Many workers are reacting to these pressures and safety hazards by slowing down production, finding ways to make fewer parts. This is growing from small spontaneous actions to more planned larger ones. One worker said, “If they’re going to be all over us, then we’ll just take our time,” a sign of more to come!

With the highest unemployment in decades many workers have to accept wage-cuts and watch their savings vanish in the crashing stock markets. We know nine-member families living in two-bedroom apartments while thousands of houses sit vacant. Anger is growing. When will enough be enough?

Competition for Maximum Profits, Falling Rate of Profit Caused this Crisis

The bosses need to make ever more profit or face rival take-overs. When fewer people are buying their products they maintain profits by squeezing more value out of the workers, and making war to destroy their rivals’ capacity to produce.

Their motto is to outdo the competition by selling more for less. One way is by spending more on technology and less on workers’ wages and benefits. Their rate of profit tends to fall because they make profit not from machines but by stealing the value we workers produce. This is a contradiction of capitalism — all profits come from workers’ labor so with more investment in technology comes a lower rate of profit.

China developed advanced manufacturing with the help of the U.S. and other imperialists so companies could invest in a super-exploited, low-wage workforce to increase profits. But with higher U.S. unemployment and lower wages worldwide, workers cannot buy all the products manufactured.

With one edge of their sword, capitalists cut jobs and wages by developing machines in which one operator can produce the work of ten. With the other edge they need us to sacrifice our wages and lives to save their profit system.

U.S. bosses blame the 3.8% decline in Gross Domestic Product on “consumer belt-tightening” (LA Times), but workers don’t have the money to spend because of these attacks. In turn, the government prints money for stimulus packages, further reducing the dollar’s value and our real wages.

Obama Can’t Change This World

The bosses hope Obama can help them climb out of this recession by shifting the blame from this capitalist crisis of overproduction to the Bush administration’s mismanagement. For this he needs workers’ support. As one worker from a sub-contracted aerospace shop said, “This is just a strategy to seduce the workers. We will still have to come to work like slaves just to pay all our bills.”

Revolution Is Our Answer!

Workers are starting to challenge speed-up, increased production quotas and unsafe conditions. In this struggle, the lasting victory is for workers to recognize that a racist, super-exploitative system that can’t provide a decent life for the people who produce for and sustain society must be destroyed, replaced by a communist system where production and all activity will be for workers’ well-being and safety. CHALLENGE’S communist ideas in these struggles help our base grow.

The anger and slowdowns show workers’ potential to act in our class interests over the long haul. We must unite to take the double-edged sword of the bosses’ exploitation out of their hands, take control of our children’s education and produce for the needs of the international working class instead of bosses’ profits.

The Progressive Labor Party consists of workers, students, soldiers and professionals who know that with time and struggle we can create a world without bosses or borders. Join us.

(For more on the falling rate of profit see CHALLENGE, 12/10/08, “Falling Rate of Profit Hits Workers in The Head”)