We must reject both the fake-optimism of the officials and the resignation that has set in after nearly two years of death and disease. We must fight for the measures that will see us through this newest episode of this ongoing crisis.

Very recently, for the first time in history, average pay for workers in supermarkets and restaurants nationwide climbed above $15 per hour, in part due to the labor shortage we have addressed previously. Confronted with this new reality, business owners and the semi-intellectual hacks that speak for them have begun to warn of a great calamity: rapid inflation. According to this prophesy, increases in wages will force increases in the prices of consumer goods, leading to inevitable economic ruin, all due to the greedy wage workers, many of whom are now earning enough to stave off poverty for the first time!

Anyone who has ever worked in a restaurant knows that the working class of the United States is an international working class, composed of people from all over the world: immigrants, refugees, second-generation Americans …. This is the direct result of US imperialism. The US maintains large parts of the globe under its domination in order to keep wages down and the price of raw materials and land low. This domination takes many forms – war, austerity, low levels of development – all of which result in the flight of workers from their home countries to the US.

With Phase II of reopening beginning Monday, June 22 in New York City, which allows for outdoor seating restaurants, de Blasio has predicted that up to 300,000 workers will return to work. However, the logic of the bosses is unforgiving, and has no respect for de Blasio’s optimism. The possibility of seating a handful of patrons on the sidewalk, in the middle of an ongoing pandemic and historic economic catastrophe, will not see us all back to work. Instead, beginning this Monday, temporary unemployment for many of us will become permanent unemployment.