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NEWS & LETTERS, May 2002
Column: Workshop Talks by Htun LinBush's war on labor
Dizzy with success, Bush has
begun to extend his permanent war abroad to a permanent war against us workers
right here at home. To challenge this, I saw huge contingents of minority
communities come out to participate in the April 20 march of 30,000 people in
San Francisco against "War, Racism, and Poverty." Increasingly, U.S. workers are
made to compete with offshore production in dictatorial countries subcontracted
to employ their large pool of state-disciplined labor force. Toward this trend,
the U.S. government is looking more and more like the biggest subcontractor for
American companies to squeeze more labor out of America's poor. The government's corporate
welfare system is shaping into an instrument of supplying private businesses
with huge quantities of state-disciplined, second-class workers at an incredible
cost savings. That workforce is comprised of 12.6 million Americans, half of
whom used to be on the welfare rolls. Now that Clinton's 1996 "Welfare
Reform" is up for renewal, Bush wants to force even more people into
workfare programs. One in three former welfare recipients currently either holds
a job, is looking for one, or is in vocational education. Bush wants to increase
that figure to seven in ten. This is happening just when a
major study revealed that in spite of the rapid pace of throwing people off
welfare, the much vaunted notion of self-help and independence in working has
been more of a mirage than reality for many of these former welfare recipients.
Even those who have been able to find jobs have discovered that they are little
better off than they were when they were on welfare–worse, if you consider the
cost of being away from one's children, while toiling in some sweatshop to earn
the same money, often without health benefits. Clinton's "Welfare
Reform" has not succeeded in lifting people out of the cycle of poverty.
The Bush government's next goal now is to make sure that no one, no matter how
poor or disadvantaged, escapes the despotism of wage slavery. The Bush
administration's eagerness to strengthen welfare-to-work rules included floating
a proposal to allow states to place welfare recipients in jobs that pay less
than minimum wage. They label such below minimum
wage jobs with the euphemisms community service or supervised work experience.
The real motive is to replace genuine job-training programs with lunatic
programs of religious zealots to fund $300 million for "marriage
training" and $135 million for "abstinence training." CRIMINALLY LOW WAGES The cruel irony is that while
the Bush fundamentalists preach that the only way out of poverty is through
marriage and "a proper work ethic," in the same breath they want to
gut the Fair Labor Standards Act and its national minimum wage of $5.15 an hour.
By a worker's standard this is already criminally low. The drive for a
"living wage" is an ongoing struggle among workers as in a grassroots
effort in Oakland, California where community organizing successfully forced the
city council to mandate a "living wage" in certain jobs connected to
the city. Wasting no time following the
slave-wage proposal, the arrogant Bush administration proposed to make its huge
tax cut to the richest 1% permanent. We workers don't see the timing of these
two Bush proposals as any coincidence. Marx said that since profit comes from
surplus value, or unpaid hours of labor, the only way capitalists can extract
more to compensate for a falling rate of profit is to squeeze every last ounce
from the worker even to the point of exhaustion and death. They know they have to do this
in the face of a global reality of recurring recessions and the permanent
decline in the rate of profit. Welfare "reform" is quickly revealing
itself to be a way for the state to discipline labor. So-called welfare policies
are instruments of coercion to administer what Marx called the "reserve
army of the unemployed" for capital's needs. WAR ON RESERVE ARMY Part of that reserve army is
warehoused in America's prisons. Another aspect of capital's reach for
totalitarian control over life and labor is when Ashcroft declared war on
immigrant workers with his racial dragnet and fear-mongering in the wake of
September 11. With Bush's latest designs,
American corporations hope to enjoy Third World labor conditions without having
to go to the Third World. That Third World is being grown right here at home.
The misery suffered by undocumented workers and workfare recipients should not
be seen as an issue only for those whom mainstream society considers
second-class citizens. Unless we see their struggle as our struggle, what awaits those of us who are now more fortunate is the same harsh conditions of life and labor currently suffered by those trapped in the bottom rung of a two-tiered society. Ultimately no one is really free unless everyone is freed from capital's werewolf hunger to extract ever more from labor for its ever greater expansion. |
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