TRENTON, NJ, February 25 — “Workers have dignity; the rich have our wealth!” This poster expressed the outrage of 4,000 New Jersey workers rallying in solidarity with Wisconsin state workers. Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, along with other governors — including NJ’s Chris Christie — is spearheading a bogus nationwide campaign, to destroy the largest remaining group of organized workers in the country: the public employee unions.
This campaign is funded by the billionaire Koch brothers through their Americans for Prosperity front group. After voting massive tax cuts for the wealthy for two decades — starving state governments of revenues and creating a false “budget crisis” — these same businessmen and their lackey politicians are now blaming public workers for their multi-billion-dollar state budget “deficits.”
Workers at the rally weren’t buying this line, however, with some holding up posters that said, “Union-busters are the new terrorists!” PLP members from NJ state colleges organized on their local campuses to get fellow American Federation of Teachers (AFT) members and Communication Workers of America (CWA) staff to attend. One teacher, who canceled classes and urged students to attend, got five emails from students after the rally asking how it went. Another recent graduate, now a social worker who will soon be in the CWA, attends a Party study group and looks forward to helping build a worker-student alliance in New Jersey.
Forming a sea of red rain ponchos and hats in front of the State House, the 4,000 New Jersey workers — both private and public sector employees — didn’t match the turnout of the 70,000 Wisconsin workers who occupied their capital building a few weeks ago. Nevertheless, the protest was one of the largest in New Jersey and signals an upsurge in working-class solidarity.
Private sector workers, after years of layoffs, wage-cuts and disappearing benefits, see that they have a lot more in common with state workers than with the billionaire businessmen funding this nationwide campaign or the governors hypocritically fronting for them. It’s impossible to believe the rhetoric describing public employees as “privileged” with “bloated salaries and pensions” when more and more workers know that the top 1% of the population controls 43% of total national wealth and the bottom 80% has only 7% (2008, extremeinequality.org).
Unfortunately, at a time when workers need class-conscious leadership, most of the state public union leaders speaking at the rally actually endorsed the position of the politicians on givebacks. After giving lip service to the view that the banks and their speculative practices — not public workers — caused the economic crisis, virtually every union leader stated that their unions would be willing to “negotiate” wage-cuts and reductions in benefits, to “share the pain.”
Their rallying cry, “Negotiate not dictate,” however, is a losing strategy that will put the ruling class in a win-win situation. They win if they can get rid of collective bargaining for public unions AND they win even if they can’t, so long as unions bargain away the salary and benefit gains their workers struggled for decades to win.
As the class struggle heats up, this defeatist line at the Trenton rally shows the important role that communist ideas must play if workers are to build a movement that will not be sold out by the current labor leaders. As communists, PLP members in these unions need not only to participate in class struggle but also to consolidate their personal ties with co-workers and discuss why the rules of capitalism make it a necessity to push to reduce wages and benefits in order to maximize corporate profits.
More than ever, as U.S. capitalism faces fiercer global competition with China and the European Union and must maintain a global military force to protect its interests, it needs to squeeze every penny it can from workers.