The capitalist jobs bloodbath continues to accelerate with 50,000 tech workers being hit by the job cuts since the beginning of the year, the highest number since the dot.com bubble burst in 2001.
The S&P index hit a record high last Tuesday, the same day IBM said it was cutting its marketing and communications workforce in half as part of previously announced plans to replace 8,000 jobs with AI.
Under capitalism, technological advances are not used for the benefit of society but to discard workers, rob their families of basic necessities and boost the fortunes of the super-rich.
As the chairman of recruiter.com told CNBC last month, “The market has rewarded companies that announced layoffs.”
The impoverishment of the working class is a deliberate class war policy, fully supported by the Biden administration and both corporate-controlled parties.
Joseph Kishore, the Socialist Equality Party’s candidate for US president, and I insist that a secure and good-paying job is the most basic right of every worker.
To protect the working class from economic ruin and all the perils associated with poverty—homelessness, broken families, substance abuse, suicide—we demand the following emergency measures to guarantee employment and full income to all workers.
- A sliding scale of work hours and wages. If new technologies enable workers to produce commodities in a shorter amount of time, then work hours must be sharply reduced and available work divided among workers while increasing pay.
Wages must be indexed to the real cost of living so workers can afford basic necessities, including groceries which cost 25 percent more now than in 2020.
- For the socialist transformation of the economy. If capitalism is incapable of guaranteeing employment and a decent living standard to all workers—and it has proved it cannot—then the profit system must be abolished.
The SEP calls for the giant conglomerates to be converted into public utilities, collectively owned and democratically controlled by the working class, as part of the socialist transformation of the US and world economy.
In every factory and workplace workers should organize rank-and-file committees, independently of the trade union bureaucracies, to prepare strikes and other measures to defend jobs.
In opposition to the filthy anti-Chinese chauvinism, economic nationalism and warmongering of both corporate-controlled parties and the union apparatus, the SEP is fighting for workers to coordinate their struggles against the global corporations through the expansion of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC).