Fighting to protect working people from the destructive effects of rising prices for food, housing, childcare and other essentials is a central responsibility in front of the unions. It goes side by side with fighting for jobs, safe working conditions and organizing solidarity with workers who are on strike or fighting bosses’ lockouts.
Socialist Workers Party candidates call for a shorter workweek with no cut in pay to create jobs for the unemployed and for cost-of-living adjustments in all contracts, benefits and pensions, so whenever prices rise our wages go up to match.
These proposals are neither unrealistic, nor new. They arise out of workers’ own struggles and have been adopted, fought for and in some cases won by unions.
The United Auto Workers won its first escalator clause in 1948 after 75,000 workers at Chrysler went on strike. Like any wage raise, this came out of the bosses’ profits. In 1970 UAW members at GM struck and won regular cost-of-living increases tied to the rise in inflation — with no ceiling.
After striking in 1956, the United Steelworkers won an escalator clause. The United Mine Workers won COLA after a 54-day strike in 1974 covering 120,000 miners.
The demand for a 30-hour workweek with no cut in pay was adopted by the UAW in 1943, as workers were beginning to break through the no-strike pledge imposed by the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II.
These demands are central today because they protect workers from the most basic afflictions we face under capitalism — joblessness and soaring prices. The SWP also calls for a government-funded public works program to provide jobs at union-scale wages to build housing, hospitals, roads and other sorely needed infrastructure. And it calls for a guaranteed income supplement for families that encourages employment rather than dependence on welfare programs.
These proposals, adopted by the SWP in 1938, are aimed at strengthening working people’s “confidence in our own worth, and our ability to organize together and fight,” the party said in its 2022 resolution, available in The Low Point of Labor Resistance Is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward by party leaders Jack Barnes, Mary-Alice Waters and Steve Clark.
Join SWP candidates in discussing these proposals with fellow workers and advance a road for workers to fight for a government of our own, one that can put an end, once and for all, to the miseries inflicted on the toiling majority by the capitalist exploiters.