Around the world, there is a global wave of strikes and social protests by the working class, from national strikes by railway and dock workers in Europe to mass protests in Sri Lanka, Albania and other countries against spiraling inflation. Whatever the immediate cause of each particular struggle, they are all focused on the demand that the resources of society be allocated away from the profit interests of the rich and towards the maintenance of human needs.
But the contrast between a high level of technology and industrial technology, which makes possible the eradication of poverty, and the reality of social misery, is not as stark as it is in the United States. The ruling class in the most powerful capitalist country in the world has cut workers’ wages and living standards for decades. In just over two years since the pandemic began, it has managed to reduce the country to the level of total dysfunction, It is now pushing the cost of this crisis on the backs of the working class. .
Scenes of grinding poverty and industrial slaughter in The Jungle, Upton Sinclair’s macabre novel about Chicago’s meatpacking industry at the turn of the 20th century, is a simple account of everyday life in 21st century America. The book, whose publication launched a scandal in the early 1900s, has lost its disturbing power.
Fatal industrial accidents happen every day. Last week, dock worker and Nicaraguan immigrant Uriel “Popeye” Matamoros was crushed to death at the Port of Newark when the equipment he was operating fell on top of him. According to co-workers, management kept them on the job, causing them to work around the accident site without even being fully cleaned. “It smelled horrible,” one worker told the WSWS.
The same day, a worker died at an Amazon warehouse in Cartaret, New Jersey, during the company’s Prime Day promotion, which puts enormous pressure on workers to keep up with orders. Earlier in the year, Steven Dierkes died at a Caterpillar foundry in Illinois when he fell into a crucible filled with molten metal.
Increasingly frequent and intense heat waves, a product of man-made global warming, also take their toll. Two weeks ago, UPS driver Esteban Chavez died of heat stroke while driving his route in nearly 100-degree Fahrenheit (38-degree Celsius) weather. UPS delivery trucks are not air conditioned. Workers at auto parts maker Ventra’s facility in Evart, Michigan, are also walking off the line and being hospitalized due to extreme heat. This is happening as a historic heat wave is ravaging Europe, killing thousands.
As horrific as this is, it pales in comparison to the human toll of the coronavirus, which has killed more than 1 million people in the US. Factories, other large workplaces and schools have long been known to be the main centers of COVID outbreaks, but the federal and local governments have deliberately kept them open to almost the entire pandemic in the name of the “economy.”
Furthermore, despite the media’s self-serving claims, the pandemic continues. At the Evart factory, workers report an outbreak. However, the true toll of COVID on workers due to the systematic suppression of outbreaks in the plants is unknown. Often, workers only find out about cases through their co-workers and word of mouth.
As large corporations desperately improvise to maintain supply chains and production, American workers are subject to arbitrary and punitive scheduling regimes, and the eight- and 40-hour workday a distant memory. Auto workers oscillate, often without warning, between 70- and 80-hour work weeks and extended vacation days. On West Coast docks, thousands of “casuals”—actually, day laborers—line up hiring halls every morning for a remote chance of getting work for the day.
Conditions are even worse in the rail industry, where 100-hour weeks are not uncommon. Workers are on call 24/7, leaving them with no time for their families or even to schedule doctor’s appointments. One worker told the WSWS that she has so little downtime that she has to take sleeping pills to maximize her rest, and then another set of pills to wake herself up in the morning.
On top of everything else, workers are being squeezed by runaway inflation, which last month exceeded 9 percent for the first time in years. The rise in nominal wages, which sent a chill down Wall Street’s spine, is nowhere near enough to keep up. Inflation-adjusted wages have fallen 4 to 5 percent over the past year.
Meanwhile, the corporate oligarchy that owns the country is making money on an unprecedented scale. Through the bipartisan infusion of trillions of dollars in cash, Washington has seen Wall Street become “complete” during the pandemic, even though millions are at stake.
Even billions of dollars have gone out of the railroad industry, which is on the verge of total collapse. This vital part of the country’s infrastructure is only used as a piggy bank for Wall Street hedge funds and billionaires like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. In 2019, according to research group Comparisun, it was the most profitable industry in the country, with a whopping 50.93 percent profit margin, more than five times the national average.
Little wonder, then, that America’s working class is overflowing with discontent. There is a growing sentiment that things can no longer go on as they were, and that things must change. This is the clearest indication of the growing militancy of workers and support for strike action. Earlier this month, railroad workers voted 99.5 percent to authorize a national strike.
In an earlier period, before most Americans alive today were even born and when the country was still a rising industrial power, the ruling elite were able to part with concessions to workers to try to quell that discontent to spread. No more. The entire domestic policy of the Biden administration is, in one way or another, aimed at suppressing the class struggle and further worsening social conditions.
The Federal Reserve, backed by Biden, is raising interest rates to avoid a “wage-price spiral”—that is, wage increases keeping pace with inflation. Modeling themselves on similar monetary policies of the late 1970s and early 1980s, which ushered in the era of deindustrialization, they are willing to trigger a recession by raising interest rates to increase mass unemployment as a weapon against casual work.
The Biden White House is also directly intervening to prevent a strike and prevent the emergence of a mass labor movement. Last Friday, on his way to meet with the autocratic ruler of Saudi Arabia, Biden signed an executive order appointing a Presidential Emergency Board (PEB) in the rail industry, blocking a strike that workers had almost unanimously called allow voting. This follows his unprecedented closeness in contract talks on West Coast docks, as well as a similar intervention earlier this year in US refineries. Biden worked with the United Steelworkers to avert a national refinery strike and to impose a contract that the union president said was “non-inflationary.”
Biden has been pursuing a policy known as corporatism for many years, to pull the state, corporations and unions together against the working class. The unions, controlled by a bureaucracy tied by a thousand threads to management, eagerly accepted this policy. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union has kept dock workers on the job without a contract, or even a formal extension, for nearly three weeks. He issued an extraordinary joint statement with port operators last month saying they had no intention of going on strike. Meanwhile, the railroad unions had been openly calling for months for Biden to appoint a PEB, effectively demanding government intervention to outlaw its own members’ strike.
But as Leon Trotsky said, the laws of history are more powerful than the bureaucratic apparatus. The attempt to bureaucratically spoil the class struggle will not only fail, it will discredit everyone involved and encourage the development of a rank and file revolt against the entire corporate conspiracy, including the companies, the unions and the government, and both pro-capitalist parties.
There are many signs that such a movement is beginning to develop. Mass workers’ rejection of sell-out contracts is a regular feature of public life. In one recent development, Kroger grocery workers flooded the local union’s Facebook page with opposing comments after a substandard memo was “passed,” prompting the UFCW to delete its page entirely.
The crucial question, however, is the organization and direction of this movement. The proliferation of rank and file committees in the last two years, set up against the treachery of the trade union bureaucracy, shows the way forward.
Will Lehman, a worker at Mack Trucks, has also taken a vital initiative in the election campaign for president of the United Auto Workers. The Lehman campaign, based on abolition, not reform, of the labor bureaucracy and the establishment of rank-and-file control, is the most conscious expression of the brewing collision between the workers and the pro-corporate union official.
Workers are facing the question of the basic structure and structure of society. Who should control the wealth of society, the capitalist ruling class or the workers?
It has been shown in the last two years that one social problem cannot be solved within the framework of the pursuit of profit. In fact, all modern social problems are rooted in the profit motive. But the fight against capitalist exploitation requires that the working class fight for the socialist reconstruction of society and the end of private ownership of social resources.
