Viva la Union
(Page 3 of 4)
Utne Reader March / April 2007
Hannah Lobel, Utne Reader
The exploitation of immigrants, particularly undocumented ones, offers an alarming glimpse of how companies would structure employment if they were unfettered by worker protections. It is a world that U.S. citizens seem oddly blind to, despite imploding pensions, diminishing benefits, increasing productivity demands, and an onslaught of government and corporate policies that defang what little power unions have left. Ironically, even when native workers recognize the erosion of their hard-won rights, they tend to view immigrants as culprits rather than fellow (and worse-off) victims. It's a decades-old story, updated for the latest wave of immigrants: Latinos, Asians, and other newcomers who are willing to work for next to nothing have wrecked the American dream of a lifelong job that will pay for retirement and send the kids to college.
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In her new book, L.A. Story: Immigrant Workers and the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement (Russell Sage Foundation, 2006), Ruth Milkman goes a long way toward debunking that myth. Milkman, director of the Institute of Industrial Relations at UCLA, shows how deregulation and employer attacks on unions in the 1970s and 1980s degraded wages, benefits, and working conditions in four Los Angeles sectors: building cleaning, garment work, residential construction, and port trucking. In this well-researched analysis, immigrants didn't flood these sectors with cheap labor and drive native workers out; they filled the void left by native workers who found decent-wage work elsewhere. Immigrants eventually filled the void in union ranks as well, providing the numbers and sacrifices necessary to turn Los Angeles from organized labor's lost cause into its revitalizing engine.
Progressives in particular would do well to wise up to immigrants' potential. As Roberto Lovato points out on the political website TomPaine.com (Dec. 22, 2006), his cohorts are botching their chance to engage the fastest-growing part of the population -- and the part that knows how to mobilize. Just look, he says, at the marches last spring, when Latino immigrants effectively euthanized proposed federal anti-immigration legislation by turning out the biggest simultaneous protests this country has ever seen.
'Rather than embrace the movimiento as an extension of the Midwestern immigrant history that gave us the eight-hour work day, the end of child labor, and other industrial-age victories at the heart of the progressive movement,' Lovato writes, 'too many of my progressive friends responded to the immigrant rights movement with limited curiosity, while remaining in front of their computer screens besotted by the spectacular achievements of digital age electoral politics that largely define progressivism today.'