Abolish Wage Slavery

NEW YORK CITY, September 16 — Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Fast Food Wage Board recently recommended that the state’s minimum wage for fast food workers be raised to $15 per hour. The decision is a big victory for the Fight for Fifteen movement (FF15). But we cannot be fooled. This is a victory not for the working class, but for the liberal bosses.
FF15 is a stage for the liberal faction of the ruling class to try to win the allegiance of fast food workers and pacify them. No doubt, the rebellions over the past year from Ferguson to Baltimore have had a lot to do with this concession. The rulers can’t hope to wage imperialist war and maintain their empire if workers and youth are rebelling in the streets. Terror alone won’t work. So everyone from Cuomo to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to Labor Secretary Tom Perez has joined the Fight for Fifteen. With the growing threat of war, the living and working conditions for our class will deteriorate.
The FF15 concession serves another purpose for the bosses: dividing the working class. This concession only includes fast food workers. It excludes retail workers, Emergency Medical Technicians, restaurant workers, and many more who make less than $15/hr. In the current auto contract talks between the United Automobile Workers union and General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, thousands of second-tier Big 3 assembly workers are making $15 or less. In the parts supplier industry, wages are even lower. Many unions, including many Service Employees International Union (SEIU) locals, have been slow to support the campaign because many of their own workers are making less than $15 an hour. Workers are fighting over crumbs when the bosses run away with the whole cake!
Though FF15 is being lauded as a great victory, $15 an hour is only $600 a week before taxes, and not enough to pay the rent and buy groceries. In 1960, the nominal minimum hourly wage was $1, but that is equal to nearly $8 today, after inflation. In fact, the real minimum wage peaked in 1968 at $8.54 an hour (2014 dollars). Since then, the purchasing power of the minimum wage has been falling every year. If it kept pace with increases in productivity, the minimum wage would over $22.
No to Lousy Nickel, Need Hammer and Sickle
Aside from the economics, the bosses are buying our allegiance to capitalism with $15. However much the minimum wage varies, exploitation is an absolute under capitalism. PLP envisions a different kind of society, where the value of labour cannot be stamped with nickels and dimes. We need a system where workers collectively decide what and how to produce, how to distribute it — all based on collectivity, not wages.  
This struggle for a higher minimum wage has involved tens of thousands of fast food workers, many supporting families on poverty wages. Black and Latin workers make up 40 percent of the workforce, and 73 percent are women. Along with the recent rebellions and mass marches against the police, this campaign has been one of the main anti-racist and anti-sexist struggles in recent years. Many fast food workers have also been active in the recent mass marches against racist police terror. The cops, the bosses, the state and its politicians are all part of the ruling class. It’s up to communists to link the minimum-wage struggle to the anti-kkkops struggle as one unified fight against capitalism.  
We cannot settle for $15/hour. Raising the minimum wage is merely giving workers breadcrumbs when we could have the whole loaf! What we need most of all is to abolish wage slavery with communist revolution and a mass PLP.