Marxists’ Internet Archive: ETOL Home Page: Trotskyist Writers Section: Farrel Dobbs
Source: The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 52, 27 December 1948, p. 4.
Transcription & Mark-up: Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
John Nichols swallowed arsenic a few days ago in a lonely New York hotel room. When the agonizing pain struck, he telephoned the switchboard operator for help. But it was too late. He died at Bellevue Hospital.
John Nichols was an unemployed accountant about 60 years old who came to New York from Chicago. For the past month he had made a futile search for a job.
His tragic death was caused by monopoly capitalism’s brutal policy of throwing aged workers on the scrap heap, not caring how they have to live, or if they live at all. Millions of people like Nichols are suffering such callous neglect, 12 years after the so-called “social security” program was set up by Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Like crooked gamblers loading the dice, the New Deal tricksters set the retirement age at 65, when the average life expectancy is only 66. That means you have a 50–50 chance of getting for one year some kind of government aid in your old age, provided you are not among the 25% of the workers who are excluded from the “social security” setup.
Then the capitalist politicians devised a slick scheme which has kept average government payments to retired workers at the starvation level of $25 a month. This rate has remained unchanged despite the terrific rise in living costs. For these dubious “benefits” the workers have been paying a 1% wage tax since 1936.
People can’t live on such a miserable dole, no matter how light their appetites may be. Consequently, most workers past 65 have tried to cling to their jobs. Those who can’t get work or are unable to work must seek aid from, relief agencies to supplement the old-age insurance pittance. There are now 2½ million people drawing an average of $39 a month for old-age relief. One million of these get nothing but the meager relief allowance because they are excluded from the “social security” setup. Neither security nor retirement is provided by the federal old-age insurance program.
Meantime a $10 billion surplus has piled up in the old-age trust fund, and current income from old-age taxes exceeds “benefit” payments by about $1 billion a year.
The Truman administration has now come forward with a few stingy proposals for “liberalizing” the old-age insurance program. Reduction of the retirement age from 65 to 60 for women only is proposed. Average monthly retirement pay would be raised to about $50. Increase of the old-age wage tax from 1% to 1½%, now scheduled for 1950, would be moved up to July 1, 1949.
Actually, the increased monthly payments would give little aid to retired workers, because the relief agencies would cut off their present supplementary allowances with the alibi that the federal government would now provide for them. It is plain to see that Truman’s “new New Deal” will no more eliminate destitution in old age than did Roosevelt’s original New Deal.
Before the workers can have comfort and security in their old age, the labor movement must fight for the adoption of a truly effective government program, including a sharply reduced retirement age; retirement pay equal to union wages, with automatic upward adjustments to meet rising prices; inclusion of all workers in the program; and a fund for retirement pay raised entirely through taxation of the rich profiteers.
F. Dobbs Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main Page
Last updated: 26 March 2023