As hunger spreads
Low-paid workers fuel union growth
By Milt
Neidenberg
They are the backbone of the unprecedented economic
expansion of the last decade. They are low-paid, women,
multinational--and they are a majority of today's work
force.
Mainly unorganized but pro-union, they are found primarily
in the service industries--food processing and service,
department stores, grocery chains, hotels, hospitals,
transportation, as well as in industries that are part of the
so-called New Economy.
They are an intricate part of the technological revolution
and, along with industrial workers, they have created the
wealth that feeds the new robber barons of Wall Street and
Corporate America. Hundreds of billionaires and many
thousands of millionaires are the beneficiaries of their
intense exploitation.
They are low-paid workers.
The Labor Department reported several months ago that a
sharp, rapid increase in hourly output of each worker was the
underpinning of the record economic expansion.
With workers receiving extremely low wages and benefits,
the bosses' super-profits are assured. Low-paid workers
increasingly live under the stresses and strains of poverty,
producing more goods and services and working longer
hours.
Hunger grows among working poor
The Second Harvest Food Bank, the biggest hunger relief
organization in the United States, showed this in human
terms. The group reported in November: "In 39 percent of
households receiving emergency food, there is at least one
working adult. Half of them work at least 40 hours.
"Children from these working families suffer the most.
Eight million children of 21 million working poor need
emergency food and the poverty rate of these families has
risen nearly 50 percent.
"The food crisis is compounded by the lack of health care
coverage. Of the 43 million people who have no health
insurance, almost half of them are parents in working poor
families."
The report concluded: "People are working full-time and
have to make choices they shouldn't have to make--a doctor or
a meal, a prescription or a meal, housing or a meal. They're
not looking like the hungry we expect. They're working."
These workers live at the low end of the pay scale while
prices for food, fuel, rent, health care and other
necessities have exploded. This has intensified the rate of
exploitation of the work force that is more Black, Latino,
Native, Asian and Arab, and includes other oppressed groups
such as immigrants, undocumented workers,
lesbian/gay/bi/trans people and prisoners.
Women compose the majority of these low-paid workers. The
AFL-CIO Working Women's Department points out that "more
women are working than ever before. But as the pressures grow
in trying to juggle work and family, make ends meet, and find
respect and opportunity on the job, women are looking for
solutions to their problems on the job. ... 99 of every 100
women work for pay at some time in their lives."
Meanwhile, "the family income for the bottom three-fifths
has fallen since 1979."
The result of this oppression has been a rise in class
consciousness. Despite the employers' vicious intransigence
and the many obstacles the government puts in the workers'
way, low-paid workers have won major victories in their
efforts to join unions.
Their eagerness has motivated the AFL-CIO and its
affiliates to provide more organizers and resources.
Unfortunately, the labor movement's all-out effort to elect
Al Gore last year seriously diverted the organizing campaign.
There is every indication that the current AFL-CIO leaders
have not learned from that experience and will continue to
support capitalist politicians they view as allies.
We can expect the Bush administration, spurred by an
oncoming economic crisis, to intensify the class struggle.
Bush's cabinet nominees--a clique of racist, sexist
anti-environmentalist militarists--show this.
Bush set the tone when he and Vice President-select Dick
Cheney commented on how they would combat a recession. Their
solution? A whopping increase in tax relief for the wealthy,
more welfare for the military and cuts in social
spending.
The major concern for Bush and his corporate and Wall
Street allies is to protect super-profits with the hope that
Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan can somehow stave off a
full-blown economic crisis.
President Bill Clinton, whose 1996 "welfare to work"
legislation stripped government entitlements from the most
impoverished workers, has now chimed in on the economic
debate. His Council of Economic Advisors has challenged the
gloom and doomers with the optimistic claim that there will
be no recession now or in the near future.
But in fact, the party is over. Buried in the business
pages of the major daily newspapers is the realization by
capitalist economic experts that a recession is already under
way.
The crisis of overproduction, decline in the stock market,
profit losses of the Fortune 500, consumer pessimism, the
weakening of the dollar, and the alarming, highly leveraged
corporate debt--as well as the developing crisis in the
global markets--have coalesced.
Bankruptcy looms over many businesses. The intense
competition to survive in the capitalist cycle of boom and
bust will inevitably lead to a falling out among these
imperialist bankers and corporate thieves at home and
abroad.
Their solution to the crisis will be plant closings and
layoffs and many more hardships for the millionfold,
multinational work force.
But repression will breed resistance. The prospects for
the growth of a class-wide movement that unites with other
progressive forces to fight back are excellent.
These forces include those struggling against imperialist
tools like the World Trade Organization, International
Monetary Fund and World Bank. And they also include
environmentalists, as well as those struggling against the
racist death penalty and the U.S. corporate globalization
that fosters sweatshops.
As Bush pushes his right-wing, racist and anti-worker
brand of "compassionate conservatism," the potential exists
for these formidable movements to embrace and develop new,
creative forms of struggle that will lead to higher class
consciousness.
In his book "High Tech, Low Pay," written over 15 years
ago, Workers World Party Chairperson Sam Marcy wrote: "These
workers can be welded together into a genuine anti-capitalist
and progressive struggle, a struggle both for democratic
rights and socialism. The change in social composition, due
to the technological revolution, toward lower-paid workers is
more than a numerical change.
"From a class point of view, it is truly one of the most
profound, socially significant trends to emerge... it is of a
thoroughgoing multinational character. It has yet to be fully
assessed. The objective basis is laid for political
leadership to be assumed by the more numerous segment of our
class."
That assessment is becoming a reality.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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