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A Workers'
Action Program to Meet the Economic Crisis
The liberals propose to tweak the Wall
Street Bailout on behalf of the amorphous “taxpayers” living on a
mythical “Main Street.” Revolutionary socialists, in contrast, start from
the needs of flesh-and-blood workers, and rely on their class power to
challenge ruling class attacks.
For that reason our Action Program for
this crisis begins with a call to the real, existing organizations of the
working class: the trade unions and allied organizations.
We call on the leaders of the AFL-CIO and
Change to Win federations, and of independent unions, to call an
Emergency Congress of Labor at which representatives of the working class
can draw up a set of demands and vote on a strategy to win them. Such a
Congress should make sure there is representation from the most embattled
segments of the class, such as immigrant workers, oppressed nationalities
and women, retirees, the disabled, etc. We therefore encourage that the
Congress be open to representatives of immigrant workers’ centers, the NAACP,
NOW, and similar organizations.
At this Congress, Socialist Action would
ally with class-struggle militants to push for adoption of the following
demands:
 Not
a cent to bail out the bankers! Nationalize the entire banking system
under the control of capitalism’s victims, not its agents! Open the
capitalists’ books so we can determine what has been stolen, hidden or
squandered at our expense! Make the banks, corporations and the ruling
class pay the full price of the crisis!
No to mortgage
foreclosures! Reduce present mortgage payments in proportion to the
capitalist-caused decline in value!
As the crisis
affects not only the financial sector, but spills over into, and is
itself in turn caused or reinforced by, simultaneous crises in
manufacturing, soaring inflation, and a global climate crisis, we demand
worker’s control of the monopoly corporations in manufacturing and
mining, energy, and transportation. We call for the election of
committees of workers to run these industries – workers who represent the
millions whose pensions have been eliminated or are on the line and whose
jobs and healthcare have been disappeared.
Jobs for all at
top union wages! Reduce the workweek to 30 hours with no cut in pay to
provide jobs for all!
Restore and
guarantee all pensions! For a real Social Security system that pays
pensions at union wage levels! Eliminate the private health insurers and
providers, and merge Medicare and Medicaid into a free, universal, and
public health system that covers all needed services without charge!
Bring all the
troops home now from Iraq, Afghanistan, and every other country where
they’re stationed, and spend the trillions for war instead on rebuilding
the nation’s inner cities, schools and hospitals. One hundred percent tax
on the war industries!
Finally, the
bipartisan support for bailing out the ruling class shows once again that
workers need our own political organ: Break with the twin parties of
capital! For a Labor Party based on a fighting union movement and all the
oppressed and exploited!
As one of its first tasks in mobilizing
support for the demands adopted at it, the Congress should organize
committees in every workplace in which workers’ jobs, pensions and health
benefits are threatened by the crisis, and in every neighborhood
threatened by foreclosures and evictions – as well as in the Gulf Coast
and urban areas destroyed by “natural” disasters and decades of
discrimination. These committees can draw up more concrete demands to
supplement the above, some examples of which follow.
Workers desperately searching for
information on the fates of their mortgages, pension funds, 401ks, health
benefits, life insurance policies, retirement annuities, education debt –
indeed their very paychecks – will respond eagerly to an opportunity to
meet collectively to share information and to demand the right to see the
books of all companies holding direct stakes in the funds affecting the
above, as well as the institutions holding the financial instruments
based on them.
Parallel committees can be formed in
neighborhoods facing high rates of foreclosure and eviction to demand
access to the banks, real estate companies, and other institutions
causing their misery. These committees could also organize physical
resistance through mass mobilization against evictions.
We demand an immediate halt to all
foreclosures, cancellation of all interest on mortgages to banks and
mortgage lenders, and renegotiation of all mortgage terms, including the
principal and debt built up due to usurious interest rates, such
negotiations to be led by workers’ and homeowners’ neighborhood
committees. We demand that what workers owe be recalculated downward in
proportion to the decline in the value of their homes caused by the
puncturing of the housing bubble built on financial speculation.
Replace the Federal Reserve with a
workers’ and consumers’ council to oversee the merged and nationalized
banks. Rehire the tens of thousands of bank workers being laid off, who
must organize their own committees, which can meet with workers’ and
neighborhood committees and expose to them the secret records of their
banks.
Abolish immediately the market for
mortgage-based securities, credit-swaps, and other derivatives. The
workers’ committees will know how to use the funds seized from these
markets to ensure the safety of the deposits of all individual workers as
well as to use their surpluses to fund production and services.
These workplace and neighborhood committees
can unite to pool their information, especially as they are often
victimized by the same banks even though working in different industries.
Meeting together, they can discuss the demands adopted at the Congress,
and concretize them further based on their collective sense of their
needs.
If bankers whose debts don’t get
“deleveraged” refuse loans to businesses which then shut down production,
workers can demand the nationalization of any company shutting down or
cutting jobs or benefits as a result.
We call for the nationalized banks to be
merged into one public institution under the supervision of workers’
committees, which could then decide how that public bank’s funds can be
used to rebuild society, based on the needs expressed in the plan of the
Congress of labor and supplemented by demands of local workplace and
neighborhood committees.
The agribusiness and energy monopolies
must be nationalized as a first step to dealing with inflation.
When threatened with plant closure in
2006, UAW Local 879 in St. Paul drew up a plan to convert from making
cars to green production of environmentally friendly products such as
wind-generating turbines and hybrid vehicles. The same process must now
be reproduced in every workplace threatened with closure due to the
crisis, and on a nationwide scale.
The transportation industry, including
auto, bus and rail manufacturers, as well as railroad and subway lines,
must be nationalized to begin reorganizing the economy in a way that can
reduce carbon emissions sufficiently to save the planet. Paulson claims
there is a financial emergency justifying his dictatorial takeovers.
Workers must declare instead a Climate Emergency which justifies our
inspection and control over the financial, food, energy and transportation
industries!
To combat inflation, we call for a
sliding scale of wages that fully matches the Consumer Price Index
(including food and energy, left out of the official CPI). Such a scale
should be applied also to retirees. It must be monitored by workers’ and
consumers’ committees, which could inspect and if need be take over
companies claiming they can’t survive under the new wage schedule.
In addition to the 6-hour day and 30-hour
week, reflecting the gains in our productivity, we demand reduction of
the retirement age to 55. We demand unemployment insurance at union wages
and benefits.
In Trotsky’s 1934 Action Program for
France, which contained demands similar to those above, he already called
for special demands for the specially oppressed: “Equal wages for equal
work. Abolition of the superexploitation imposed on women, young people,
aliens and colonials. Maternity protection with supplementary leaves of
absence. Repeal of all special legislation applying to foreign and
colonial workers.” Those demands if anything are more urgent today,
especially as a way of fighting the violent racism that the ruling class
will organize to divert us from our common exploitation today!
For a confiscatory tax on the rich! Even
manic deregulator John McCain recently proposed that none of the
executives involved in the taken-over firms get salaries more than the
President, which is $400,000. We say instead, institute a 100% tax on all
income over $400,000 throughout the economy! And jail time for anyone
shifting their bank accounts offshore to evade this.
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