Persistently high prices and growing employer attacks are increasing the difficulties workers and our families face. It’s harder today to find steady work with livable wages and meet the costs of our housing, health care, child care and other essentials. More workers face a struggle to get by month by month, let alone prosper.
Prices haven’t fallen since they soared between 2021 and 2023, a big factor in Donald Trump winning the 2024 election. After the Biden presidency, many workers hope Trump will do something to bring prices down. But protection from the ruinous impact of higher prices will not be found by looking to whichever capitalist politician is in the White House.
There is a road forward. Workers are increasingly turning to our unions to defend our class interests. The unions are 14.4 million members strong, with millions more looking to join or back today’s labor struggles.
Demands for substantial wage increases are being fought for in strikes at Milk-Bone in Buffalo, at hotels in San Francisco and Las Vegas, by the 55,000 postal workers, who have walked out across Canada, and teachers in Massachusetts. As they mobilize to press forward, they can make real gains, as shown in recent strikes by the International Longshoremen’s Association at East and Gulf coast ports and by Machinists at Boeing.
Building solidarity to strengthen these fights is in the interests of all workers.
When Democrats and Republicans claim they’ll bring “inflation under control,” they obscure how the workings of the capitalist system inevitably cause prices to rise. Bosses’ competition with rivals for markets, at home and abroad, is inherent to capitalism, and it determines which capitalists survive and which go under. This fuels bosses’ attacks on workers. As dog-eat-dog competition causes profit rates to fall, the rulers’ governments move to print more money, hoping this will buffer the crisis. With the supply of money outstripping commodities, prices inevitably rise with disastrous consequences for workers.
Nothing under capitalism can prevent this. Moreover, the rulers and their backers in the meritocratic upper middle class are blind to the true social and moral consequences of these crises on the working class.
Without fighting for protection from the twin ravages of high prices and joblessness, more workers get thrown deeper into poverty, and the working class as a whole can begin to get torn apart.
It falls to the working class to lead the fight to defend the interests of the millions of toilers. Unions have before, and can again, lead a fight for full cost-of-living protection in every contract and all government benefits, so whenever prices rise, our wages go up automatically. Bosses will howl that they cannot afford this, as they do every time workers defend ourselves. But this just points to the fact that every class struggle is a political struggle, and that workers must look to taking political power into our own hands.
Today’s strikes, many featured in the Militant, are the starting point to push back the bosses’ offensive. Unions can mobilize labor support, help win more victories and, in the process, build workers’ confidence in ourselves and our own capacities. Build solidarity with these union fights.