As the capitalist economic and social crisis deepens, the working class is being hammered by high prices for necessities, including groceries, energy, rent, health care and more, and by increasing difficulties in getting and keeping a decent job.
This year bosses have laid off some 1.2 million workers, the highest number since the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The monthly government reports about the jobs being “created” today are a total distortion of the facts. When statistics were adjusted, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 900,000 fewer jobs had actually been created in the 12-month period ending in March 2025. According to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, this trend has continued through the rest of this year. Since April, he says, there’s actually been a net loss of 20,000 jobs a month.
For those laid off it has become increasingly difficult to get another job. More than one in four workers on the unemployment rolls, nearly 2 million, have been without a job for at least six months. With the capitalist economy stagnating, bosses are either cutting their workforce or not replacing workers who leave, while making those still on the job work faster, at the expense of their lives and limbs.
“The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation,” the Socialist Workers Party said in the program adopted at its founding convention in 1938. This is the starting point for organizing a union-led fight for every worker’s right to a job with adequate wages, humane work schedules and proper job conditions families need to live, rather than be torn apart by the bosses’ relentless drive for profits.
The political resolution adopted by the SWP in 2022, printed in The Low Point of Labor Resistance Is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward, explains: “Working people need a course that strengthens confidence in our own worth and our ability to organize together and fight. A course that helps the working class and unions forge alliances with farmers, other exploited producers, and the oppressed.
“Class-conscious workers call for a shorter workweek with no cut in pay, with regular hours. We call for a massive public works program to provide employment for millions at union-scale wages building hospitals, schools, childcare centers, housing, bridges, roads, and other needed infrastructure. In face of inflation, we demand cost-of-living escalators for wages (as well as retirement, jobless, and disability payments).”
Millions of workers today are being forced to increase their incomes by taking on two or three jobs. But this leaves no time to relax, to look at how workers can unite to take on the attacks of the capitalist rulers, and to spend time with their families and participate in union, political and social activity.
“What’s needed is a floor for all families of working people,” says the SWP resolution, “an income that’s sufficient for workers to maintain steady employment, as the labor movement fights for universal childcare and medical care.” All of those below this line, which today encompasses millions of working-class families, should be provided with a government-guaranteed income supplement.
It’s along this course that working people can strengthen and revitalize our unions and join the fight to build a movement tens of millions strong, to take political power out of the hands of the capitalist rulers, end once and for all the exploitative and oppressive system of capitalism, and join the struggle for a socialist world.