“The Great American Job-Creation Machine Comes Back to Life,” headlined an enthusiastic June 6 Wall Street Journal article, hailing the Labor Department’s claim 172,000 jobs were “created” in May.
But a closer look at the facts shows this claim is a far cry from the reality the working class faces today. We continue to be battered by chronically high prices on basic necessities, from groceries to gas, electricity, rents and mortgages, healthcare, daycare and more, and where a decent-paying full-time job is hard to get.
The vast majority of the jobs ballyhooed by the Journal’s editors were in leisure and hospitality, food services and bars and in healthcare, jobs notorious for low pay, few benefits and either too few or way too many hours. Meanwhile, some 2 million workers — 27.5% of all those on the government’s unemployment rolls in May — have been unable to find work for the last 27 weeks or more, with their benefits running out.
At the same time, another 4.8 million work part time because they can’t get full-time jobs. And the government admits at least 6.2 million want a job but haven’t been able to find one for so long that they are no longer counted as part of the labor force.
The bosses continue to push to maximize their profits and privileges from exploiting our class, deepening class divisions we face. “Labor’s share of gross domestic income,” the Journal reported May 28, “sank to 51%, the lowest since records began in 1947. Profits’ share climbed to 12.1%, the highest since 1950.”
Average hourly wages have risen by a measly 3% since the end of 2019, but for many this “raise” has been wiped out by higher prices. At the same time, profits of the bosses and bankers are up 50% or more.
The consumer price index rose 4.2% in the month of May from a year earlier, the highest increase in three years. Impacting this hike was the huge increase in gasoline at the pump, up 40.5%, and fuel oil, up 58.9%. The big-business press tries to push the blame onto Washington’s war with Iran, but the fact is the price increases are primarily aimed at protecting the bosses’ profits from erosion.
Soaring prices squeeze workers
On other fronts, coffee is now 18.5% higher and beef roasts are up 17.8%. “Something so basic as buying fresh vegetables is starting to become a serious financial decision for many families,” New York City chef Isaac Bernal Carbajo told The Associated Press. He pointed to the sharp increase in the price of tomatoes, up 40% over a year ago.
The prices of other vegetables are also higher. At the Hunts Point market in the Bronx in New York in mid-May, asparagus was selling for around $60 for 11 pounds. A year ago it was half that.
Jason Turek, who grows sweet corn on his farm in New York state, told the Journal his freight cost per shipment jumped from $4,000 last year to $6,600 this year. “At a certain point, it’s not worth picking up the crop, just to ship it up the road at a loss,” he said.
Electricity prices have risen by about 40% over the past five years, with double-digit increases in the last year as data center hotspots like in Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania suck up billions of kilobytes. Bosses in some 40 states are already charging millions of working-class households extra for upgrades to these power grids before they’re even built.
Work overtime to make ends meet
“I’m working between eight and 12 hours of overtime every week,” Alex Watt, a hospital nurse in Columbus, Ohio, told the New York Times. “We’re cutting even, at best, but sometimes we’re spending more than we‘re getting.” He and his wife, Kali, own a home and are raising three children there. They have a combined income of about $140,000 a year, which seems, on paper, to be enough to get by, but that’s no longer the case, with prices rising on just about everything.
To try to cover essential expenses, they and increasing numbers of working-class families across the country are using their credit cards. Credit card balances reached a record $1.3 trillion at the end of 2025. With average annual interest rates climbing over 22%, these cards are a profits bonanza for the giant banks, while pushing increasing numbers of working people deeper into debt.
In the first quarter of this year, the percentage of credit-card balances that were delinquent at least 90 days rose to over 13%. That’s the highest level in 15 years.
Bosses determined to protect their profit rates have locked out workers at Cargill in Colorado, Marathon in the Bay Area and BP in Indiana, while workers elsewhere are going on strike to defend their wages and improve increasingly unsafe conditions and schedules. These union battles are crucial to meet the attacks of the bosses. Show your support!