Economic Programs of N.A.M., Adopted at Davenport, Iowa

November, 1971

Internal Education
Strike Support
Equal Work and Equal Pay for Women
Price Activity
Taxation
Social Services
Day Care
People’s Control of the Economy

1. Internal Education

The National Interim Committee shall develop an educational program on the economy for all N.A.M. chapters.

2. Strike Support

We support all strikes that attempt to break the wage guidelines; we give priority to wildcat, illegal, and profit-limiting strikes. We encourage union sanctioned and wildcat strikes to extend their struggle into the arena of corporate and state policy, as a basic method of transforming the divisive character of these policies. Wherever possible we attempt to bring to these strikes class-wide demands which can bring together all sections of the working class around a common interest program. (For instance, when public employees strike for higher wages, rather than setting their demands in conflict with the community N.A.M. should demand that the government tax the rich to pay for it, and not use it as a rationale to cut back public services to the poor.) We are also committed to fighting all anti-working class, anti-strike legislation and actions on the part of the government (Taft-Hartley, anti-strike laws, use on injunctions, and so on.)

The following key strategic objectives should provide guidelines for N.A.M. strike support work:

The workers themselves playing an active political role (for instance, creating the opportunity for striking workers to bring their message to the community—at union halls, campuses, church groups, clubs, etc.)
Winning, by means of building up an offensive momentum, and by a dramatic presentation of the issues to the public at large.
Education of the youth on pro-working class lines, and calling on unions to develop a program which is oriented toward the needs of youth.
Calling on unions to develop programs to meet the needs of women and national minorities; and urging that minorities and women operate respectively as collective bodies to determine their needs and to pressure the trade unions to satisfy these demands.
Meeting the needs of the strikers (e.g., access to legal assistance, printing facilities, day care assistance, supplies, etc.)

3. Equal Work and Equal Pay for Women

The New American Movement should initiate a fight for women’s liberation in the workforce as an integral part of its response to the new economic policy. The central focus of such a campaign would be Equal Work and Equal Pay, but it would also take up the issues of child care, equivalent pay for part-time work, no loss of seniority for maternity leaves or leaves of absence necessitated by women’s role in the family, and an end to sexual tracking in the schools.

In particular, we suggest at this time a national N.A.M. campaign to attack the channelling of jobs in particular target industries or companies. Where possible, we urge that AT&T be this target for all N.A.M. chapters. The Bell telephone system has 62 job classifications, every one of which is sex typed, and has come under considerable attack for its sex and race discrimination. (7% of all EEOC complaints received are against Ma Bell.) The jobs are, or course, the low paid ones, and they reflect women’s role in society at large. Such a campaign could go along the following lines: N.A.M. groups would approach rank and file telephone groups, male as well as female, but especially operators and working women who would like to apply for jobs in the telephone crafts, or want to support such a campaign. At the same time we would approach women’s liberation groups and the considerable number of women’s liberationists not now in groups to join us.

Women, in numbers as substantial as possible, would go into the employment office and apply for craft jobs, while a demonstration such as a picket line would be held outside the employment office. If this were not successful other direct mass actions such as sit-ins are possible. Where there is generalized rank and file support, the unions could be asked to support such a campaign—and if they did not, demonstrations could be held against them for not fighting for the need of their ranks.

We can also link such a campaign to other portions of our new economic policy: program, such as campaigns against rate increases by AT&T, where there is already substantial interest and where a public service commission rules on increases.

4. Price Activity

N.A.M. chapters should undertake to initiate and create community organizations whose program is to combat oligopoly pricing power. The principle is clear, but the application is difficult because N.A.M. organizers will have to make choices among potential targets on strategic grounds. N.A.M. chapters will have to choose which classes of price fixing can be made vulnerable to politicized mass organizing.

The criteria N.A.M. should use are the following:

a. That the price be significant enough (i.e., affect the family budget) to generate widespread support

b. That the target not be so remote that local activity is irrelevant (e.g., steel prices), nor so localized that it is very difficult to go beyond neighborhood organizing

c. That there be a lag between the announcement of the price rise and its implementation so as to permit time for mass mobilization (e.g., prices subject to a public decision-making process as with utility rates)

The following are the major types of prices fitting this strategic concept of key prices: 1. utility rates, 2. state and local taxes, 3. (sometimes) rents and food chain prices, and 4. transit fares.

N.A.M. chapters should choose one or more key area-wide price decisions or existing price inequities (e.g., a utility filing for a rate increase) and campaign to freeze or roll back that price. The campaign should make that price struggle a symbol in the public mind of the whole price structure. It should, with whatever specificity is appropriate, raise the goal of social control over these decisions in place of private control. And the basis for community organizing should be the involvement of whatever community organizations (such as local unions and rank and file groups) and institutions can be brought into the struggle, as well as the elaboration of new community group. The [unreadable] may well create the opportunity to broaden the organizing thrust to include other kinds of consumer struggles as well; and wherever possible should be linked to the demand for decent wages for the relevant employees.

5. Taxation

The goals should be a sharp reduction of federal, state, and local taxes on lower and middle income groups, to be accompanied by drastic reductions in military expenditures and increases in taxes on corporations and upper income groups. N.A.M. and its chapters should develop specific programs and proposals within this framework. We strongly encourage N.A.M. chapters to develop state and local tax initiatives to meet these goals.

The N.A.M. in its programs should respond to the current decline in government services, including health facilities, housing, mass transit, welfare programs, educational facilities; and police and fire departments. State and local governments are reacting to the present financial crisis with a widespread move toward austerity which includes severe cutbacks in services provided, so-called “slave labor” and “brownie point” systems for welfare recipients, large-scale layoffs of public employees in all types of jobs, rising prices of services not wholly subsidized by taxation, and even the shutting down of vital service institutions. This is resulting in a growing awareness among working people that despite crushing taxation the quality of life in America is deteriorating and the government is unable to meet basic needs. The following are suggestions for actions in these areas.

Tactically, such actions might begin where vocal opposition to cutbacks in specific areas exists in a community. They might involve coalitions with Third World, community service, religious and organized labor groups. They might consist of demonstrations at affected service institutions, at city halls, and state houses, of petition campaigns, of strikes of service workers in sympathy with those affected by layoffs and cutbacks, and of ballot box efforts.

The following general strategic demands would be vital:

No cutbacks in services, in particular an end to work requirements and bonus systems for welfare recipients.
Expansion of existing services for working people, immediate rehiring of laid-off workers without disadvantageous arrangements regarding wages and working conditions, hiring of people from the community served by the institution.
No increase in taxation of working people. The maintenance of service should be financed from the profits of large corporations and banks. This demand could of course be linked to specific tax initiatives.
Community control of service institutions, including some sort of decentralized administration.

The long term objectives of such programs include:

Unifying white-collar workers, blue-collar workers and the poor and unemployed in a sector which affects them all simultaneously. This includes a breakdown of the anti-welfare recipient attitude which exists in parts of the taxpayer revolt.
Building an anti-ruling class attitude around the conception that the “fat cats,” and only they, stand to gain by the cutbacks while every one else suffers.
Development of a consciousness that all people have an absolute right to the services they need to live in this society.
Development of an awareness that government bureaucracy and the capitalist system cannot meet social needs in an adequate and democratic manner, and that therefore popular control is necessary.

7. Child Care

An issue which unites women’s interests, workplace and community organizing, unpaid labor (in the home), sex roles and sex typing, and the economic exploitation of women by the nuclear family structure, child care should be a project of each N.A.M. chapter. Different versions of child care programs could be worked on by different chapters, depending upon local needs.

Of particular importance is a nationally coordinated attack on the day care programs now in the works at federal, state, county and municipal levels. These government programs have two purposes:

To take women “off the welfare rolls” and put them into low paid jobs
To funnel money to corporate interests—i.e., “Control Data” and real estate interests.
Money must be channelled to community controlled child care centers, not to corporate controlled “Kentucky Fried Chicken” centers. Attack could take the form of neighborhood organizing to gain control of local day care councils, thus of funds and regulations.

N.A.M. child care projects should meet the following criteria:

Provide loving enlightened child care and attempt to break down sex role stereotypes, for example by hiring men on the staff.
Be a politicizing force which brings new members into N.A.M. and raises their consciousness.
Day care centers at work places should be paid for entirely by the employer, and controlled entirely by the parents.

The N.A.M. conference workshop on Child Care shall be incorporated into the N.A.M. interim structure as a continuing committee for research and information in this area. Funds should be available from N.A.M. for such activities as a clearinghouse for such information. We recommend that at least one member of the N.I.C. have as his or her main program responsibility, the development and coordination of N.A.M.’s child care program.

8. People’s Control of the Economy

We believe that “People’s Control of the Economy” should be a central principle of N.A.M. “People’s Control of the Economy” opens the door to discussion of our ultimate goal and squarely confronts the new economic policy through which the government nakedly manages the economy on behalf of the corporations.

This means that in all specific activities, as well as in our literature, we should raise the question of “Who decides?” and answer, “Working people should—men, women, and children, ranging from production workers through housewives, older people, street people, etc.”

As a long range program, chapters are encouraged to work toward the organization of people’s councils, under whatever name, including both rank and file groups in the workplace and organizations of people in the community, which in fact begin to bid for control of specific economic decisions, such as the location of industry, housing, airports, and highways, locally-determined prices such as utility rates, transit fares, and property tax assessments, the level and quality of services such as education and child care. People’s councils, even in their infancy, should project the vision of a society which abundantly meets the full spectrum of human needs, and offer specific plans and budgets as to how this could be done in each community and region. A first step toward such councils might be city-wide or regional conferences of all forces opposing the new economic policy. (These forces might be first brought together at teach-ins on the policy in working-class communities.)

These councils, understood as a long range goal, would have four tasks. They would:

Take account of social needs in the context of social potential in the fields of transportation, health, food, work, income, education, culture, leisure, child care, old age, planning.
Take account of current social consumption in these areas
Project the gap between the actual under the present system and the potential under a people’s control system
Search for ways to address the problems of the disparity between the needs and resources of various regions and groups

There are three components to the program:

The struggle for a reorganization of production and services through conflict at the workplace
A political struggle taking place in the broad community, around the allocation of resources for the achievement of social goals. The struggle for a reorganization of production of services affords the working class, broadly defined, a chance to relate their day-by-day conflict at work to a larger political struggle for the utilization of production for social needs.
An attempt to extend regional struggles to affect national and international allocation of resources.