The right to employment is the most basic of all. Without a steady, good-paying job, it is impossible to satisfy all other needs. The loss of a job means the loss of self-esteem and social connection, immense psychological distress, along with the elimination of health care coverage, the destruction of life savings, and vulnerability to poverty and homelessness for oneself and one’s family.

The world economy is integrated as never before in a single system of production, and yet this has only exacerbated the conflicts between nation-states and heightened the danger of war. Bush’s “wars of the Twenty-First Century” began with the US invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, now the longest military engagement in the country’s history. This was followed by the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Now the US and Europe have launched another military intervention in Libya, two months after the beginning of revolutionary uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East.

The problems workers confront in the United States are, in essence, the same as those confronting workers in every other part of the world. War, attacks on democratic rights, exploitation, unemployment, poverty and environmental destruction are not merely American problems. They are world problems that require global solutions.

Great advances in science and technology, accompanied by unprecedented global integration, have made possible a new era of human prosperity. Yet young people confront a world full of war and want, of massive global poverty and disease, of pending environmental catastrophe, of cultural backwardness and superstition, of assaults on the most basic democratic freedoms.