BY DOUG JENNESS
ST. PAUL, Minnesota - During my recent election campaign as the Socialist Workers candidate for city council, which ended after the "non-partisan" primary on September 12, I was often asked what the main issue for St. Paul is. In each case I said the biggest questions aren't those confronting St. Paul as a whole, but those that are a challenge for working people. Top on the list for workers - but not for employers - I explained, is the same problem we face nationally and internationally: unemployment.
I cited an International Labor Organization report issued earlier this year on world employment. It stated that 30 percent of the worldwide labor force was without a job or underemployed at the end of 1994. This is the highest global jobless level since the worst period of the 1930s Great Depression.
These are depression conditions that are going to get worse as the mounting glut of commodities on the world market drives the capitalist predators into even more intense rivalry and imposing more draconian cost-cutting measures.
In the United States the official jobless rate has been hovering around 5.6 percent for some time, a level that has come to be accepted by the bosses and their economic experts as "normal" for an upturn in the business cycle. But this represents about 8 million workers and is higher than most years between 1941 and 1975.
In St. Paul, as elsewhere, the highest levels of joblessness or underemployment are among youth and workers who are Black, Latino, or Hmong.
The harmful effects on those who are out of work, with only meager jobless benefits or none at all and no medical benefits, is pretty evident, especially if months drag on before they can get another job, usually one that pays less. But unemployment is also a serious problem for those who are still hanging onto their jobs. Not only are they tormented by the possibility that they might be next, but the employers use high levels of joblessness to press us to accept no wage increases or even cuts and worse working conditions.
According to a recent report from the Economic Policy Institute, in the last six years, hourly pay, when adjusted for inflation, has remained the same or declined for all but the top 20 percent of male wage-earners and the top 30 percent of women in the work force. Overall, in the last 15 years the average wage has declined.
The bosses also use unemployment to pit employed and unemployed workers against each other, reinforcing the greatest chasm between workers. Employed workers are told that the jobless are too lazy to find work. Certain categories are branded as inferior- Blacks, Latinos, immigrants, youth, women - and thus less deserving of jobs or of better-paying jobs. These pariahs, we are told, are out to steal the jobs of those who are currently working. Each worker is thus backed into a corner trying to defend my job, in my plant, in my city, and in my country. The ruling rich foster this divide to undermine the possibility of workers recognizing our common exploitation and common enemy and joining forces to fight collectively.
Labor must lead campaign for jobs
"But what can be done?" I was asked. "What does the
Socialist Workers Party propose?"
"Electing me to the city council won't solve the problem," I pointed out. "The real challenge is for the organized labor movement - the trade unions - to lead a campaign for jobs."
It's out of current battles and those that are coming that workers will press for this fight. In the Twin Cities, for example, some 2,000 bus drivers are now out on strike resisting efforts by the ruling rich to increase the proportion of part-time drivers.
In my campaign I outlined the key proposals that must be part of this fight:
1) Reduce the work week to 30 hours, with no loss in weekly pay, in order to spread the available work to more workers;
2) Launch a government-financed public works program to build, repair, and adequately staff schools, hospitals and clinics, parks, libraries, public transportation, and child-care centers.
3) Establish and enforce affirmative action, including quotas, to achieve preferential hiring and upgrading of workers who are Black, Latino, Asian, or women. Maintain dual seniority lists to prevent erosion of past gains when layoffs hit.
4) Substantially increase wages, Social Security benefits, and pensions and institute cost-of-living escalator clauses to keep up with inflation.
One can readily see that these steps can't be implemented simply on a plant-wide or even a city- or state-wide level. They will require action by the national government. This means unions have to go beyond fighting for better contracts to also establishing a political movement.
This can't be done by ringing doorbells for the "friends of labor" in the Democratic Party. This lot were never truly champions of workers, and a growing number of those who pretended to be on our side are openly thumbing their nose at labor. A rude lesson was served earlier this year in Minnesota when labor-backed Democrats in the state legislature joined with Republicans to slash workmen's compensation benefits by 33 percent.
The next giant step for working people is to establish our own political instrument, a fighting party that is based on the organizational strengths of revitalized unions.
During the city elections another approach to the problem of unemployment has been posed. A "Jobs and Fair Wage Initiative" has been placed on the ballot for the November 7 elections that would place some restrictions on private corporations receiving more than $25,000 in aid from city or port authority coffers - tax credits, grants, etc., as well as all affected contractors, subcontractors, and leaseholders. To receive public aid they would need to produce a net increase in jobs within two years; pay employees at work sites in the city at least a poverty- level wage for a family of four (currently $7.22); and to the extent possible fill all job openings with unemployed or underemployed St. Paul residents referred by a community hiring hall to be established.
This initiative was placed on the ballot through the petitioning efforts of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and the Twin Cities Area New Party. It is being promoted by liberal Democratic city council members and a wing of the city's union officials. At its August meeting the St. Paul Trades and Labor Assembly voted to support the measure, but reversed this position at its September meeting when building trades officials mobilized a big turnout to oppose the ballot initiative.
The editors of the city's main daily, the Pioneer Press, denounced the measure for its "unreasonable wage and job- growth mandates on city businesses." This, the paper claims, would "cause a rapid business exodus from St. Paul into the suburbs and Minneapolis."
St. Paul Mayor Norman Coleman, who has been leading the charge to slash medical benefits for city employees, echoed this line at a news conference a few days later, dubbing the measure "dumb and dangerous."
`Jobs' initiative is diversion from fight
What stand should working people take on the ballot
measure?
The Socialist Workers Party is urging a vote against it. In no way does the proposal seriously address or offer any remedy to the problems of unemployment and low wages. Nor does support for it even take the first step toward resolving these problems. In fact, it is a diversion from labor launching the kind of working-class fight for jobs and wages that is necessary.
Instead of a government-financed and operated public works program it accepts the framework of doling out public funds to profit-gouging real estate sharks, construction companies, and land developers. These are grants and tax breaks that they get above payments received in city contracts through a normal bidding process.
Moreover, the initiative accepts, and in fact promotes, the notion that poverty-level wages are all right. Naturally, the construction companies and other profiteers, backed by their mayor, yelp that $7.22 is too high, because they are currently trying to drive down workers' wages and lower expectations. But this is well below the union scale currently paid to city employees and construction workers. To the extent that the St. Paul city government enforced such a wage policy, it would be used as a bludgeon to put downward pressure on union construction and industrial wages in St. Paul, not to raise the wages of the worst-paid workers and thus the working class as a whole.
Even though unemployment is highest among the Hmong from Laos and Vietnam, recent immigrants from Mexico and Central America, and Blacks, there are no proposals for affirmative action. Instead the measure advocates hiring residents of St. Paul through "community" hiring halls. This is a narrow-minded, reactionary notion that would bolster divisions between workers in St. Paul and those from Minneapolis and the surrounding suburbs who are part of the same job pool.
Hiring halls set up and run by a bourgeois municipal government are not an improvement for any section of the working class, including Blacks, women, and others who are often denied equal employment opportunities by job trusts imposed by the trade union officialdom. They in no way point toward independent working-class action and organization.
The main problem is that the proposal leads to counting on trying to make, in a very limited way, the bosses accountable. If they refuse, and move somewhere else as the mayor and the Pioneer Press editors warn, then where's the jobs program?
All of this underlines the need for working people to count on our own strength through an independent organized political movement that can fight for the government to implement the measures that are needed as the social and economic crisis deepens.