Leaders of various labor unions and federations nationwide came up yesterday with a resolution against massive job cuts, contractualization and other anti-labor schemes in the face of the worsening global economic situation.

[Basically trying to dispel claims that a new international economic order is in place; the old bosses still call the shots]

US workers' real wages (money wages adjusted for the prices workers actually pay) have not risen from their levels in the 1970s. Recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data confirm that real wages continued to stagnate through 2009. Across the same 30-year period, the productivity of labor kept rising: the average worker produced ever more output for the average employer to sell. Thus, capitalists' revenues rose relative to workers' wages.

Over the last three decades the advanced capitalist countries have tried to overcome the recurrent crisis of overproduction and to keep their economies and profits growing through the neoliberal offensive of exploiting cheap labor, seizing raw materials and dominating markets across the globe. Since the 1990s, they have resorted more and more to financial devices: speculative profits and debt-driven consumption and production.