A people’s movement can often surprise or surpass, in its sudden upsurge, the organized workers’ movement.
 Day laborers join Los Angeles boycott rally, May 1, 2006. Photo: Chuck Green |
One historic example is the struggle of women textile workers in Russia in 1917. Their strike on International Women’s Day that year was a principal spark of the Russian revolution. No one—including the most politically advanced sector of the working class, the Bolshevik Party—expected that the strike would set in motion a train of events leading within a few days to the fall of a 300-year-old monarchy.
The mass movement of immigrants that burst onto the scene in March was just as unexpected. Virtually everyone, friend or foe, was stunned when 500,000 immigrants protested in Chicago on March 10 against the repressive Sensenbrenner bill.
Since then, millions of immigrants—undocumented and documented—have defied their employers, the government and police to demand amnesty. On May 1, millions took to the streets and millions more stayed away from work and school, refraining from buying any goods, as part of the “Day without an Immigrant” boycott.
In a spirit of defiance not seen in decades, and with numbers unprecedented in the United States, what initially began as a response to dangerous racist legislation that aimed to criminalize undocumented workers has quickly galvanized into a movement for full rights and amnesty.
The organized labor movement in general is supportive of the new immigrant rights struggle. In recent years, the most dynamic sector where the labor movement has had its greatest organizing success is among immigrant workers.
The role of the unions
In immigrant rights coalitions that have sprung up across the country since March, many organizing meetings have taken place in union halls, with some local unions taking part in the marches and providing logistical support.
But since the new movement’s rise, neither the AFL-CIO nor the Change to Win coalition has yet mobilized their ranks on a national scale. They have not brought their weight to bear on the government with the immense mobilizing capacity that organized labor still retains.
In particular, the force and support of organized labor was absent in the highly effective May Day boycott.
Amidst a flurry of right-wing attacks against the idea that immigrant workers would dare withdraw their labor in this historic political strike—from Bush to racist media commentators like CNN’s Lou Dobbs—the national labor movement passed up a tremendous opportunity to show its solidarity.
It was left entirely to the immigrant workers to carry out one of the greatest working-class actions in U.S. history.
They walked off their jobs and filled the streets by the millions, forcing some of the largest companies in the world to close in anticipation of an absent workforce on May Day.
With union representation on the job at an all-time low—8 percent in the private sector and 12.5 percent overall—the U.S. organized labor movement is searching for ways to strengthen itself.
Some labor leaders have spoken out against the demand for amnesty, claiming it harms the immigrant cause.
The AFL-CIO and Change to Win were both silent about the boycott. But individual leaders vehemently opposed it. Jaime Contreras, chair of the National Capitol Immigration Coalition and chair of SEIU Local 32-BJ in Washington, D.C., denounced the May 1 action on national television. “If we do it right now, it’s going to backfire,” he claimed.
Change to Win, an alliance of several large unions including the Service Employees, Teamsters and Hotel and Clothing workers of UNITE-HERE, split from the AFL-CIO federation in July 2005.
What is behind labor’s reticence?
The ruling class in the United States has spared no repression and effort over the past 150 years to try to prevent the emergence and development of an independent, radical labor movement.
Samuel Gompers, founder of the American Federation of Labor in 1886 and AFL leader until 1924, set the trend for U.S. labor unions by proposing that the labor movement back politicians of the capitalist parties rather than organize a political party that would represent workers’ interests.
This philosophy in reality made the workers’ movement subject to the influence of the two main parties of the capitalist class. Of course, labor parties in other capitalist countries have over time evolved into strong defenders of the bourgeoisie against the workers as well. Britain’s Labour Party is a prime example.
But from the outset, the U.S. labor movement had historically closer ties to the bourgeois political parties.
The unions’ political action is for the most part limited to that of supporting the Democratic Party. Tremendous energy and resources are expended for the Democrats in U.S. elections. By some estimates, upwards of $165 million in 2004 was spent by unions.
 Photo: William Hooks |
In February of this year, the AFL-CIO announced it would spend $40 million to help elect “labor-friendly” candidates to Congress for the November 2006 elections. This represents a 20 percent increase over its political spending for the 2002 mid-term elections.
AFL-CIO president John Sweeney said the federation’s election campaigning will be “the largest and most aggressive grassroots mobilization in a mid-term election in our history.”
Change to Win unions’ political strategy is not much different from the AFL-CIO. Before the five major unions in CTW broke away from the “house of labor,” SEIU spent close to $65 million in the 2004 presidential elections to support the Democrats’ pro-war candidate John Kerry.
The leaderships of the AFL-CIO and Change to Win coalition are reticent to view working-class struggles in the United States independently of the Democratic Party, for fear of jeopardizing their illusory relationship with that party.
As the November elections draw closer, there is certain to be a tighter adherence by the labor leadership to the Democrats, who offer no real alternative for the U.S. working class.
The Democratic Party leadership, virtually indistinguishable from the Republicans in its backing of the U.S. imperialist war drive, has supported every multi-billion-dollar war budget for Iraq and Afghanistan, and is backing the Bush administration on its growing aggression against Iran.
Yet, the labor unions are the first step for workers to overcome the individual competition inherent in capitalist society, and to forge a unity of workers in the workplace.
Fighting for the right to negotiate with the bosses for a contract that limits their exploitation by setting down wages, terms and conditions gives workers the first taste of organized defense against the capitalists.
Organized labor’s opportunity and duty
While the Republican majority is pushing for the more severe legislation encompassed in the Sensenbrenner bill or similar legislation in the Senate, the Democrats are also opposed to a full legalization process for the undocumented.
It is clear that the immigrant rights movement will need to keep fighting to overcome a determined effort within large sections of the ruling class to pass extremely repressive legislation now in debate.
The immigrant workers movement has all the signs of growing and deepening. Undocumented workers have had no other recourse to win justice, until now.
The entire community is demanding nothing less than full civil and workers’ rights. There is a strong sense that, to paraphrase Marx, they have nothing to lose but their chains of oppression.
Threats of job loss and expulsions from school did not stop millions of proud undocumented workers and students from making themselves seen and heard from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles.
Regardless of the collaborationist character of the U.S. labor leadership with a section of the ruling class, the unions are still the strongest organizations that workers have.
Organized labor has a great opportunity to show solidarity with the new workers’ movement by mobilizing unions to demand full rights and amnesty for all immigrants.
