By the Rank-and-Filer, January 2013
These are the notes from a short (10 min) talk I gave to the Hunter Radical Social Work Group.
“Austerity” is a really use framework to understand and talk about the conditions social service workers are facing today. Another name for austerity is “neoliberalism.”
It’s a broad class strategy. What does this mean? Austerity is a set of a whole bunch of different policies that share some key elements. It’s pursued and pushed by rich people, usually organized together in business associations and corporate-funded think tanks. And these policies are designed to accomplish very specific goals, about changing politics and wealth.
What are the goals of austerity?
There are two main goals to austerity. There are two main goals of austerity: to increase the share of wealth going to the rich, and to break the power of social movements. We know this from actual statements written by business associations in the 1970s, when they really laid out a vision for how to change the country. The first goals is to increase the share of wealth that goes towards profit and the rich. We all create wealth in our jobs, by the work we do. Part of this wealth goes into our wages, part of it goes to the government in taxes, and the rest goes towards our boss, whoever is hiring us. The rich pursued austerity in order to increase their share. The second goal was to try to break the power of social movements in the 1970s, particularly power won by workers through unions, and by Black people in the Black Liberation, Black Power and Civil Rights movements. Black folks and other workers had growing power through mass movements in the 1960s and 1970s, and austerity was designed to crush these movements.
What is the history of austerity?
Austerity started in the 1970s. There was a major economic crisis in the mid-1970s, due to increased competition between different capitalist countries around the world, and a number of basic problems in capitalism. Businesses had been starting to organize together more for a few years, and they responded to the economic crisis by launching a major business offensive — a coordinated strategy to influence and shape government policies, and to change how they related to their own workers.
The 1975-1975 fiscal crisis in New York City was a major pivotal moment in this. In the 1950s and 1960s, working class movements in NYC were very strong. They had won free higher education, free health care, a huge system of public housing and affordable housing, cheap transportation and a lot of influence in city government. Black people, through the labor movement, welfare movements and community autonomy struggles, were growing in power. (Most Black people in America today, and in the NYC in the 1970s, are working class; so these two movements of workers and the Black community were very connected and overlapped a lot.) In 1975 the city government went into default, and banking executives literally took control of city government. They radically changed city policy, gutting protections for city workers, charging tuition at CUNY, and pushing people off the welfare roles.
What is involved in austerity?
Austerity involves three major strategies:
- Attack workers, wages and unions
- Cut government budgets and taxes
- Particularly, slash public benefits, welfare and social services.
Since the 1970s, we’ve seen a major attack on workers. While productivity has gone up, wages have remained fairly stagnant. For the poorest fifth of the population, people’s real wages and standard of living has fallen in the last few decades. This is due to attacks on unions, and employers constantly pushing to lower wages.
In the recent debates on the so-called Fiscal Cliff, we saw how aggressively Republicans, and many Democrats, are working to reduce government spending and to decrease taxes on the wealthy, or to maintain tax cuts they’ve received over recent decades. Taxes on the wealthy are much lower than they were in the early 1970s, and government programs suffer due to a lack of resources.
The government programs being cut, however, are rarely the military or prisons. They are programs designed to support poor and working class people: welfare programs, social services, and other forms of public benefits. This is core to austerity, and helps in both decreasing the share of wealth going to the poor, and breaking the community power of working class people and black communities.
What are some major examples of this attack on government services?
In the early 1980s, Mayor Koch in New York City began to enforce workfare, mandated unpaid work for welfare recipients. He also implemented programs to try to push as many people off of welfare benefits as possible.
In 1996, Clinton signed welfare reform, that imposed lifetime 5 year limits on benefits, and mandated unpaid work for welfare recipients all over the country.
Many cities such as Chicago have destroyed their public housing, and here in NYC public housing has been starved for funding for decades — leading to it taking over two weeks for NYC public housing residents to get power back after Hurricane Sandy.
In national debates right now, we see a lot of debate about cutting or privatizing social security, medicaid and other major federal programs.
Who is hurt by austerity?
The biggest target of austerity programs, both in the workplace and through government policies, are women of color. As well, queers have been hurt pretty hard. Think about the spread of AIDS in the 1980s, right as government programs in public health and health care were being cut back. All poor people and working class people ultimately suffer from austerity.
As social service workers, we also suffer. We see the budgets of our agencies cut, and have a much harder time finding work. We also face a lot more control and discipline from our supervisors, trying to get more work out of us for less money. We are also pushed to impose more control over our clients, as benefits become more stingy.
How can we fight back?
There are many small struggles against bits and pieces of austerity. But it’s a big, interconnected strategy and we need big movements to fight back.
These movements should bring together three major groups: social service workers, like us; social service recipients, meaning poor folks and other people dependent on social services; and unions, particularly of public sector workers.
To be a part of these kind of coalitions, however, social service workers need to get organized! Our professional associations like NASW, our informal professional networks, or our agencies are not going to wage these fights. We need to form new organizations, like the Radical Social Work Group or unions of social service workers, to be able to start building the campaigns to fight back against austerity.