Take away this plank in our platform and we have nothing to stand on

The movement of the unemployed in the USA was the first mass movement of the American proletariat under the leadership of the Communist Party. By December 1929 the CPA leadership, having achieved the complete ideological defeat of right opportunism, worked out a program of action for the unemployed. The Communists mobilized them to struggle for the introduction of state social security benefits, including unemployment relief, and for immediate aid from the federal and state governments and from the municipal authorities. The CPA called for just wages for public work.

The mass movement of the unemployed made its presence felt in the very first year of the crisis. On March 6, 1930 protest demonstrations against unemployment were held throughout the country under the leadership of the Communist Party. Tens of thousands of working people took to the streets of New York, Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburg, Philadelphia and other major industrial centers. The number of demonstrators on this day reached 1,250 thousand. In June 1930, the first National Unemployed Convention was held in Chicago. The convention delegates, who came from all parts of the country, approved the Communist-initiated program of action for immediate aid for the unemployed and for introduction of a federal social security system. The convention established a National Unemployment Council to coordinate the activities of the numerous local councils of unemployed leading the workers’ struggle in the various cities, countries and states. Large segments of the Black population played an active role in the movement of the unemployed.

Following the Chicago Convention decisions in the summer of 1930 the CPA worked out and presented to the workers for consideration a social security plan. This plan envisaged the payment of relief for unemployment, old age or illness to an amount equal to the average wages of an industrial worker. The social security fund was to be created through a surtax on big capital and at the expense of the 98 military allocations. The activities of the federal social security bodies were to be under the constant control of elected workers’ organizations. The program drawn up in the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill became the demand of demonstrations and hunger inarches that mushroomed throughout the country in 1930–1931. In this new upsurge of the labor movement, the first National Hunger March of the unemployed, initiated and led by the Communist Party, moved on Washington in November-December 1931. On December 7, 1931, the opening day of the regular session of Congress, the marchers moved through the streets of the US capital, demanding immediate aid to the unemployed. The Washington authorities, frightened by the scale of the demonstration, mobilized the police and refused a delegation of the unemployed access to the Capitol building and to the White House. However, the determination and high measure of organization evinced by the hunger marchers produced a strong impression on the nation.