This explanation of what the employers are forcing on working people rings even more true today for tens of millions across the United States and other countries. In March, President George Bush whisked a bill through Congress that repealed workplace safety regulations. While the regulations were among several last-minute decrees on environmental and worker-related question issued by former president William Clinton to burnish his liberal "legacy" after eight years in office, policies adopted under Clinton were "business-friendly," to use a watchword of the Bush regime. The great "productivity boom" he hailed and the "longest economic expansion" Clinton took credit for were built on the backs of working people, as Barnes describes in Capitalism's World Disorder.

But workers, including a significant component of immigrant workers, are showing they will not accept the speed-up and restructuring that guarantees that many will be crippled at work. Workers at the Excel slaughterhouse in Fort Morgan, Colorado, recently carried out a strike which included a demand that the line speed had to be lowered when workers were absent on the line. A worker on strike at the Hormel-owned Rochelle Foods in Rochelle, Illinois, explained the company is "always trying to speed up the lines. When one of us gets hurt, they won't let us go to the nurse.... It has made us all mad." And rail workers at Burlington Northern-Santa Fe successfully pushed back the company's program to perform "genetic testing" in an effort to claim some workers are predisposed to carpal tunnel injuries.

"The exploiters under crisis conditions always attempt to push back the clock of history," Barnes writes. In response, the labor movement must raise the banner of the right of every worker to leave the factory, mine, or office each day as healthy as when they entered.

This is part of the broader historic struggle for Social Security, which is not only the fight for the lifetime right of every worker to medical care, to workers compensation when injured, and to unemployment insurance for as long as a person is jobless. It is also combined with demanding jobs for all, affirmative action measures including raising the minimum wage, defense of immigrant rights, and a shorter workweek with no cut in pay as part of an international fight to defend working people.

Conditions of life for workers and farmers throughout the semicolonial world also push to the fore the pressing need for unions and other working-class and farmer organizations to demand: Cancel the Third World Debt! By taking the moral high ground on these questions, the working-class movement will forge the unity needed to build a powerful movement that can take power away from the capitalist masters in whose crisis-racked system profit is everything and the dignity and physical well-being of workers and farmers are of no concern.  
 
 
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