WHAT DO WE DO NOW? the crisis of the American working class and what we can do to fix it

 

WHAT DO WE DO NOW? the crisis of the American working class and what we can do to fix it

America is a country where citizens have more civil liberties than anywhere else on the planet, yet we are politically voiceless.

We have a very narrow political spectrum; a multicultural, socially radical but fiscally conservative, center right party of the billionaires (the preferred party of that class) and an openly racist, socially and fiscally conservative far right party of the billionaires.

The Democratic Party has its mass social base among a portion of the nation’s affluent professionals, corporate executives, small business owners and the more privileged and affluent layers of the working class – among African American and Jewish professionals, executives, businesspeople and affluent workers, support for the Democratic Party is almost unanimous, due to the open racism of the leaders of the other major party

The Republican Party has it’s mass base among a portion of the nation’s White, Asian and Latino professionals, executives, small business owners and privileged affluent workers – as mentioned above, support for the Republicans among upper class Jewish people and Black people is negligible due to the party’s open racism

Together, these two parties compete over who best serves this country’s 1,000 billionaires. When possible, they also attempt to deal with the problems of the nation’s broader upper classes – the top 20% of society, about 66 million people.

What about the other 274 million Americans, 80% of the country, the silent majority (or, more accurately, the silenced majority)?

The bottom 20% of the country – the poor, the homeless, undocumented immigrants, prison inmates, parolees etc. – are seen as a problem to be managed. Their needs are casually and callously ignored and they are casually blamed for the problems the billionaires and the top 20% inflict on them.

What of the remaining 60%?

The nation’s working class -  the 160 million men , women and children of the free and employed workforce and the 800,000 forced laborers in this country’s prison systems, and their non working family members are a voiceless majority

They are the most productive workforce on the planet but  they live paycheck to paycheck.

The average non agricultural, non domestic service American private sector worker employed in interstate commerce produces roughly $200,000 worth of goods or services a year…. but only gets paid $35,000 in gross pre tax wages in return
This in a country where you need to make $100,000 a year to support a family of 4 at a middle income standard of living. Most American workers can’t come up with $400 bucks for an emergency – a broken pair of classes, a sick pet, a knocked out tooth, a blown transmission on a car or a broken hot water heater is an immediate crisis for these workers, who produce so much but are paid so little

 

We submit to this because we are divided and lack the organizational strength to resist – we can’t even defend ourselves, let alone fight for more

 

The American working class does not have a party of its own – the American working class over the last century is defined by just how unorganized it is – most workers are not in unions, few are in any sort of community organization, in a country where religious belief is widespread actual membership in religious organizations is rare – the social inertness of the bottom 80% of the American population enables the billionaires, corporations and the top 20% to inflict their will on the rest of us with little fear of resistance

 

America is also a starkly racially divided nation – the tragic legacy of the genocide and mass land theft of indigenous Americans by first the British Army and later the US Army and the Transatlantic slave trade and 247 years of Black Americans being used as slaves, followed by 98 years of legalized racial discrimination against African Americans and other racial minorities, that only ended in 1964

 

Members of America’s main racial groups – White Americans, Jews, African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, Indigenous Americans (“American Indians”) and Pacific Islanders   - often identify primarily as members of their race first, rather than as Americans or as members of  their social class (capitalists, middle class, workers, poor)

 

Among workers in particular, far too many American workers will see a billionaire or millionaire of their own race as an ally and a worker of a different race as their mortal enemy

 

This stark racial divide is the main reason the working class movement is so weak in America – it is why we don’t have a workers party here, and why we’ve never had more than one third of American workers unionized – it is also why we have such a weak social safety net here 

 

This original  sin of the American body politic is the number one political issue in this country and the main barrier to social progress here – as has been the case since the first slave ship docked and the first Indigenous village was burned down by soldiers way back in the early 1600s, before we were even a country

 

As for America’s labor movement, the country has one national labor federation, the American Federation of Labor – Congress of Industrial Organizations – it was born of a merger between the rival American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1955 and is almost universally known by its acronym, AFL-CIO (nobody ever says the whole name and most people probably don’t even know what the acronym stands for)

 

There are a few notable independent unions – the National Education Association and the Fraternal Order of Police are two prominent examples – but most unions are AFL-CIO affiliates

 

The AFL-CIO, its leadership, and its subordinate bodies and affiliated national and international unions, the latter being American based unions with members in Canada) are utterly subordinated to and dominated by the Democratic Party

 

American labor unions also have a longstanding relationship with America’s organized crime syndicates, especially the syndicate known as Cosa Nostra (Sicilian Italian for “this thing of ours” – commonly referred to as “the mafia”)

 

Almost all American labor unions have extensive benefit funds and pension funds, a private welfare state for union  members and their families only – the vast pools of capital and the poor regulation of those funds has been a magnet for racketeers and gangsters since the late 19^th century

 

Arguably American unions are among the most corrupt in the world – the widespread labor racketeering here is only matched by the Canadian labor unions (many of which are affiliates  of US based unions) and the labor movement in Australia

 

Only 14.3 million of America’s 161 million workers are unionized – 9.9% of the workforce - 7 million of these workers are public sector employees and 7.3 million are private sector workers

 

Union membership  is disproportionately concentrated among public sector workers – in particular employees of the federal government, and of states, counties, cities and Indian tribes run by politicians of the Democratic Party – 32% of the nation’s public sector workers are unionized – but only 5.9% of private sector workers

 

The two most heavily unionized occupations in the United States are public school teacher and police officer

 

Union membership is distributed unevenly geographically – states in the Northeast, the Great Lakes area and the Pacific Coast are among the most heavily unionized – Hawaii with 26% unionization and New York with 20% are the highest – and states in the Southeast and the Intermountain West are among the most heavily unorganized – with South Dakota at 2.7% and South Carolina with 2.4% the least organized states

 

Membership is also distributed unevenly by branch of industry – most private sector union members are in manufacturing, construction, transportation and utilities – farm workers, white collar workers and service workers are almost completely unorganized

 

There has been a stark decline in union  membership since the neoliberal attacks on the labor movement that  began during the Carter Administration in the late 1970s – during those years, the trucking industry was deregulated and largely deunionized, railroad workers and miners strikes were broken by presidential orders under the Taft Hartley Act and there was a coordinated national attack on unions in construction and heavy industry

 

As a result, private sector unionization declined from 20% to the current 5.9% - construction went from 80% union to 10%, trucking from 90% union to 7%, manufacturing from 50% union to 10% - the total number of union  members also fell from 17.7 million to the present 14.3 million

 

America’s corrupt Democratic Party dominated AFL-CIO leadership made no attempt to resist these attacks – they basically retreated and surrendered without a fight

 

As a result, many younger workers who have entered the workforce this century have a well founded feeling that they have been abandoned by the older generation of workers (“The Boomers”)  the fact that only 2% of workers under 30 are unionized is mute testimony to the correctness of this perception

 

In the last 50 years, strikes have become very rare in America – the US labor leadership has largely abandoned the strike weapon – on the rare occasions when unions carry out strikes, they are notable for their ineffectiveness – it is common at workplaces with multiple unions for members of other unions to keep working while other trades on strike (in the US this is called “scabbing”)

 

American unions rarely strike even over the worst sort of employer abuses – including bosses literally stealing the wages of their workers and armed plainclothes federal officers raiding workplaces and dragging workers away in handcuffs – political strikes are all but unknown here

 So what’s the way forward?

We need to build a mass, interracial, explicitly anti capitalist mass workers party that's both electoral and activist focused - that party needs to focus on the bread and butter dollars and cents demands of the working class (and all the inequalities that make some of us, of certain races, in need of more bread and butter and dollars and cents) in the short term and in the long term for the end of capitalism and our class coming to power for the first time in the history of the world

We need to build new labor unions for the 95% non union private sector and recapture the public sector legacy unions - these new jack labor unions need to also be explicitly anti capitalist, radically democratic, anti corrupt and strike oriented, and they need to be built by grassroots organization, not the NLRB process that requires that you ask permission from the employer to organize your coworkers

We live in a country with the most expansive civil liberties and right of free association on the planet - there is nothing external stopping us from recruiting our fellow workers into a workers party and into militant labor unions and using our right to protest to carry out peaceful, non violent mass struggle for our ideas, at work and on the streets

That's what we need to be organizing right now

Let the billionaires, small business owners and professional classes fight each other over which party of the rich will rule over us - we need to organize for our class agenda from the streets and the jobsites