SLAVE WAGES ARE NO JOKE
The old joke goes “God must love the poor-he’s made so many of them. ” Today the joke goes, “The Walton family (owners of Wal-Mart) must love the poor…..” Mocking real workers while promoting their corporate image, these slave-wage employers peddle self-aggrandizing mythologies. By their furnishing supplementary income for the retired or ‘pin-money’ for the house wife, or “entry level work,” where youth learn work discipline and skills, (which presumably they can use to move up the ladder according to their ability…,) Wal-Mart & the food franchises actually depress real workers wages. Today these workers are standing up at SUBWAY, STARBUCKS, MCDONALDS, in car washes and other slave wage franchises, for their rights in a long overdue battle that all workers and the labor movement must champion.
Without better industrial jobs available, the “stepping stone” mythological gibberish and media hype of the low wage paying corporations and franchises has exploded into picket lines, protests and organizing drives across the country. Low wage workers in the fast food and retail industry have entered the class struggle as an organizing force of the “new” proletariat in the urban centers. Their hands may not be on the levers of production, like mine workers, metal workers or auto-workers, but they are ubiquitous in the working class and they are our sons, daughters and increasingly, the young parents in our communities. Their fight for decent union wages and benefits is an inspiration and revitalizing force in the organization of the American working class today.
As the low paying jobs make up a greater and greater percentage of the available work, more workers are driven into poverty. These jobs depress the exchange value of the worker’s labor power. The result is life-long quarantine of large percentages of the black and brown population and immigrant workers, largely from the global south, into a vast pool of low wage labor who compete for jobs in an employer’s market.
Many workers have to get two or more jobs because employers cut hours to avoid paying medical or other benefits. This minimum wage existence forces many to work more than 40 hours with excessive travel between jobs, and they are still treading water in a lead- lined Speedo.
“A study taken in 2012 estimated that roughly 38% of Americans live “paycheck to paycheck.” (Wikipedia) This pool of under-employed, undereducated and relatively unskilled workers can be mobilized through the popularization of anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and socialist consciousness. This can develop when workers struggle for their rights together and socialist propagandists connect the dots, and workers take their individual struggles and turn them into class-wide concerns; or, the poor will be manipulated by the bosses, as they have been for many decades. Bosses who use media, pop culture, the church, the schools and the state to foster immigrant-bashing, race hatred, and gender bias, injecting this poison into the culture in order to separate poor white workers from poor black and brown folks. The bosses and their politicians even depend upon and employ business union bureaucrats to limit workers struggles (by industry, job, or bargaining unit) rather than allowing workers to make each struggle a class-wide battle. When you think of the revolving door of the corporate and government insiders, think of Andy Stern who moved from a sybaritic life off the SEIU membership to a cushy Obama campaign job and on to a fellowship at a Georgetown University think tank.
27% of blacks and 27.9% of Latinos, respectively, live below the official poverty level, a combined 24 million people. This is a conservatively low number presented by the government (and debunked here.) Alongside these 24 million black and brown folks living in poverty are another 20 million poor white people (who are only 9% of the white population, but a numerically comparable body to the population of black and brown living in poverty.) This number is the human material underpinning the backward consciousness the bosses perpetuate in order to stoke race hatred and drive a wedge between workers. This is still manifested in the backward consciousness of white workers who blame black workers for ‘taking their jobs.” And even among some ‘progressive’ blacks we find an equally nationalist, reactionary and insidious outcry against immigrants for the same reason. The Obama administration plays to this and sets new records for deportations (see pg. 6).
Even so, youth today are driven together by an increasingly inter-penetrated common urban culture. A common experience of fighting for justice on the job can create the subjective force capable of smashing the bosses’ racist, misogynist, and anti-immigrant ideology. Then workers can mobilize the forces of a united multi-racial working class to free ourselves collectively in our organizations, our work places and our communities from the disease of white supremacy, racial hatred, bigotry and prejudice, which only serves to separate and prevent workers from organizing together to defeat the bosses. To organize together To do this we must break out of the old model of union organizing which limits the struggle to an individual job site or organizing drive. We must turn our unions into class struggle instruments with a program to unite the entire class.
At the Oakland Airport on Sunday, July 14th, workers took strike action against the franchises and fast food industry in their fight for union recognition. The issues are similar across the industry and we touched on them above. The issues are similar and we call on our readers to learn the local issues and details and to support their local picket- lines! We recommend to our readers and all franchise workers the program and the logic and the statements of the inter-union organizing committee (IUOC). Revolutionary integration is not an intellectual exercise alone. Walking the picket lines is required.
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The following action July 24th is not based on the demands the CWG advocates for. Never the less we support all actions by workers mobilizing for their interests.
BERKELEY, RAISE THE WAGE!
No one who works hard should be living in poverty. We’re fighting to raise the floor for our lowest paid workers and to keep good paying, middle class jobs that allow us to support our families.
