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Carter's Jobs Program A Sham & Attack

By VVAW

The only campaign promise that Carter has kept since coming into office is when he told a Governor's conference during the campaign, "Why should we pay a man $80 a week to do nothing on unemployment when we can pay him $100 a week to rebuild the railroads?" In other words, replace union labor at union pay with forced labor at slave pay.

This is the essence of Carter's jobs programs and income reforms. Behind Carter's smile and promises of jobs lays a deceptive and concentrated attack on the interests of working people.

The US capitalist economy is now two years out of the deepest recession since the 1930s and business investment is still 11% under its 1973 peak. Despite renewed claims of recovery, the corporate bosses and politicians know their economy is in deep trouble. They have tried such methods as rebates to stimulate purchasing and tax credits to reduce the cost of investments.

But they know that in the short run the only way they can hope to pull themselves out of economic crisis is to squeeze more work for less pay out of the working class, and throw millions of workers out on the streets. Key to this, for them, is to put the unemployed into a position where they will take any kind of work, at any wage, just to keep something on the table and a roof overhead.

They have done this before. During the first few years of the Great Depression, with unemployment in this country at its highest point in history, big business and their government drove the average workingman's wages down by more than one half!

HANDS QUICKER THAN EYE

Carter's economic package featured the proposed creation of some 415,000 CETA public service jobs, 346,000 CETA skill training and youth program slots, and $4 billion for public works projects. But these are no real expansions or reforms. It is nothing other than the fine art of giving with one hand while taking with the other. The money allocated in the past for federal supplementary unemployment benefits (the 13 week federal extensions of unemployment benefits) is simply being shifted to CETA. The money for many of the former rural water projects is being shifted to urban public worker projects.

BENEFITS CUT

Carter signed a bill cutting unemployment benefits by 13 weeks (from 65 to 52 weeks), leaving one 13 week extension until October 31, followed by a 3 month phase-out. After October no new applicants for the federal supplementary benefits will be accepted, meaning the FSB will expire by Jan 31, 1978.

Included in this Bill is the requirement for "suitable work", slave labor jobs. If offered a job that pays a gross wage that exceeds the FSB benefit or minimum wage, whichever is greater, you have to take the job or lose your benefits. It means that if you are collecting up to $92 a week and you are offered a minimum wage job, $2.30 an hour--you have to take that job or lose your benefits.

Carter and congress were hoping to cut off the unemployment extensions in one clean chop, but the were met by a massive campaign, built in a lot cities from Boston to Honolulu, which brought 1,000 workers, old and young, and of different nationalities to march on the White House last March 5th demanding union jobs at union wages, (see last issue of THE VETERAN).

CARTER'S JOBS

Carter's proposal to expand CETA is a three-pronged offensive. Take for example the public service jobs: at least 60% of these job slots will be used directly by cities and states hit hard by the economic crisis to shift workers off the regular payroll onto CETA funds. Only the illusion of creating new jobs exists here. What this allows is the federal government to foot the bill for a good portion of existing city jobs.

The remaining 40% of the public service employment slots will create low minimum wage jobs such as in hospital, national parks, and city recreation programs. Veterans are supposed to get 35% of these public service jobs.

The largest program is to be skill training and so-called on-the-job work-experience training. Again these jobs will be at low wages and will enable private industry to have cheap government subsidized labor. This program is aimed at adults and will be the minimum wage slave labor jobs that workers on unemployment insurance will be forced to take.

The youth program involves the expansion of present programs combining low wage, part-time summer jobs and rural conservation camps to defuse the youth rebellion and the potential for urban summer riots.

Carter's entire program will not reduce the unemployment rate any more than one tenth of one percent. The program is not designed to provide jobs to the millions of unemployed workers. It is basically a political program to create the impressions of a larger-than-real jobs campaign, while simultaneously stabilizing the bare bones of city social services, driving the unemployed into slave wage jobs.

But Carter's plans will certainly be met with struggle. A recent unemployed Workers organizing committee newsletter vows, "We will not be crushed. We will not be held at subsistence wages or less so the bosses can bail themselves out of their crisis...

"We've got to build our fight for jobs UNION JOBS AT UNION WAGES, against all their wage-cutting schemes--the starvation wage job programs, the day-labor union-busting agencies, the vicious provision in Carter's bill. We demand that any jobs program they set up pay union wages. And at the same time, we've got to keep one eye towards Oct. 31, when the remaining 13 week extension will run out.

"It is our future and that of our families and fellow workers that we're talking about. We have not choice but to fight."