A homeless mother called a shelter hotline only to be told that if she and her kids had nowhere safe to sleep, she’d be reported to the city’s Child and Family Services Agency for Investigation into abuse and neglect. Alongside of this devastating situation which effects more and more homeless is the rise of a new section of homeless who are employed but living in shelters or Tent Cities.
“I’m working 12 hours a day, but can’t afford the rent,” says a woman who works two jobs and lives in a shelter.
The combination of soaring rents and the loss of good paying jobs has caused an astronomical growth of the working homeless in the country, with no end in sight. In the Silicon Valley region, the richest area in the U.S, and only a short distance from the headquarters of the high-tech giants Google, Facebook, and Oracle, activists say they have never seen so many newly hungry and homeless people; even engineers are in food lines.
This new and dire situation is affecting millions of us. Underlying it is the new reality that robots can produce an abundance of goods more cheaply than humans. This could be beneficial for society, but under capitalism, a system where life itself is commodified for profits, we must work to eat. Yet, there is less and less work because technology is replacing our labor.
We are at war. The billionaire ruling class will stop at nothing to keep their wealth and privilege as the system crumbles. They aim to pick us off one by one, divide us by race, sex, religion or age, and use the power of their militarized police state to stop our movement for a just society.
Our movement can only grow. They do not intend to solve our problems. Let us build our movement’s strength and unity by defending the least among us. We have a world to win.