THE FURLOUGH: Intent and Impact
California State workers have had 18 months of furloughs, and the threat of being paid minimum wage if the budget impasse continues still hangs over our heads. The furloughs ended June 30 after 18 months, but then the courts agreed with the Controller that paying minimum wage could not be accomplished with the current payroll system. Having lost his minimum wage gambit, at least pending appeal, the Governor in turn reinstituted furloughs in August. The message to State workers is contradictory and confusing, and changes on a dime. Management says come to work on Friday, then two days later they say stay home. Oh yeah, State workers are feeling like ping pong balls.
From the trenches of Cal-Trans, to the drudgery of DMV offices; the cubicles in thousands of offices; the facilities and workshops maintained by stationary engineers, and the washrooms tended to the custodial staff, as well as at the benches of the laboratories and in the bio-safety rated clean rooms, the sentiment toward the Governor is clear: workers see him as a vindictive bastard who hates workers and loves the rich.
State workers find it hard to make financial plans for our families not knowing if our monthly paycheck will be full pay, partial pay, or minimum wage. State workers feel like pawns in the fallout of the world economic crisis. All the while, the politicians shed crocodile tears for us while they blame their partisan rivals for the budget standoff. But we know their task is to drive down the living standard of the American workers by crushing our unions. The saddest thing is that workers feel there is nothing we can do about these unending attacks on our wages and benefit packages, which have been embraced by both Republican and Democratic politicians alike.
Furloughs Hurt Public Services and the State Economy
Beyond the financial burden on California state workers’ families, the 18 months of furloughs, followed by the instability in July and August this year, has wreaked havoc on the management of work flow and accomplishment of tasks the state is mandated to attend to by law. Chaos and demoralization of the workforce is leading to safety, worker retention, and productivity problems, which create waste and non-recoupable losses to the taxpayer.
While the Governor attempts to continue driving down state workers’ income by 15%, he is draining the state economy of millions in lost circulation of retained wages. (See these figures.) Meanwhile, the lines just get longer at the agencies that deal with the public directly, making it even more frustrating and time-consuming than ever to access vital public services like signing up for unemployment benefits or registering your car.
Keeping the Workers in Line
Lacking class consciousness, workers have not developed a class struggle perspective or a politically independent strong fighting leadership to fight back against these attacks. Feeding on and perpetuating this backwardness, the union tops are content – and indeed are counted on – to deliver the workers for the Democrats at the polls each November, regardless of the Democrats’ ability to deliver on anything they promise in return. The class collaborationist union leaders limit our resistance to appeals to the bosses’ courts and to ineffectual minor mobilizations. While workers wait for the other shoe to drop, the leaderships of our various unions are intent on keeping us sitting passively at our jobs, instead of organizing the rank and file for the massive strikes it will take to defend livelihoods, working conditions, and the services we provide.
Objectively, only an indefinite general strike of all state workers, coupled with teachers and other public workers, can defend our wages and benefits, not to mention catching up with the buying power lost to inflation over the last decade. To defend our standard of living successfully, labor must unite to smash the barrier of class-biased anti-labor laws such as Taft Hartley, which strictly limit strikes, resulting in the concept of being “strike legal” that keeps us chained to our workstations. These laws shackle our psychology and set the parameters of labor’s options too narrowly, preventing us from using our only really effective tools: UNIFIED STRIKE ACTION AND CLASS SOLIDARITY!
Today’s labor leaders, like good slaves, have grown accustomed to the chains imposed by laws like Taft Hartley, and they cower at the thought of confronting them. But to win against the retrenchment today, these laws must be swept away by direct massive action. Only by linking the struggle of the state workers to that of other public workers, of students and teachers, and of the unemployed and underemployed, is it possible to build a workers’ movement that can stand down the capitalist crisis. Instead, labor leaders committed to business unionism keep the working class separated into dozens of competing unions, whose only joint role is to corral the workers into the dead end submission to the twin parties of Wall Street.
We know all our unions are giving money to the Democrats, and now we see the SEIU is hedging its bets by giving $100,000 to the Republican governors’ conference. Ultimately, workers have no faith in the Democrats; the only expectation or hope they have is that the Democrats will wield the cuts against us a little less severely. The union tops’ dedication to giving our money to the Democrats despite the workers’ justifiable cynicism is a formula for creating disaffected members, who become apathetic and resigned to the atomization and alienation we feel as workers in the absence of genuine class consciousness. The union flunkies’ role is to assure that our labor organizations, which should be at the forefront of defending our rights, instead remain captives of the two-capitalist-party system, instead of seeking an independent political role for the workers based on class struggle methods of organization.
The breakdown of government is only a reflection of the generalized collapse of the capitalist system’s ability to continue providing a “middle class” lifestyle to working people. The post-WWII Donna Reed, Leave it to Beaver mythology of the rising middle class in perpetuity is now a faded dream of what the worker could achieve. The 35-year decline in workers’ real wages should be an indication that the days of “go along to get along, bosom buddy with the Democrats business unionism” is not working to protect even our basic standard of living.
While we are told to be happy to have a job at all, we have to consider what has happened to our income over the years. On top of an inflation-to-COLA ratio that has diminished our take-home pay by 18% over ten years, we have lost 15% to the furloughs – adding up to approximately a 25% decline in wages over 10 years. This drive to push down union wages coincides with the generalized decline in labor share, and increase in the capital share, of the GDP.
The Bosses’ Agenda: Drive Down Wages and Destroy Pensions
The ruling class’s politicians are tasked with administering the economic crisis in such a way as to protect corporate profit at the expense of workers’ jobs, salaries, and benefits. In particular, their task is to crush the few remaining unionized sectors of workers. Public workers, as the largest remaining unionized sector, are targeted not only here in California but almost everywhere, at every level of government, across the United States and internationally. And judging from the weak response of our unions, we have to conclude they are close to dead, if not already buried. They have become little more than dues collection agencies, with no winning perspective of how to fight for our interests.
The first six California state worker unions that signed tentative agreements with Governator Schwarzenegger gave concessions without even a hint of a fight.
The kinds of concessions already extracted from public workers will soon be expected from workers in private industry. When the economy picks up and provides new jobs (if that ever happens, which is far from certain), workers will be forced to accept lower wages and weaker benefits. Auto workers, traditionally among the highest paid industrial workers in this country, have seen their wages fall from $28 down to $14 per hour. Even before the G-20 meeting in Toronto last month, it was clear that the plan was to limit social spending and drive down unionized workers’ wages.
Playing the Blame Game
State and public workers have been made scapegoats for the budget impasse. The message to the public from the politicians and media pundits is that the budget crisis is caused by the state workers and our pensions. These liars point to the pensions of the relatively few top earners who have spiked their earnings and finagled pensions way above those of average retirees, whose checks are under 30K per year. But these same media hacks never point to the majority of state workers who will retire with these bare bones pensions.
The supposed need for “pension reform” is just part of an overall drive by the free marketers today to do away with defined benefit pensions (those that pay a guaranteed amount, determined by a formula based on years of service, age, and income while working). Although CalPERS is not going away soon, the bosses prefer 401K’s to defined benefit plans. The 401K leaves one with little option but to invest in the market, so the bosses’ friends on Wall Street, who fix the game, can drain our “investments” through exorbitant fees and market fluctuations. The cost and risk of managing investments tends to kill the small investor, who generally has little understanding of financial instruments or ability to “play the market.” (Not that we should ignore the bozo moves made by CalPERS in buying into the collateralized mortgage racket at the top of the bubble and losing billions of workers’ hard earned savings ... but that is another sad story.)
The same hype is used in each attack on public workers. The Sacramento Bee and other California newspapers post links to public workers’ salaries as a way to show how high they supposedly are. This method was used to discredit the BART workers during negotiations last year. But you don’t have to scratch too deep to see that a pyramid structure exists in all public worker salary scales, which mimics the income stratification in private industry. A few at the top are well-paid, and the bulk of us are stuck far below in the middle. But the media makes hay over the top earners as a way to turn the public against all state and public workers. It would be interesting to post the salary of the corporate media hounds and their publishers alongside that of the average state worker.
The attack on pensions and wages is couched in the manufactured anger of the have-nots. State and other public workers are implicitly and in some cases explicitly being told to be happy we have a job, because many people these days have none, and hate us for what they think are our fat salary and benefit packages. We are told to be happy we have health care because so many must go without. We are told not to fight the capitalists or their politicians, but just sit and wait out the crisis, tighten our belts, and continue to vote for the Democrats – including Jerry Brown, even though he has already promised to “do some things that organized labor doesn’t like” if he is elected to the governor’s office in November.
This is a combined attack from both the right and left wings of the capitalists. And the union bureaucracy only backs them up, trying to keep us complacent while they tell us to wait for the next court decision when the California Supreme Court adjudicates the furlough cases (scheduled to be argued on September 8th).
How to Win the Struggle
Meanwhile, the reformists among both the liberal/progressives and the left/socialist/anarchist milieu clamor on about how the crisis can be resolved by taxing the rich. Oh, if only California’s budget weren’t held hostage by the two-thirds rule, the progressive Democrats could pass progressive taxes and all would be rosy in California. This is the idealist dreaming of small minds, who seek endlessly to reform that which can no longer be reformed. Progressive taxes are off the table, as is any economic reform that favors workers, the unemployed, the dependent and the poor. The whole question is not how to make the capitalists pay the minimal taxes that their government gently “imposes” on them, but rather, who should control the economy: the plutocrats and their captive government, or the workers?
For workers to win, we must revitalize our unions, drive out the class collaborationist leaders, break with the bosses’ twin political parties, and take independent political action. Such action can take the form of an independent fighting workers’/labor party, but must not rely on legislative or judicial action to win. Political independence for the working class must seek a transitional program to take us from where we are today toward the development of mass organizations of workers’ democracy, such as worksite committees, factory committees, and councils of the unemployed, followed by the formation of regional workers’ councils. Through these steps, we can ultimately replace the capitalists’ government with a workers’ government that will manage the economy to meet the needs of the many rather than stuffing the pockets of the few.
(Reprinted with permission from the California State Workers - Class Struggle Militants blog.)