Conservatives and anti-union forces are hammering labor unions for our function within the demonstrations towards Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and Saturday’s “No Kings” rallies. However unions, together with controversial Service Workers Worldwide Union California president David Huerta, are doing what we must be doing — standing up for our members and for employees as a complete towards the enemies of labor.
Labor’s largest mistake of the trendy period was to permit the destruction of thousands and thousands of commercial jobs with out efficient resistance. President Trump spoke the reality about deindustrialization in his 2017 Presidential Inaugural Tackle when he stated, “Rusted out factories [are] scattered like tombstones throughout the panorama of our nation … One after the other, the factories shuttered and left our shores, with not even a thought concerning the thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of American employees that had been left behind.”
It was Massive Labor’s disgraceful acquiescence to this catastrophic assault on American employees’ livelihoods that has allowed Trump to pose because the good friend of the American employee. He has efficiently channeled employees’ legit anger and resentment within the route of immigrants as a substitute of towards the massive companies who destroyed America’s industrial working class.
Whereas the labor motion in Los Angeles and in California is being criticized for our sympathies for so-called “unlawful aliens,” immigrants (authorized or not) make up one-third of California’s labor force. Most of California’s “illegals” arrived within the Nineteen Eighties, Nineteen Nineties, and early 2000s, many fleeing horrific U.S.-backed Central America dictatorships and the civil wars these regimes created. Most got here too late to reap the benefits of President Ronald Reagan’s 1986 immigration amnesty however are law-abiding and pay taxes in quite a few methods and varieties. Why would we flip our backs on them?
As a commerce unionist, the immigration standing of my union brothers and sisters is of no import. The Trump Administration and the massive enterprise pursuits it serves search to divide working folks, however employees as a complete will both transfer ahead collectively or fall again collectively. Assaults on one a part of the working class can not, over time, profit the opposite components.
A serious line of assault towards labor argued by Aaron Withe, CEO of the anti-union Freedom Basis, conservative investigative reporter Robert Schmid and others is that the typical American is being forced to help finance the anti-ICE motion as a result of the SEIU different unions resisting ICE “depend on taxpayer-funded dues.” However this isn’t taxpayer cash. It’s employees’ wages, and we now have the best to do no matter they need with it, simply as if we labored within the personal sector.
Furthermore, union dues is cash nicely spent. For instance, in March, 2023 the SEIU and United Academics Los Angeles collectively struck the Los Angeles Unified College District. Our picket traces held, SEIU won large pay increases and an intensive growth of healthcare advantages for part-time workers, and UTLA gained an excellent contract as nicely.
Conservatives are virtually unanimous of their condemnation of Huerta, who spent three nights in detention and is charged with conspiracy to impede an officer — a felony carrying a sentence of as much as six years in jail. However Huerta was doing precisely what an excellent labor chief must be doing — placing himself out entrance and, if vital, in hurt’s method for the good thing about his members and of employees. The truth that folks on each the left and the best had been so stunned by Huerta’s incarceration is reflective of contemporary America’s ignorance about labor historical past–efficient labor leaders have often needed to threat incarceration.
Throughout the large strikes that constructed organized labor within the Thirties, there have been many employees and union leaders attacked, jailed, and even killed by police and Nationwide Guard. In 1948, John L. Lewis, combative chief of the United Mine Staff, was discovered guilty of criminal and civil contempt of court for failing to finish a coal strike.
In 1964, beneath then-Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa, truckers gained the primary Nationwide Grasp Freight Settlement, a nationwide over-the-road contract stated to have introduced extra employees into the center class than another single occasion within the historical past of labor organizing. In a long-running, politically-motivated prosecution by Robert F. Kennedy, who known as the Teamsters the “enemy inside,” and others, Hoffa was convicted of jury tampering, tried bribery, and fraud and incarcerated from 1967 till 1971. Nevertheless, within the eyes of authorities, Hoffa’s actual crime had been his effectiveness as a labor chief.
Throughout the 1966 New York Metropolis Transit Staff Union strike, union chief Mike Quill led his 36,000 employees in shutting down the world’s largest subway and bus system. Simply as Huerta and unions are vilified right now, Mayor John Lindsay known as the strike “defiance towards eight million folks” and, as British labor author Ronan Burtenshaw explains, “the New York Instances known as for the police and military to run the buses; William F. Buckley Jr wished the Nationwide Guard.”
A choose issued an injunction to cease the strike, however Quill tore it up in entrance of the media, saying, “The choose can drop lifeless in his black robes. We is not going to name off the strike!” Quill and different leaders had been arrested and jailed, however the TWU traces held, they usually gained the strike.
The Trump Administration’s assault on immigrant employees may be the catalyst for a revitalized labor motion with the sort of energy unions just like the TWU and the Teamsters as soon as wielded. In that case, all employees — immigrant or native born, male or feminine, white, Black, Latino, or different — would be the winners.
Glenn Sacks teaches Social Research and represents United Academics Los Angeles at James Monroe Excessive College within the Los Angeles Unified College District.