US. The World's greatest country and vacations.

In a recent blog a contributor gave the statistics about vacation days guaranteed by law in the different advanced capitalist countries. The US has none guaranteed by law. This is the only advanced capitalist country that does not guarantee vacation days. The rest guarantee up to the twenties and thirties. Yes the US is dead last with none guaranteed. Dead last.

Yet I continually meet workers who say that this is the greatest country in the world. Why is this? The reason is ignorance. These workers do not know. Why do they not know? Yes they should educate themselves. Our blog here gives the information and is accessible to all who have a computer and who are on line. But this is not the main reason for this ignorance.

The main reason is the role of the union leaders. They should be using their millions of members and tens of thousands of locals to explain the reality. That from the workers point of view this is not the greatest country in the world. Far from it. It is one of the worst. The least vacations guaranteed by law of any advanced capitalist country.

Let the union leaders engage the bosses and their collaborators in the Democratic Party on this basis. Let them mobilize the millions of their members in mass demonstrations and general strikes and occupations on this issue. Let them use this reality to build a mass working peoples party to break the political monopoly of capitalism and to break the censorship of the privately owned media.

Such a campaign and mobilization would change the agenda of mass discussion in this country. It would end the non stop discussion of the so called war on terror, the so called war on drugs, god bless America, the nonsense of the christian right and the tea baggers. Instead this could be replaced with a mobilized movement which would make the main topic of discussion and the main issue of struggle how this country is the worst of all the advanced capitalist countries for workers.

What we would have arising out of this would be a transformation of the consciousness of the working class and a change in the balance of forces to the advantage of the working class. We in the left and amongst the activists have to keep fighting for this and putting the pressure on the union leaders to break from their pathetic bootlicking of capitalism and lead a struggle to change how workers see things. If they do not take this road they will have forfeited their right to lead the movement.

Sean.