Nationwide Protests Demand Raising Minimum Wage

April 27, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

Protests to raise the federally mandated $7.25 hourly minimum wage have spread across the country for the past three years. People who work as maids and janitors, in fast food restaurants, day care centers, drug stores, call centers, and in many other industries have been joined by supporters to launch a series of marches, rallies, die-ins, and other protests. On April 15, tens of thousands of people in over 200 cities and towns held the largest series of protests yet, demanding that the minimum wage be raised to $15 an hour.

It is a very positive element in the overall “mix” in society today that thousands of people are rising up against the inhuman degradation and mistreatment they face on these jobs, and bringing their fight out into the open; it is very positive that people are demanding to be treated as human beings and not interchangeable parts of a bone- and soul-crushing machine; it is very positive that people are raising their sights and seeking out allies in their fight for justice.

Wealth and income disparities have grown enormously within the U.S. over the last 30 years. Tens of millions of people in this “greatest of all societies,” this self-proclaimed “land of opportunity” are increasingly becoming immiserated and impoverished, with little or no prospect of anything getting any better for them. This is one very sharp expression of the utter worthlessness of a system based upon relentless exploitation.

The minimum wage, low as it has always been, has not kept up with the rise in the cost of living and inflation, especially of the essential means of life, such as food and housing. This means that people making minimum wage today have significantly less “earning power” than they did 20 or 30 years ago. In fact, the earning power of the minimum wage has been in decline since 1968. The percentage of the population earning at or around minimum wage is highest in the South, but the real earnings of minimum wage people are lowest in big cities, with New York City being at the bottom of the list.

About 3.6 million people worked at or below minimum wage in 2012, according to the federal government’s own figures. Tens of millions more work at slightly above the minimum wage but below the $15 an hour the protesters are demanding—42 percent of the overall employed workforce, and more than “half of all African Americans ... and nearly 60% of Latinos,” according to Forbes magazine.

Most of the people with jobs at or just above the minimum wage are adults supporting a family, and often working two, three, even four jobs just for bare survival. Women are disproportionately among those making minimum wage. Tens of millions of people, especially children, are supported by people working these jobs. Most of these jobs provide no or few of the “benefits” essential to functioning in this society, such as sick pay and child care.

Much—in fact most—of the “job growth” in the U.S. Obama brags about is minimum- or low-wage jobs. As an organizing director of the Service Employees International Union recently said, low-wage jobs are “the fastest growing jobs in the U.S.” A report by two Massachusetts Institute of Technology professors indicated that low-wage jobs include “food service workers, security guards, janitors and gardeners, cleaners, home health aides, child care workers, hairdressers and beauticians, and recreation occupations,” and “maids and porters, call-center workers, bank tellers, data-entry keyers, cooks, food preparation workers, waiters and waitresses, cashiers and pharmacy assistants, parking-lot attendants, hotel receptionists and clerks, ambulance drivers, poultry, fish and meat processors, sewing-machine operators, laundry and dry-cleaning operators, and agricultural workers.”

These jobs are not marginal to the functioning of the capitalist-imperialist economy; they are not just a way for teenagers to earn some cash. They are deeply integrated into and play a vital role in the overall functioning and profitability of capitalism-imperialism.

Changes and developments in the global imperialist economy have contributed to and accelerated changes within the U.S. economy, and long-term shifts in how it is structured. Heightened globalization and the ongoing “outsourcing” of many industrial jobs, rapid developments in technological innovation that have impacted all levels of production, transportation, distribution, and communication worldwide, and a global assault on wages—all of it shaped by intense competition between blocs of imperialist capital and imperialist countries—have driven the growth of low-wage jobs, and been a big part of the compulsion of the capitalists to immiserate and impoverish ever growing numbers of people.

An International Class, an Internationalist Revolution

The tens of millions of minimum and near minimum wage workers in this country are an important section of the proletariat—an international class of people whose interest as a class lies in overthrowing capitalism through a proletarian led revolution, a revolution that actually serves the emancipation of humanity and is not just promoting one group of people over another, or creating a new class of oppressors.

The man stocking shelves for minimum wage at Wal-mart is likely to be putting up shirts made by deeply exploited young women and girls working in hellish sweatshops in Bangladesh; the young woman preparing Big Macs uses tomatoes harvested by impoverished Mexican youth who have been driven off their own farms.

All this is integral to the functioning of capitalism; all this contributes to lowering the cost of the labor power of workers in this country and across the world, and heightening the competitive position of the U.S. The blood and bones of countless people everywhere on this earth are embedded deeply into the essence of every commodity produced in capitalism; the aspirations, dreams, and passions of people who never knew each other are sealed together in every T-shirt, iPhone, and head of lettuce for sale in America.

But overcoming this exploitation requires nothing less than revolution, systematically digging up the roots and the foundations of the inequalities and oppression that define capitalist society, and the dismantling of the machinery of repression—the laws, the police, the courts, the jails, the military—that enables and enforces them.

Bob Avakian, in his talk Revolution: Why It’s Necessary, Why It’s Possible, What It’s All About, describes capital as “a relation of domination, of exploitation. Capitalism is a system based on exploitation. ... Capital is a relation in which one person, or group or class of people, owns or controls the means to live and means to create wealth, and thereby forces others to work for them in exchange for a wage. Capital is control over labor of others, and it is this, forcing others to work for them, that creates wealth that the capitalists get.” BA in the same talk also deeply exposes what this system is all about: “Capitalism is a form of modern day wage slavery. What counts to capitalism is not human need but what they called demand, measured in dollar terms”.

This is capitalism’s nature. One cold hard truth that people need to learn: capitalists don’t give a shit about you, your family, your needs, your health care, your living situation. What they care about is their “bottom line.” Any concessions that may be wrung from their system will be partial and temporary, and will leave the system of unending exploitation intact, until revolution puts an end to it.

The capitalist system of wage slavery is completely outmoded and a detriment to humanity; it can’t in any way meet the needs of the masses of people. Human potential will be twisted and crushed, the lives of tens and hundreds of millions of people will be destroyed and sucked dry as long as this system dominates the planet. It needs to be overcome, through an actual revolution, as soon as possible, everywhere on earth.

The ruthless exploitation faced by low-wage workers in the U.S. and internationally is an expression of the very core nature of the system of capitalism. The struggle people are waging to improve their living conditions and raise their wages is righteous, and can be an important component of mounting resistance and opposition to the savage injustices and inequalities of capitalism.

In today’s world the production of things, and the distribution of the things produced, is overwhelmingly carried out by large numbers of people who work collectively and are organized in highly coordinated networks. At the foundation of this whole process is the proletariat, an international class which owns nothing, yet has created and works these massive socialized productive forces. These tremendous productive powers could enable humanity to not only meet the basic needs of every person on the planet, but to build a new society, with a whole different set of social relations and values...a society where all people could truly and fully flourish together.

—Constitution of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA

 

 

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