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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Jan. 4/11, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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If the bankers weren't getting their money, it would be called a default. Every mogul on Wall Street would be up in arms.
No fear. The United States government is paying huge interest payments to the bankers as usual. It is also carrying out a costly military intervention in Bosnia.
But it has defaulted on its own workers here at home.
The plight of these federal workers means so little to the capitalist class and its politicians that Sen. Phil Gramm says nobody has even noticed, so why not get rid of them entirely?
Some 280,000 employees of the federal government were "furloughed" Dec. 16 for the second time in just a few weeks when Congress failed to vote for a new budget or stopgap funds to keep the government going.
They can at least apply for unemployment insurance.
But another 480,000 workers considered to have emergency status must work--without pay--until the budget struggle is resolved.
Moreover, many government paychecks that arrived Jan. 2 covered only half the wages due.
"A lot of government employees live from paycheck to paycheck," says Barbara Davidson, an employee of Housing and Urban Development's Office of HIV Housing and a member of the Federation of Government Employees. "Here in the D.C. area where so many thousands work for the government, many people won't have enough for their rent, mortgages or car payments."
Davidson pointed out that many services in government agencies have been privatized. This means that cafeteria workers and security guards, for example, can lose their entire pay for this period because they are no longer government employees. They now work for private companies that get paid on a service-rendered basis--no service, no pay.
About 100 federal workers protested the partial government shutdown on Dec. 26. They marched to Social Security Administration headquarters in Woodlawn, Md., with signs reading "Congress, we have a contract with America, too."
But for the most part, there has been little resistance from the workers so far. Many have been made to feel that President Bill Clinton had only two choices: Either refuse to go along with proposed Republican budget cuts and let the shutdown happen, or cave in once again to pressure from the right and agree to sign a budget that would permanently eliminate many services and the workers who provide them.
From this point of view, the so-called "furlough" of government workers would be better than having their jobs eliminated entirely. And, they hope, they'll get paid when all is said and done.
Clinton has actually gained in popularity by seeming to have finally taken a stand, after having caved in so many times before to Republican demands.
However, all this could change if the workers don't get paid after all--and they have no guarantee of anything, just politicians' promises. Furthermore, Clinton has already agreed to the general premises of Gingrich and Dole: that the budget must be balanced in seven years; that economic projections on which the budgets are based will come from the Republican-controlled Congressional Budget Office; that the military, police, FBI, CIA and other repressive bodies are sacrosanct, so cuts must come from the social services won by decades of progressive struggle.
So while Clinton is finally trying to look like someone putting up a fight against the infamous Contract with America, it is at the expense of hundreds of thousands of government workers who could end up paying for the budget crisis out of their own pockets.
Where is all this massive downsizing and restructuring of government going? Will it be open-ended, like that in private industry?
There seems to be no limit to how far the bosses will go in reducing the work force to low-paid, no-benefits, part- time and occasional workers. The giddy race for profits keeps driving them on and on.
If this can be done to blue-collar workers, white-collar workers and lower-level management, then why not to government workers, too? This is the thinking on Capitol Hill, which borrows all its magnificently original and super-modernistic new-age ideas from Wall Street.
As the country moves into an election year, there will be more pressure than ever on workers to suspend any struggles that might offend the "conservatives" and concentrate on voting Clinton back in. But pushing them in the opposite direction is the utterly vicious and rapacious drive of the capitalist class and its politicians to maximize profits off the backs of all workers.
Something has to give. That's what the French government found out when it pushed the workers too hard.
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