Mass protests against the global economic crisis are spreading.

Protests recently toppled the government of Iceland. There have been militant protests against unemployment in Greece, Chile, Latvia and Bulgaria. A general strike in France on Jan. 29 compelled the government to give money to the automaker Citroën in return for a promise not to lay off workers.

As the crisis deepens in the United States, the multinational working class, unions, community organizations, students and youth must not be lulled into inactivity waiting for the $787 billion stimulus package, signed on Feb. 17, to take effect.

It is understandable that millions of workers who voted for Barack Obama are anxiously hoping that the legislation will bring them some assistance and relief from the dire economic circumstances they face. Some are unemployed and running out of benefits. Others, particularly public workers, are in danger of losing their jobs and health care.

In addition to the millions of unemployed workers and the people who have lost their homes, there are millions more who were impoverished even before the crisis and are hoping that the stimulus package will help them.

What workers get directly

Many features of the package are aimed at immediate relief. They are the very measures the Republicans focused on trying to cut back, evoking the rightful outrage of workers and all progressives.

Among many other provisions, the final bill stipulates $40 billion for extended unemployment benefits through Dec. 31, 2009. It increases these benefits by $25 a week and funds job training. It sets aside $20 billion to increase food stamp benefits by 14 percent. It includes $3 billion in temporary welfare payments and $14 billion for a one-time $250 payment to Social Security recipients, people on Supplemental Security Income, and veterans receiving disability and pensions. (USAToday.com)

There is aid to students, to workers who have lost their health care, to states to keep their sinking budgets from going completely under, and other measures that, altogether, are supposed to create 3.5 million jobs.

The bill is designed to entice states into expanding their unemployment benefits to include part-time workers, workers who have been forced to leave the job for family reasons, and workers who are in training.

Better than nothing—but still a pittance

Of course, any increase in assistance to workers is better than no increase at all. When you are unemployed or falling into poverty, every dollar counts. The workers are in desperate need and should take everything they can get.

But considering that the working class has created all the wealth of this society in goods and services yet now is living with a huge deficit, the workers are entitled to a lot more than the paltry sums being talked about.

According to government statistics, the unemployment rate went up to 7.6 percent in January. It is expected to continue growing for the foreseeable future, certainly for the rest of 2009 and into 2010.

A rate of 7.6 percent means 11.5 million jobless workers. Let’s assume that the annual wage of these workers was $40,000—which is a little less than the average wage and represents mere survival for a family of four.

If the jobless rate remains at the present level for the next year, the officially unemployed will have lost $460 billion in wages. This does not include the millions who are unemployed but not counted because they have given up looking for work. Add them in and the figure rises to $500 billion.

It is important to note that “total unemployment”—an official government figure that also includes those estimated to have dropped out of the workforce from discouragement about finding a job and those forced into part-time work—is actually 13.9 percent. At that rate, more than 20 million people are unemployed or underemployed. Of those, only 4.8 million are receiving unemployment benefits from the states and 1.7 million are receiving federal special supplementary benefits.

That means that 14 million unemployed or underemployed get no unemployment insurance.

Bankers get lion’s share

The situation is only going to get worse. The number of unemployed is far surpassing the limited plans for job creation. For the first time since 1939, the number of unemployed has grown by more than half a million per month for three months in a row. While the stimulus package is supposed to create 3.5 million jobs over the next two years, 3.6 million jobs have already been destroyed since the crisis began in December 2007.

To make matters worse, the government’s plan to bail out the banks aims to squander $2.5 trillion—three times the amount of the stimulus plan. The excuse for this fund is to “loosen up the credit markets.”

The fact that the government has given the banks trillions of dollars in direct cash and loan guarantees certainly entitles Washington to tell the banks: “Lend, or else.” But everyone knows that banks will not lend in an economy that is going under. There is no profit in lending in a shrinking economy and that is what banks do—make profit.

So why give trillions of dollars to greedy, profit-gouging bankers to “help” the economy? They are less than useless and have proven it by wild, fraudulent speculation that has ended up in disaster.

That money is being taken away from the stimulus package. It is being taken away from funds needed to keep people in their homes. It should be used to create a real jobs program. The multinational working class needs a direct jobs program. Unemployment insurance, if you’re lucky enough to get it, has a time limit and is not enough to live on. What workers need most right now is jobs at a living wage and an affordable home.

This is what the $2.5 trillion bailout should be spent on—every nickel of it.

Save workers, not profits

The secret truth that no one in the government dares say out loud is that most of these big banks are probably insolvent already. They should have been declared bankrupt long ago because the debts on their books are not worth much more than pennies on the dollar. The bailout is meant to keep these crooks from going under.

These millionaires and billionaires are worrying that they may be down to their last $100 million or so. Meanwhile, millions of workers are worrying about how to pay their rent, their mortgages, their bills for food, medical care, credit cards, auto loans, student loans and so on.

Only after decades of economic attacks on the multinational working class is the capitalist government hastily coming forward with a pittance in aid. These band-aids have nothing to do with concern for the workers. They are meant to save the profit system.

The help the government is offering is a pittance in comparison to what is needed.

The workers and their communities must form alliances everywhere to fight back.

This is an emergency!

The federal government and every state and local government have provisions in their charters or constitutions mandating the authorities to render assistance to the residents of a state or locality in time of emergency. The profit-addicted capitalist class has created emergencies everywhere–of unemployment, poverty, homelessness, medical crises and hunger.

An outstanding example of fightback is the Detroit Moratorium Now! campaign. The organizers have been carrying on a campaign of mass demonstrations and popular agitation to force the government to pass legislation to declare an emergency and stop foreclosures and evictions. The campaign has influenced the political atmosphere in Michigan to the extent that the Wayne County sheriff recently found a legal reason under the provisions of the Troubled Asset Relief Program to refuse to execute any more foreclosures.

Mass layoffs in times of unemployment create a threat to survival, a true emergency for the workers, their families and the communities that depend on their income.

State and local governments have given hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks, infrastructure and other enticements to get corporations to build in their areas in order to promote jobs and economic activity. Every one of these companies that closes down or cuts shifts is in violation of such an agreement. The community and the workers have every right to enforce the agreement by demanding that the plants stay open and the jobs remain.

In general, the right to a job should be recognized as a right of all workers. Every worker who has worked for a boss has contributed to the wealth of the employer and the creation of the enterprise. The workers have property rights to their jobs, since they have created the property by their labor.

Inextricably bound to this right is the right to occupy the workplace, the way the Republic Windows and Doors workers did in Chicago and the way the Waterford-Crystal workers have done in Kilbarry, Ireland.

There are innumerable legal ways to assert the rights of workers. But the only way to make those rights legally enforceable is for mass organization and struggle to compel the employers and the governments to meet their obligations to the people.

Labels: economic crisis, jobs, stimulus package, unemployment

On becoming president, Barack Obama proclaimed his job creation goal to be 3 million jobs over the next two years. Yet in the last two months alone nearly 1.2 million jobs have been lost: 577,000 in December and 598,000 in January. The December figure was revised upward by the government, which had originally estimated it at 533,000. Economists expect the monthly number to be even worse in February.

With each new layoff announcement, the target number for jobs to be created goes up. The latest target is 4 million, even though right-wing Republicans are whittling down the stimulus package.

The official unemployment number has jumped from 7.2 percent to 7.6 percent. But this is not the total unemployment number, which includes those who have stopped looking for work and those working part time because they cannot find full-time work. That has jumped from 13.5 percent to 13.9 percent.

In effect, this means that to achieve full employment for the approximately 154 million people in the workforce, some 21.4 million new full-time jobs would be needed now—and this number is growing rapidly each month.

Every worker should do the math. The so-called stimulus package, even assuming that it could meet its goals, appears more and more anemic compared to the momentum of the crisis, which is growing each week, each month. Creating relatively few jobs at a snail’s pace leaves tens of millions of workers unemployed and underemployed. Tens of millions more are vulnerable to becoming part of the unemployment statistics.

Every new grim announcement by the government on unemployment, foreclosures, evictions, homelessness, the loss of health care, hunger, record numbers applying to hard-pressed food banks, an increase in child poverty, etc., should become a big wake-up call for the multinational working class to get organized for a fightback.

Actions being planned

One important attempt to begin the crucial fightback is taking place in New York City where the Bail Out the People Movement is forging a grassroots alliance for struggle and calling a national action against the bankers on Wall Street on April 3 and 4. While the mobilization is targeting the bankers, it has a broad program with a focus on stopping the layoffs. Hundreds of endorsers and contingents are coming aboard from every region of the country.

Along the same line, a network of local coalitions in cities around the country, from New York to Boston to Los Angeles, is organizing to make May Day 2009 a day of struggle and unity to fight back against attacks on immigrant workers and to strengthen the struggle against the economic crisis. Many of these coalitions played key roles in the great May Day 2006 strike/boycott of millions of immigrant workers.

At this moment a delegation representing 250 workers, most of them immigrants, who sat in at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago is touring the country. These workers occupied the plant for five days until they won their severance pay and back pay. They are telling their inspiring story to standing-room-only gatherings of trade unionists and activists. The workers are from the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers, Local 1110. The tour is sponsored by Jobs with Justice.

The boldness of Local 1110 inspired the solidarity of the labor movement and the political movement. These workers set a living example of reviving a tactic–the sit-down strike—that was used in the 1930s on a massive scale to win the greatest victories in U.S. labor history.

Local 1110 carried out its sit-down strike in Chicago in the midst of a growing economic crisis. But these workers are not unique. All over the country there are rank-and-file workers, lower-level union officials, shop stewards and trade union activists at all levels, as well as sympathizers with the labor movement, looking for a way to fight back.

Vast network of potential power

There are now 16 million workers in the organized labor movement. There are tens of thousands of local unions around the country, thousands of them under attack by the waves of layoffs. There are hundreds of municipal and regional labor councils whose members are under siege or living in fear of layoffs, shortened hours and demands for concessions.

This vast network of potential working class power is lying dormant as the top labor leaders try to avoid mobilizing the workers to push back. The labor leadership is understandably focused for the moment on pushing through a legislative victory for the Employee Free Choice Act, which legalizes the card check system for union organizing. But this measure, important as it is in the day-to-day campaign to organize unions, will not meet the urgent needs of the millions falling under the ax of layoffs or losing their health care and their homes on a daily basis.

Most importantly, these measures fail to blunt future layoffs. The layoffs arise from the urgent needs of the capitalists to preserve their profits and cut their losses.

The rank and file must get organized within their locals, within their unions and within the union movement as a whole and unite with the communities and activists all over the country to develop a genuine fighting force. Neither John Sweeney of the AFL-CIO nor Andrew Stern of SEIU/Change to Win has represented the labor movement or the working class as a whole in this crisis.

French workers set example

These leaders should contemplate what just took place in France, where 2.5 million people, led by the unions, struck and/or marched to demand priority be given to protecting and creating jobs. The French workers shut down major cities, from Paris to Marseilles, as all the unions united for a show of strength. Of course, the French working class movement has a great tradition of class struggle.

But the workers in the U.S. have a history of struggle as well. During the 1930s they carried out marches and rallies of the unemployed. The Workers Alliance and the Unemployed Councils put hundreds of thousands of people who had been evicted back in their homes. They carried out citywide general strikes. The workers initiated hundreds of sit-down strikes. This is a history and tradition that can and must be revived.

The bosses, bankers and their “experts” are fully aware of this history, more so than are most workers at the moment. That is one of the reasons they were so anxious to settle the Republic Windows and Doors sit-down: the fear that it would become contagious in the midst of a layoff crisis.

Each time they announce a new figure for layoffs that is “the highest” since 1983, or 1972, or declare the crisis to be the “worst since the Great Depression,” they keep their fingers crossed that the working class in general, including the oppressed—the African American, Latina/o, Asian and Native communities—will get frightened, demoralized and retreat into trying to deal with the crisis on an individual basis.

But everyone knows in their bones that this crisis cannot be fought on an individual basis. Organization is the most important weapon that the working class and the oppressed have.

The capitalist system is in the midst of a major, global crisis of overproduction. There is a glut of commodities that cannot be sold because the entire capitalist class all over the world, in the race for profits, has lowered wages and increased production. That is what is called capitalist anarchy of production.

In the auto industry the global capacity could produce 90 million autos a year. Present production is 66 million a year. Semiconductors are used in everything from iPods to airplanes, yet the semiconductor industry is operating at 66 percent of capacity. Even the oil industry is operating far below capacity.

Why? Because the masses do not have the money to purchase the vast inventories of commodities that have been built up by their own labor as the bosses race for profits and market share. So production shuts down. Plants and offices are destroyed or sit idle.

The only thing that can change the course of the crisis is the conscious, organized intervention of the workers and the communities to defend themselves–to demand the right to a job, to housing, to health care, to education and to social services of all kinds.

The process of getting organized for struggle is a difficult one. But there is no other course. The only social force that can bail out the workers, the only force that is going to stop the layoffs, the foreclosures and evictions, the racist attacks, the sexist inequality of wages and abuse of women, the raids on undocumented workers—that is going to stop all forms of oppression—is the might of the organized, multinational working class.

Labels: april3 and 4, bail out the people movement, bailout, layoffs, march on wall street, stimulus package