Vol. 71/No. 21      May 28, 2007

This is part of a broader picture in which real wages for working people in the United States have declined over the past three decades, while their indebtedness has risen. This is the result of the employers’ drive—under the whip of ruthless competition among themselves—to increase profits by pushing down wages, slashing medical and pension coverage, and making us work faster, longer hours, and more unsafely.

The BusinessWeek article cited defenders of what the magazine called “U.S. companies’ audacious drive to extract more profits from the nation’s working poor.” Voices in big-business circles, however, have expressed concern that the rapid growth of “subprime lending”—also a factor in the rise in home loan defaults—will hasten a financial crisis for U.S. capitalism. Some also warn that it will increase class tensions and eventually risk social explosions as workers’ living standards are pushed down.

San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank president Janet Yellen said in a speech last November, in language rare for a bank official, that “rising [income] inequality is intensifying resistance to globalization, impairing social cohesion, and could, ultimately, undermine American democracy.”

For more than a quarter century, U.S. capitalists’ profit rates have stagnated. To reverse this trend they have been squeezing more labor out of working people, while increasingly flexing their military might abroad to control markets and territory. At the same time they have expanded speculative investments in search of higher returns. The resulting massive debt bubble is a growing threat to the entire U.S. capitalist financial system.

To accomplish their profit goals, the U.S. rulers must take much more aggressive steps and deal severe blows to workers and farmers. The biggest obstacle to their objectives today is the resistance by working people, including vanguard actions by foreign-born workers such as the recent May Day demonstrations. These actions are a significant factor in U.S. politics even while the trade unions continue to decline and many labor struggles continue to end in standoffs with the bosses, or even in setbacks.

The May 1 mobilization of 400,000 workers in the streets of U.S. cities and towns nationwide to demand legal status for all undocumented immigrants showed the increased confidence of a substantial layer of workers. Follow-up actions, like the May 17 march in Los Angeles to protest the May Day cop riot there, show that May 1 actions were not a fluke. These mobilizations set an example for other working people of how to fight and reach out for solidarity.
 
 
Related articles:
U.S. 'working poor' superexploited
'BusinessWeek' warns of impending disaster  
 
 
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