Marchers Hit Racist Understaffing, Welfare for Bosses

Newark, NJ, November 3 — Chanting “Same struggle same fight, workers and clients must unite”, and “The bankers got bailed out, we got sold out,” 125 unionized Essex County welfare workers marched and rallied here today. The workers were joined by the War Against Poverty Coalition (WAPC), the People’s Organization for Progress (POP) and several other organizations to protest the severe racist understaffing of welfare centers throughout Essex County. This is causing a huge backlog of Food Stamp and Medicaid applications. We demand jobs at living wages, restoration of all social service cutbacks, and an end to government subsidies/welfare for corporations.
Speakers included social service workers and one client. The client was laid off along with hundreds of other workers from a New Jersey factory. He spoke passionately about the inability of the understaffed welfare system to provide for the needs of people like himself. He called for welfare workers to unite with their clients, and not be sucked into an anti-client mentality. “Welfare reform” has deliberately promoted this kind of thinking.
Other speakers stressed the need to vote in the upcoming election. But one social services worker called for a revolution of the working people to shake up the foundation of the “1 percent”, calling on workers to “directly pierce the heart of capitalism squarely in the chest and reclaim the rights that have been stripped away from us”.  
Under communism, human needs like health care and food would not be commodities to be sold so that some boss makes a profit. That is because communism would eliminate the commodity exchange system that capitalism requires. Also, capitalism needs unemployment in order to drive down wages, a necessary measure for any boss to stay competitive. Stop-gap programs like Food Stamps are only necessary because of the mass racist unemployment we see under capitalism. Black, Latin, and Asian workers are super-exploited and continue used as a wedge against the white working class.
In the past six years, as a direct result of capitalism’s economic crisis, Food Stamp applications in Essex County and statewide have skyrocketed. Ten percent of New Jersey residents now receive Food Stamps, and thousands of others need help but can’t get it. Also, Medicaid income eligibility levels have gone up as the new Affordable Care Act is rolled out, resulting in thousands of new applicants for benefits in Essex County alone. These applicants for Food Stamp and Medicaid benefits are overwhelmingly Black and Latin residents.
Instead of hiring more staff so that all these new applications can be processed on time, the county bosses, backed by their state overlords, have kept a hiring freeze in place for years! As a result thousands of unfinished applications pile up in local offices, causing needy clients frustration, lack of health care and hunger. Rank-and-file caseworkers catch the brunt of the clients’ anger while the state and county bosses get off scot free!
Meanwhile, Prudential Insurance Co. received more than $200 million in state tax credits from the NJ Economic Development Authority last year alone. This was in return for a “promise” to create a measly 400 jobs, few of which will go to Newark residents. These giveaways to “Pru” bosses are paying half the cost of their new 20-story office tower (The Real Deal, Dec. 2013), clearly visible from the daily long lines at the main Essex County welfare office.
The campaign against racist understaffing in the welfare centers will continue. PLP will bring to participants in this campaign the idea of a communist world without unemployment where everything produced by the working class is shared according to need.