For the last several decades, public workers in the United States
could count on eventually retiring from their jobs with their living
expenses covered by pensions guaranteed by the governing entity that had
employed them. But the raging capitalist economic crisis has caused
governments at all levels to renege on their obligations to workers.
Social Security has notably come under attack, with new Speaker of the
House John Boehner having previously threatened to drastically “reform”
the system.
Public workers, whose government-guaranteed pensions were meant to
either supplement or replace Social Security, are the latest workers to
see their benefits attacked. A number of states, including California,
Illinois and New Jersey, have seen their pension funds run dry or into
steep deficits, prompting drastic actions that could result in
significant cuts to benefits or the end of pensions altogether.
That
the pension benefits are guaranteed by law complicates matters; in some
cases, workers who have experienced cuts have sued for the restoration
of their entitlements. That is why all eyes have turned to the town of
Pritchard, Ala.
Pritchard, a small city outside Mobile, used to
grant pensions to its retired public workers and made the system work
despite budgetary challenges. But, due to various factors, the town’s
pension fund officially ran out of money in 2009. In response, despite a
state law requiring the city to continue to pay benefits to its
retirees, Pritchard opted to simply stop paying.
The results have
been devastating. As in other areas of the United States, lost benefits
have pushed proud people who worked and contributed to society for
years to the very brink of poverty and homelessness. Some have died as a
result.
But Pritchard’s government remains reticent, and the
coming legal challenges will decide just how obligated a governmental
entity, even when so required by law, is to those to whom it has pledged
to provide.
Should it be decided in the courts that state
entities are not required to meet their obligations to retired workers,
the result would be dire not only for those already retired, but for the
Baby Boomer generation that is rapidly approaching retirement age.
After decades of contributing to the massive increases in productivity
and profitability that defined the United States after World War II,
millions of workers could find themselves facing impoverishment,
continued debt and the need to continue working well past the official
federal retirement age.
With the Baby Boomers unable to retire,
younger workers, including the most educated and well-trained—and
indebted—generations in U.S. history, will have difficulty finding
adequate work. They will be competing en masse for low-paying service
jobs, further forcing the less educated to the economic margins and
depressing pay for all, which will further dampen the ability of
municipalities to catch up financially. And through it all, the bosses
at the root of the problem will continue to profit handsomely.
A recurring theme
Loss
of revenue for general budgets and pension funds has been a recurring
theme for years. Between tax cuts for the rich and race-to-the-bottom
wage policies, state and local governments have been hurting for
resources since before the current capitalist economic crisis began. The
current conditions have only made the situation worse. In addition to
falling property values, slack business activity and increased
unemployment causing large losses in tax revenue, the crash in the stock
market wreaked havoc on the investments of pension funds.
Of
course, the humane solution to budget shortfalls is for society to take
more from those who have the most. A capitalist crisis rightly requires
capitalist sacrifice, and a more just society would seek to provide for
those most at risk before protecting the exploiters.
But the
very idea of taxing capitalists and their enterprises at anything more
than a token level has become politically forbidden in the 30 years
since Ronald Reagan became president and the income tax structure began
to tilt heavily onto the working class. Some major corporations, thanks
to various cuts and generous loopholes, pay virtually no taxes to the
federal government; at the local level, entities like Wal-Mart
essentially blackmail communities into giving them complete tax breaks
lest they take their operations—and the jobs, however low-paying, that
come with them—somewhere else.
To keep public attention away from
the capitalist criminals who caused and continue to foster the economic
crisis, the right wing and its allies have scapegoated one group of
workers after another. From immigrants to LGBT people to Muslims,
working people of all stripes have been targeted for attacks since the
crisis began, the goal being to keep the working class divided. In this
case, allegedly overpaid retired public workers have drawn the ire of
the right.
But as Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for
Economic and Policy Research, points out, “Fifteen million people are
not out of work because of generous public employee pensions. Nor is
this the reason that millions of homeowners are … facing the loss of
their home. In fact, if we cut all public employee pensions in half
tomorrow, it would not create a single job or save anyone’s house.”
What
could create jobs, save homes and guarantee retirement in comfort would
be the public expropriation of the vast wealth of the capitalists who
caused the economic crisis. Rather than obscene executive salaries and
record-breaking bonuses, the billions of dollars in the capitalists’
coffers could be used to alleviate all manner of social ills and create a
truly level playing field for working people.
The current
crisis of capitalism is the result of the system itself. Capitalism is
required by its very nature to cycle through booms and busts, and each
downturn is met with a heightening of class conflict and contradictions.
In this case, as has been the case since the ostensibly pro-worker
reforms of the New Deal, the boss class uses crisis to attack any gains
workers have made.
Pensions were won for workers after years of
struggle against the bosses and their capitalist state machine that
would just as soon grind working people to death than provide for them
in old age. The bosses knew that conceding a comfortable retirement for
some workers was better than all workers overthrowing the capitalist
system, as they did in the Soviet Union and other socialist countries.
The
truth is that only socialism can guarantee workers the right to a
living after a certain age. While the capitalist United States seeks to
increase the retirement age to 70 and cut benefits and Social Security,
along the way, the Soviet Union guaranteed full wages for life for male
workers over 60 and female workers over 55.
These latest attacks
on the hard-won rights of workers to have comfort and dignity in their
lives are just further proof that this exploitative, criminal capitalist
system needs to go. Workers of all ages must unite in their own best
interest to create a new system that exists only to meet human needs—we
must unite for socialism!
