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.
In 2012 more than a quarter of all political contributions came from just 30,000 people who represented the 1 percent of the 1 percent, 90 percent who spent the most won. Today, we are an experiment in either a democracy, which started in 1787 or an oligarchy, which is winning. The nonunion people, like Trump and Musk, have most all the tools in their pockets to destroy our unions. They have money, they have the courts, they have law enforcement, they have the media, and 50 percent of workers that don’t know this don’t know the history of the working class people. This is the perfect storm to lose all the gains workers have made whether they’re union or not, even our Social Security and Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act. So, now we will have to go way back to the late 1920s and ‘30s and dig up the old labor party books. One book, written in 1964, has the information, The Rebel Voices, an IWW Anthology by Joyce L. Kornbluh, educator, activist, and advocate. The history of our labor...
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