Limits of the Chicago workweek law

CHICAGO, July 25 – On July 24th, the Chicago City Council and newly-elected “progressive” Mayor Lori Lightfoot unanimously passed a law called the “fair workweek” ordinance. It’s already being widely celebrated by many liberal labor groups as a significant reform victory. Similar workers’ schedule reforms are currently in place in other major U.S. cities like New York, San Francisco, and Seattle.
But as the history of class struggle shows, we cannot reform our way to workers’ power. Like the national Fight for $15 campaign, the capitalist bosses and their misleaders running the unions will always manipulate any reform victory to ultimately serve their interests. We need the worker-run society of communism to guarantee safety, security, and egalitarian working conditions for our class, not another compromise with the bosses.
No fairness for workers
under capitalism
The city’s Fair Workweek Ordinance was first proposed around two years ago, as a means to address the unpredictable and unstable job schedules that many service and retail workers face. Many of the workers filling these mostly part-time positions are Black, Latin, and immigrant women workers, so the fact that they have to face such difficulties is another reflection of the racist and sexist nature of capitalism.
The most updated form of the ordinance that passed the city council, mandates that employers provide at least ten days advance notice of employees work schedules, instead of the one or two day notice that a lot of employers now give. It also mandates compensation for workers sent home from work on short notice. The different capitalist industries expected to comply include hotels, day laborers, healthcare facilities, and larger restaurants (chicagofairworkweek.com).
The ordinance was allowed to pass because the retail and service bosses were successful in pressuring the politicians to shape it more and more in their own favor. The final version of the bill excludes any worker making more than $50,000 per year, which intentionally leaves out many nurses and other healthcare professionals who still have their shifts cancelled at the last minute. Also, those workers who are employed at smaller businesses and non-profit organizations, not covered by the ordinance, will still face instability in wages and schedules.
But these shortcomings didn’t stop the union misleaders from SEIU and other organizations from singing their praises for the ordinance. They paraded different workers to the city council meetings to provide testimony, but after the bosses were able to chop the ordinance up in their favor, the bosses and politicians alike had very little reason to object to workers speaking out within their “democratic” rights.
This reform, much like the Fight for $15 campaign, is useful for the unions and the liberal bosses to sell the illusion of progress to the working class. They intentionally use terms like a “fair” workweek or wages even though there can be no equality or fairness between bosses and workers under capitalism. As the communist Karl Marx detailed over 150 years ago, the profit system is based off of the bosses extracting surplus value from the exploitation of our labor. If they paid us for the value of what we actually produce, the system would implode.
The only solution is
communist revolution
This is not to say that as workers and communists we should not be participating in reform movements large and small. We must, as these are the struggles where we learn to organize and understand our power as a united working class, and steel ourselves collectively in a period of growing fascism and inter-imperialist rivalry. But it is essential that we are clear among ourselves as workers that these reforms will never resolve the fundamental contradiction between the international working class and the capitalist bosses.
In order to resolve that contradiction – and all the racism, sexism, nationalism, misery, and inequality that comes with it – we need the mass international Progressive Labor Party openly advocating and organizing for a communist revolution that wrenches state power from the bosses and builds a collective egalitarian society based on our needs. When this revolutionary goal is widely grasped and embraced by the masses, capitalism’s days are numbered!