What workers need today:
A Fighting Program and Mass Direct Action,
Up to and Including General Strikes!
Flyer distributed by HRS at Rally Protesting
Wage and Benefit Cuts for California State Workers
Sacramento, California, July 1, 2009
The current economic crisis has triggered the biggest attacks on the working class since the Great Depression. The Obama administration and its allies among “liberal/progressive” Democratic politicians, as well as the bloated and entrenched labor bureaucracy, are all too ready to negotiate away our jobs, our social programs, and our benefit packages, using the economic meltdown and the resulting budget crisis as an excuse. In the coming months, we can expect a further watering down of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA); a total inability to provide a plan for affordable, quality universal health care; layoffs and/or furloughs of thousands of public workers and teachers; school closures; tuition rises and restrictions on student registration at public colleges; and the commensurate ever-increasing expansion of prisons and the military-industrial complex.
To counter the current attacks against the unions and all working people, we need massive united labor actions from coast to coast. Factory occupations, such as the one at Republic Windows and Doors in 2008, are necessary to stop massive layoffs and closures of factories and workplaces.
Unified strikes of public workers, teachers, and students are the only tactic that can save social programs, education, and the social safety net. But the current labor leadership, entrenched in its love affair with the Democratic Party, is incapable of launching the type of struggle that can win against the current attacks.
Calling for nationalizing the banks and the automobile industry is not enough. Reformist social democratic governments have nationalized banks during this crisis and before. They keep the banks and the financial institutions going for the benefit of the bankers and the capitalists, and then they de-nationalize them when it is safe to do so, returning the bank’s assets and operating capital to private hands once the risk of failure has been averted with the aid of public resources. Therefore, we must call for the nationalization of banks, financial institutions, and basic industries under workers’ control and without compensation.
Begging President Obama and other Democrats to turn against their corporate benefactors is useless. We workers cannot defend ourselves by conducting cross-class campaigns. We need concrete preparation for militant direct labor actions, up to and including strikes and sympathy strikes, if we are to turn the current class war around. Labor activists need to create strategies and tactics for turning our unions back into truly democratic fighting organizations that act in the interest of the entire working class, rather than the narrow interests of one particular union or that of the labor aristocracy.
A first step in this direction would be to bring together regional, inter-union general meetings to organize and coordinate preparatory committees in every local. The preparatory committees, in turn, can take the lead in preparing, mobilizing, and motivating workers in their own locals to help lay the necessary groundwork for massive actions. Inter-union organizations can build a framework around which workers can construct sustained, ongoing, democratically run coalitions of unions, working class communities, and the unemployed, with the goal of building for broad-based, militant direct actions such as massive strikes and occupations of workplaces, schools and universities. Our brothers and sisters in France have shown that such actions are the natural response of the working class. We should start organizing and follow their example.
We need to fight for the following demands, which can only be implemented by mobilizing the working class for a massive fightback:
1. Full Employment at prevailing union rates for all who are willing and able to work. To assure full employment, thirty hours of work for forty hours’ pay must be implemented to spread the available work to all and to compensate for the increased rate of production over the last 50 years that has been exploited by capital to sustain high unemployment rates and lower real wages. The EFCA will help workers forge fighting unions capable of winning full employment. To that end, we must mobilize demonstrations demanding that the EFCA be adopted.
2. Failing industries (both financial and industrial) must be taken over (nationalized) under workers’ control without compensation to provide adequate access to credit and to get the wheels of industry rolling again. For example, the Big Three automakers, as well as the domes-tic plants of foreign auto manufacturers, should be taken over under workers’ control. Only then can the industry be rationally planned to assure that production is retooled to provide, first and foremost, a public transportation and energy infrastructure that obviates the need for excessive auto production and the commensurate waste of petroleum. The production of non-polluting electric cars, for example, must be planned and coordinated under workers’ control as a step toward staving off the environmental disasters threatened by climate change.
3. STOP LAYOFFS! When the bosses declare layoffs or attempt to close down a workplace, workers should occupy the factories and the workplaces and establish workers’ control. Follow the example of our Argentinean brothers and sisters, and go even further by establishing a massive network of occupied workplaces as democratically run organs of an incipient planned rational economy.
4. Housing is a right! Stop all foreclosures and evictions. Move the homeless and those in overcrowded housing into housing vacated by foreclosures and the falling real estate market. Massive public works projects to build adequate housing for all, and put people to work doing socially necessary construction, financed by banks nationalized and coordinated under workers’ control.
5. Quality universal public education at no charge from daycare and pre-school through the graduate level. Working people know that without a good education, our children have no future. To confront the current economic and environmental crisis, everyone’s intellectual potential must be cultivated. Through education we can build a rational economy and divest the world of poverty and drudgery. Education should be under the control of teachers, parents, and students old enough to participate. In that way, we will assure quality education and not the mis-education, over testing, and ruling class propaganda that currently plague our public schools.
6. Quality free universal health care at no charge from prenatal to the grave is long overdue. Each person must be given access to the benefit of medical science and current treatment options. Insurance companies must have no “place at the table”; the only way to provide health care for all is to divest it of the profit motive. To accomplish democratic health care, all medical institutions must be placed under worker (Doctor, Nurses, Staff) control with community/patient participation.
7. End attacks on undocumented workers! End the ICE raids! Full employment rights for all workers! End super-exploitation through working class solidarity across borders. Same work, same contract, same wages and working conditions! Down with the maquiladoras! Open all the borders. For the right of all workers to cross the borders and seek work and establish their homes without restrictions and arrests. Free all detained undocumented workers!
8. US troops out of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the rest of the world. Down with imperialist oppression. The defeat of imperialism is a victory for workers and the oppressed in the world.
9. We cannot count on Obama and the capitalists to clean up the environment and prevent catastrophic climate change. For them, profit always comes before the environment and the need of the workers. But the time to stop climate change is running out. The working class must combine its struggle against capitalist exploitation, and against the current economic crisis, with environmental consciousness. We must fight for workers’ control of industry in order to transform the current, outmoded technology of industrial production to totally green and sustainable technology.
10. Break with the Democrats. No cross-class coalitions with Democrats and pro-capitalist Greens. For a struggle to replace the union bureaucracies that give our dues to the Democratic Party. Fight for the political independence of the working class! We need to build a workers’ or labor party based on democratically run unions and organizations of the oppressed and the unemployed.
11. For a workers’ government that can and will implement and defend all the above transitional demands. To accomplish these goals, working people need their own government. If we allow the capitalists to control the state via their government, they will continue to attack and ultimately destroy our social gains. To defend our gains, we need workers’ power.