Draft Program for Consideration by UPWA Conference
Introductory Note: On March 15, 2009, a conference of California public workers was held in Sacramento, California under the auspices of United Public Workers for Action (UPWA). One of HRS's founding members, a California state public employee and union member, attended the conference and submitted the following draft as a proposed program to be adopted by UPWA.
For a Spanish translation of the text below, click here.
Politicians and pundits of all stripes blather on about how labor needs “a haircut”; how “we all need to tighten our belts”; and how “this is going to hurt everyone.” But the top 1% and the 5% lackey layer will not “feel the pain” like the working class, the poor, the elderly, students, and those dependent on the social safety net. For the working class and our allies, the cuts mean layoffs, furloughs, lost wages, missed meals, power shut-offs, lost medical care, home foreclosures, school closures, and cuts to student aid, nursing homes, and homeless shelters. For the rich and their apologists, it means flying business class instead of taking the corporate jet, or trading in the Hummer for a Prius.
Working people can no longer wait for our organizations to take the lead. They have already shown their proclivity for concessions, and long ago abandoned class struggle methods. In face of a one-sided class war on the working class, a counteroffensive must be launched immediately! It will take a social movement unlike anything seen here for decades to defend ourselves during this crisis. UPWA seeks to unite with all workers and their allies to initiate a class struggle movement to fight the bosses’ crisis.
Thirty years since Proposition 13 passed, the simultaneous impact of a California budget crisis rendered intractable by the two-thirds majority rule, and the worldwide breakdown of financial institutions, has created a perfect storm, raining debt and empty promises on working class people. This crisis appears to be unrelenting, unstoppable, and beyond the ability of the best and brightest to solve. All the institutions of democratic governance, from the lowly school board to the state legislature and the mighty senate of the United States, are incapable of addressing the concerns of working people.
Rather, these august institutions are poised as one to enforce the greatest wealth transfer ever from the working class to the elite. Cutting jobs, wages and benefits is not the only way the working class is being forced to bear the burden of capitalism’s breakdown in the wake of fiscal mismanagement and unrestrained wealth appropriation by the elites. The elderly, the uninsured, the unemployed, sub-prime mortgage holders, government workers, the disabled, and the indigent have all been abandoned Katrina style. Millions have seen their life savings and retirement or pension plans wiped out. Tent cities are popping up outside Sacramento – shades of 1929.
The safety net has been shredded, and the specter of a full-fledged depression haunts the economic forecasts. Advocates of deregulation, tax breaks for the rich, and unrestrained markets, who during the Reagan, Clinton, and Bush years promised endless prosperity, have been exposed as the self-promoting hucksters that they are.
The federal government has shown that its first loyalty is to the very bankers, speculators and war profiteers who brought the economic crisis to its inevitable head. The bailout of the banks in October 2008 was opposed by the grassroots, who flooded elected representatives with phone calls and e-mails. Against the better judgment of the American people, the bailout passed in two short weeks – with bipartisan support, and Obama’s blessing. Six months later, it has been revealed that not only did the bailout not work, but in addition, millions of bailout dollars were used to pay outrageous bonuses to the very speculators who fueled the economic meltdown. Despite the proof that the bailout was a failure, and will result in lowering the worth of the dollar and incurring debts our grandchildren will be paying for decades to come; the current administration has refused to stop the bank bailout disaster, and is poised not only to release the second half of the money to the banks, but also to institute a new plan to buy their “toxic assets,” shifting the risk of loss from the bankers to the taxpayers. In response, working people around the country are asking, “WHERE IS OUR BAILOUT?”
When working people lose jobs, homes, health care, and schools, the economic elite, the pundits, and the government either ignore their plight altogether, blame the victim, or pose and posture but provide no relief. Inversely, when the fat cats of finance destroy the economy, they are quickly bailed out by the taxpayers, against their will. Rather than nationalizing the failed financial institutions, or letting the “free market” take its course, the elite decision makers deem the speculators “too big to fail.” At the same time, workers and our allies are deemed too burdensome to provide with full employment, universal health care, universal education, and care for the elderly, sick and indigent.
If layoffs, furloughs, and cuts in our wages, social programs and education are not opposed vigorously, they will be made now, under the guise of the current crisis, and will never be restored even if the economy recovers. Yet finding, printing, or borrowing money is no problem for politicians when their puppet masters – the war profiteers, the bankers and big business – deem it necessary. It all comes down to the question, “Whose priorities do the institutions of governance serve?”
Working class people can’t compete with the corporate elite in the effort to buy politicians. The millions in small contributions to the Obama campaign are dwarfed by the huge contributions bundled by the corporate elite. Not surprisingly, then, the new administration is loaded down with bankers and speculators, including many of the same players who helped deregulate the financial markets and bring down the system in the first place.
The working class has little recourse via the polite civic process of petitioning the government for redress. However, we are not without the means to force a reordering of priorities. The working class has enormous power. We can build roads, railways, planes, power and steel plants, auto factories, hospitals, and schools, and to teach others our skills. We also have the power not to work. It is only when we withhold our work that our real power is felt in the pocketbook of the business elite, as the profits they usually derive from our labor stop flowing. Our power not to work, if used to its fullest, can paralyze the economy and force the ruling class to meet our demands.
Strike action is the most powerful weapon in the working class arsenal. However, the leaders of our organizations have become too enamored of the corporate model; of their Democratic Party “friends”; and of the irrational and misguided belief that justice can be won in the bosses’ courthouse. Diverted by their illusions from their proper role, our union leaders refuse to prepare workers and their community for direct action: strikes, mass demonstrations, and occupations of worksites, universities, schools, and social service centers slated for cuts or closure.
Full employment at union wages; universal medical care, childcare, education, and housing; an end to hunger; and freedom from fear of economic destitution are not compatible with an endless war economy, a prison economy, or a government dominated by corporations, bankers and speculators. Once we see the problem and the obstacles, the solution becomes self-evident. When we unite as a community of working people, and forge organizations based on solidarity and democracy, there is no force that can withstand our power.
The UPWA recognizes that labor’s leadership has bought into the corporate model of business unionism and is incapable of leading the political struggle needed to confront their “friends” in the Democratic and other capitalist political parties. Those collaborationist leaders must be swept away by a wave of democracy from the grass roots of labor. Otherwise, the working class will suffer historic defeats at the hands of the over-paid misleaders.
The UPWA understands that for the working class to win, it must build its own independent political party in order to democratize the unions and defeat the bosses’ offensive.
Therefore, the UPWA fights for the following demands: