” that applies to both working people and the bosses and their government.

Social services and wage increases are won by working people through organized, collective struggle. That's why the unions, the basic defense organization of the working class, will increasingly come under attack. To put working people in a stronger fighting position we should demand the capitalists open their books to committees of workers and farmers so that we can expose the bloated “administrative costs” and “debt service” payments. Working people should call for a federally funded public works program to put millions of people to work at union-scale wages.

A revolutionary movement of working people fighting to win these and similar demands is necessary to defend what we have won as a social wage. These gains can only be defended and extended by working people taking political power and joining the worldwide struggle to reorganize society on the basis of the needs of the majority, rather than the interests of big capital.
 
 
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