The American Unemployment Exchange

Sriram

America has always boasted about a superior production system and claimed to be the work house of the world. But when the September results of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics came out, it showed that unemployment for the month was 10%. This was higher in 2009 than in 2008. For any economic crisis to be classified as a depression, like what happened in the US in the 1920s, the unemployment rate has to be around 20%. At the rate that unemployment rate has been rising, America appears to be heading towards one.

With finance capital given a free, de-regulated hand in the present era, crises in capitalism are emerging with greater frequency. One of the reasons for the periodic rise in unemployment in the US is because of footloose capital that shifted to low-wage production regions like Mexico and China in the cold pursuit of profit. With each crisis come the need to understand what the working-class needs to do in order to usher in more progressive change and ensure job-security.

This holds a lesson for a country like India, which still has the bulk of the market for its production within the domestic base and need not allow itself to be subjected to the fleeting nature of monopoly capital. Any industrialization process aimed at stable and long-term economic growth needs to be tied in strongly to the domestic market and a steady controllable resource base which would protect the gains of that industrialization.

How does this relate to the working-class in India? It is imperative that, in order to hold on to secure and viable work, unions across the country demand that economic production and growth not be subject to whims of monopoly capital. Apart from agitation and collective-bargaining at the site of production, it is imperative for trade unions to fight to secure production and therefore secure workers rights. This can happen if there is a broad-based coalition across unions to ensure that the economic growth of the country is not at the mercy of marauding footloose capital.

This has been exemplified by some of the struggles led by the GFTU including the most recent one against the privatization of public utility institutions like the AMTS, as well as larger federations like TUCI, which has been agitating against the hijacking of the economic integrity of India by imperialist capital. It is imperative that like-minded unions join forces in these large struggles in conjuncture with the local struggles at the factory-floor.