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Demand Jobs Or Income For All!

By VVAW

In Cincinnati, Ohio, on February 1, 150 people marched to demand Jobs or Income for All. The demonstration, called by the Unemployed Workers Organizing Committee (UWOC), had a veterans' contingent organized by the Cincinnati chapter of VVAW/WSO; it was the largest contingent in the march.

Like all working people, vets are hard hit by the current economic crises. But because of seniority time lost while serving in the military, vets are especially clobbered by the lay-offs. There's at least a 10% unemployment rate among Vietnam-era vets--and 20% for Black vets. The 600,000 vets with less-than-honorable discharges are lucky if they can get any work at all. These are the same vets who, in return for years in the military, were paid back with a lot of promises about great benefits and job opportunities. Yet, vets find unemployment, a sorry excuse for a GI Bill, inadequate training programs, miserable VA hospital care.

Despite these special problems, however, veterans in Cincinnati and around the country will not be separated from other working people--employed or unemployed. This is why VVAW/WSO joined with UWOC in the action which built both the struggle for jobs or income now and the VVAW/WSO chapter. The demands for the demonstration were: 1. Jobs! 2. Income--enough to cover the rising cost of living for as long as we are out of work! 3. Benefits--for all strikers and people who won't scab: the bosses can't use the unemployed as strikebreakers! and 4. Stop the extra high unemployment rate amount Black people!

At as rally before the march, a VVAW/WSO speaker expressed the organization's solidarity with all these demands. The same economic conditions which forced poor and working people into the military to fight in Vietnam are now responsible for the epidemic of unemployment, he said. He quoted one vet who was standing in the long lines at the unemployment office: "We go from chow lines in the army to unemployment lines here; in the Army we got crummy food, now we're getting crumbs."

The militant march wound through the downtown section of Cincinnati to a park in a poor neighborhood populated by working people; community people joined in a second rally to hear speakers tell about different cases of exploitation and oppression--lay-offs, job discrimination, police attacks, especially in the Black community. All the speakers called for unity to fight back against these attacks.

VVAW/WSO helped build the march and the vets contingent with leaflets explaining why they supported the march; these were distributed at the VA Hospital and the unemployment office. To the people of Cincinnati, and to the owners of Cincinnati corporations, the message was that the people--vets and non-vets, employed and unemployed--will not quietly accept the crumbs from the system until the government decides to cut off benefits. Instead, the people will join together, putting the good of all ahead of the good of any one segment of the people, and demand Jobs or Income for All. And that the people will fight until these demands are met.