Nowadays, a lot of the things many people took for granted are suddenly no longer there. Like their job, their steady income, their home; enough food to keep body and soul together.
So the question comes: Are these basic human rights, which the society is obligated to provide? Or is it a matter of “I’ve got mine, buddy. What’s wrong with you?”
The right to a job
What if the way the economy is structured means there will always be a lot of unemployed people, as has always been the case since the dawn of capitalism 200-some years ago? What if the recent high-tech revolution creates a larger and larger pool of people without any job or realistic hope of finding one? Are we doomed to see more and more of our fine young people hanging around in the wasteland with no job and nothing to do?
Obviously, the big business owners and the government they control don’t give a rat’s ass about there not being enough jobs to go around – or they would have long since done something about it! The truth is, they need to have a pool of unemployed to keep the wages down [and profits up]!
And yet – as we watch our children growing up, isn’t every one of them entitled to a useful role and place in society, and a way to support themselves and their families? Of course they are! Do they have a right to a job and education back home, so they don’t wind up in prison, so they don’t have to join the military to kill and be killed in a war for oil halfway around the world? Of course they have that right!
So we need to find a way to reorganize society to make sure this happens. We could start by cutting the work week to 30 hours (with no cut in pay). Hire more people. Organize public works construction like the WPA in the 1930s. Put people to work. Pass laws to require union wages and conditions in industry and agriculture, which will put money in people’s hands.
Clearly, a “quick fix” will not solve as intractable a problem as unemployment. But come on, this is not rocket science either. A job should be a right for everyone who wants one. Give everyone a job, and together we can build this country back up again.
The right to housing
Housing is another human right. Yet the nation’s homeless population is large and increasing. Thousands of units of public housing are being demolished, and millions may lose their homes to foreclosure and eviction — all at a time when workers need the jobs at prevailing wages that building adequate housing for the people would provide.
- 4,500 units of habitable or easily renovated public housing are being demolished or threatened with demolition in New Orleans, just as many thousands of public housing units in other cities have been demolished, leaving many residents without a home.
- For the last hundred years, greedy real estate interests and others have moved in on long-established Black communities in city after city, forcing people out [documented in the new historical film, Banished]. And this process — whether you call it urban renewal, ‘gentrification’ or just plain people removal — is still going on today, as residents of New Orleans, San Francisco and many other cities can attest.
- A large number of Americans are losing their homes to foreclosure, many victimized by predatory banks and mortgage companies. The growing economic crisis has caused more evictions of renters, and utility shutoffs for those unable to pay their gas and electric bills.
The author is a delegate to the San Francisco Labor Council, which on June 9, 2008 adopted a resolution calling for a Moratorium on Foreclosures, Utility Shutoffs, Evictions, and Public Housing Demolitions. The resolution deals with the issue of the Right to Housing.
We need a moratorium (freeze) on home foreclosures, utility shut-offs, evictions and public housing demolitions. These housing demolitions should not be allowed until they have first been replaced with affordable units in the community — one-for-one replacement at comparable rents.
The trade union movement needs to work with housing advocates in a joint effort to bring about these reforms, and establish the principle and practice that housing is a right for every man, woman and child living in the United States.
The right to food and water
Food riots in Haiti, Egypt. All over the world, millions don’t have food to eat. Countries like Indonesia that used to feed themselves and export food, are now importing it.
Why is this happening? One reason is the intervention of the US government, acting on behalf of agribusiness giants. “Free trade” agreements like NAFTA are destroying subsistence agriculture in countries like Mexico. Cheap US-taxpayer-subsidized corn has flooded the market, putting Mexican subsistence farmers out of business. That in turn has been one impetus for the migration northward of millions of jobless Mexican and Central American workers looking for work.
US ‘experts’ went to Haiti and arranged the extermination of almost the entire population of Haitian Creole pigs, a principal source of protein for the people. Haitian rice farmers were put out of business by an influx of cheap US rice. Now the price of rice has skyrocketed and people can’t afford to buy it.
Agribusiness is now diverting acres and acres of corn to making ethanol for fuel, raising the price of corn beyond what people can afford. These greedy trans-national corporations are in effect taking away the people’s right to food in many poor countries, trampling on their “food sovereignty.”
The same applies to the right to clean drinking water. In Bolivia, a private US company, Bechtel, tried to privatize the water supply in Cochabamba and then sell it back to the people – but the people said “Hands off our water” and threw Bechtel out. In India, Coca-Cola has drained huge amounts of water from local water supplies, putting the supply of real drinking water in jeopardy.
The erosion of our basic human rights
These and many other fundamental human rights are under attack. We, as working people in many countries, need to organize to throw off the corporate and political parasites – who grab everything for themselves and leave the people without the rights and resources that are our birthright.
Why can’t we transform society so that the ‘right’ to a job, the ‘right’ to housing and the ‘right’ to food and water become realities for everyone?
And what about our right to live in peace with our neighbors in the world [without the US military setting up bases in 130 countries, invading sovereign nations and bombing civilian populations, using up all the people’s money]? What about our right to affordable health care for all? Our right to privacy and to be free of government and corporate surveillance?
What about our right to live peacefully in our communities without regular occurrences of police brutality, racial profiling, police killings of unarmed civilians? — and without some communities repeatedly being subjected to unconstitutional stop-and-frisk, home invasion, workplace invasion or prolonged detention by police or immigration authorities? What about our disappearing right to free, quality public education for all?
We need to step up and defend our basic human rights, before they are all gone.