When European Central Bank president Mario Draghi recently told German tabloid Bild ”The worst is over,” he was talking about government budgets and European banks’ balance sheets. It is a completely different story for workers through-out Europe who are finding their trade union rights undermined, their wages squeezed, their retirement age raised and their pensions cut while the employers are granted more and increasing power. 27 European Union members are implementing austerity measures to the tune of about 450 billion euros. Such austerity measures have been portrayed as a necessary part of bringing national debts under control and making European businesses competitive, but...
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The top graph is taken from “Left Business Observer” . Real income is adjusted for inflation. So, the working class, or 95% of the population, the part who actually produce the wealth of the USA have had their wages/income flattened since 1967 whereas the top 5%, the bourgeoisie or capitalist class have seen their real incomes increase quite a bit. The second graph shows the real productivity increases of the working class over the years since the 1940s. Note how productive of wealth you and your fellow workers are and how you’re becoming ever more productive as a class. Aside...
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The Fiscal Times published an article arguing that a family with an income of $250,000 per year is not really rich. When taxes, housing costs, college costs for children and so on are accounted for, even those with an income five times the median family income are just barely getting by, it said. Later the Fiscal Times reported that a study recently found that a middle class family needs at least $150,000 of income just to cover the basics. Subsequently, The New York Times published an article sympathizing with the plight of those making only $250,000. They are certainly...
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Young workers see pay shrink in United States. The Economic Policy Institute think tank found that the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage for male college graduates aged 23 to 29 dropped 11% over the past decade to $21.68 in 2011. For female college graduates of the same age, the average wage is down 7.6% to $18.80. For the entire working population, average hourly wages have risen modestly over the past 10 years. But that is partly because many of the lowest-paid workers have lost their jobs and are no longer included in the average.”People who normally make below-average wages are...
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Recently, the New York Times praised Chelsea Clinton’s current successes and commitment to public service. Ms. Clinton is the daughter of current U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton. The Times reported Ms. Clinton is making the sacrifice of leading us because she feels a responsibility to serve the public good and “hopes to make a positive, productive contribution.” Ms. Clinton’s newsworthy steps toward public service, noted by the NYT, include: meeting people such as Elton John and Richard Gere, taking a public role with her father’s Clinton Global Initiative, presenting an award to her...
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The World Socialist Party is frequently lambasted for its opposition to reformism. The workers clamor for something concrete now, it is claimed , not abstract socialist principles. They demand immediate improvements that can be obtained by campaigns for legislation it is argued. The World Socialist Party case that although some reforms may be of material benefit to the working class, advocating party policy to struggle for particular reforms hinders the struggle for socialism and diverts our energies into what often results in dead-ends. We found this article by Stephanie Luce on the Labor Notes website particularly relevant in that it offers some...
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Bankers are unpopular. Not the ordinary bank teller or the back-up IT staff, but the directors and top managers who award themselves huge salaries and big bonuses. They are so unpopular, in fact, that the chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland, Stephen Hester, has been forced to give up a bonus of nearly £1m while his predecessor, Sir Fred Goodwin, has been stripped of his knighthood. The banks defend themselves by arguing that they bring “wealth” into Britain, and pay a considerable amount of tax on it. Some even describe themselves as “wealth creators”. This is absurd. What...
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"This is not to say that Marx's ideas can't be measured against experience. His predictions need to be compared with the history of capitalism over the last 200 years. From this perspective, Marx's ideas come off very well, as the main tendencies he predicted for capitalism – towards the supplanting of human labour by machinery, the concentration and centralisation of capital, the spread of wage labour, the tendency towards widescale unemployment, and above all the recurrence of periods of depression – have been realised. In fact, I would say that Marx's theory of the tendency of the rate of...
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SO PROCLAIM some of those who called for the occupation of Wall Street, explaining: “We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we’re working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything. We are the 99 percent”. A powerful appeal – the sort of thing we might say ourselves. But who are “the other 1 percent” that are getting the...
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Mark Fishman, associate professor of sociology at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, investigated routine news production by examining the work practices of reporters and other news workers. His research findings were published by the University of Texas Press in 1980 in a book entitled Manufacturing the News. At the beginning of his book, Fishman touches on the practical mode of social reproduction by quoting from W. I. Thomas, The Child in America (1928): “Our picture of how the world works is integrally tied to how we work in the world. By acting in accordance with our conception...
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