SESSION RENEWS ATTACKS ON WORKERS, CUTS TAXES FOR RICH
While workers have been suffering from hunger, unemployment, and poverty wages, the Louisiana Legislature has spent most of the last session focused on lowering taxes for the rich and enabling even more blatant corruption.
Another year has passed with no raise to the minimum wage (still at $7.25), when $15 an hour would raise wages for half of all Louisiana workers, especially women and Black workers.
$300 million a year has been diverted from the state general fund for education, healthcare and other services to road construction. This will line the pockets of Boh Brothers and others mega-builders who contribute to their campaigns.
Louisiana lawmakers also moved to strip the additional $300 million in FEDERAL money to the unemployed. This is a giveaway to employers who pay poverty wages to desperate workers. After dealing this blow, they make it seem like raising maximum unemployment a whole $28 a week is an act of kindness. The max now is $247, the lowest in the country. Many workers get less than $150.
Add to their crimes the denial of Medicaid coverage to women after giving birth which endangers the lives of many new mothers.
FIRE THE LOUISIANA LEGISLATORS, STRIP THEIR MEDICAL BENEFITS, TAX THEIR INCOMES
Just a few days ago the Legislature agreed to end some corporate loopholes, but only after lowering the tax rate for corporations, 200 of which already pay no taxes. They have made the “temporary” sales tax hike permanent putting the burden on the poorest.
These legislators, with only a few exceptions, own companies or receive personal compensation from sheriff’s departments, water corporations, oil and gas and plastic companies’ companies, banks, real estate developers, and law firms representing the rich. This is why they continue to praise and give exemptions to companies like Formosa Plastics, which is killing the Black community in Cancer Alley in St. James Parish.
Workers Must Get Organized to Stop the Louisiana Legislature’s War On Workers
The Louisiana legislators are smug, sitting in their mansions and country clubs as Louisiana remains the worst in child poverty, mass incarceration, unemployment benefits, wages, maternal deaths, and vaccination rates.
They attempt to block education about the history of racism in the U.S. and Louisiana, which suffered massacres of Black residents in Colfax, Thibodaux, Opelousas, Bossier, St. Bernard, Orleans Parish and more. These were attempts by KKK-type groups backed by white politicians to prevent Black men from voting and from taking seats in elections they had won. Today, as Louisiana joins other states to suppress voting rights, that aim is being pursued by other means.
The legislature is controlled by right-wing white supremacists, and while the burden falls especially hard on Black Louisianians, their policies create suffering for millions of workers of all nationalities. The state government’s claims of democratic legitimacy are ridiculous. They do not even allow a method for a popular vote to be put on the ballot by the people. We, the working class, have no representation.
This will not change until we build independent workers’ organizations like the Louisiana Workers Councils. We need to build a militant workers’ movement to fight back.