The fight about inequality in the coming year will bring increasingly conscious and organized resistance by a growing vanguard of wage slaves pushed to the wall by bosses’ drive to cut wages and increase what they call productivity. This will be punctuated by street battles with ultra-rightist movements fighting against unions, militants, revolutionary socialists, women, blacks, gays, immigrants, Jews and others.
This will happen even in the most stable democracies if the working class fails to take power out of the hands of the oligarchies. This is why the $15 to $18 an hour minimum wage is so important at this time. For one reason, it is a rallying point, and two, it will show the workers they can have a better life if they set aside all other differences and work together.
The pressure is beginning to pay off as evident in a recent survey of American millionaires, 51 percent think inequality is a major problem for the U.S. About two-thirds also think higher taxes on the wealthy and a higher minimum wage are ways to narrow the inequality. Almost 60 percent of the American people polled think the minimum wage should be raised beginning at $10.10.
We need to take advantage of existing groups working toward reforms, such as the millions of workers who have taken to the streets over immigration reform, which is given very little attention on television, but it did take the oligarchies by surprise. This didn’t come out of the blue. It has developed in response to the money employers and their quarter-century long anti-labor offensive which drove down wages and all social benefits, imposing literally life threatening production speeds and denying simple dignity to the toilers on and off the job.
We need to support the $15 to $18 an hour fast food workers strike just for all the reasons mentioned above.
Yes, they are coming for us. Workers need to have one another’s backs because no one else will. Neither the broader labor movement nor the Democratic party are prepared to meet the urgency of this moment. So it’s going to fall upon the rest of us to mount a real resistance against Trump’s authoritarian takeover. We’re going to have to get our hands dirty. I don’t care if you have a good, well-paying union job and you are in the middle class now—if you see a worker being dragged out of his workplace regardless of how skilled the job and potentially taken to another country, you should be ready to be there for that worker. When I.C.E. shows up, gather around and shame them into leaving. It has worked in other places. America is sleep walking into authoritarianism, and if there’s anyone out there who is a member of a labor union that is safe—at this point— and doesn’t think this applies to them. Understand that they just haven’t gotten to you yet. They’re coming for all of us. There are ...
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