Sam Smith - With the working class increasingly getting left out of the political picture by today's liberals, it's not all that surprising that Donald Trump was able to con many into supporting him. Now that Joe Biden is in the White House, however, it may be possible to rewrite the story. And a leading potential role would be for black and latino organizers to take the lead in representing all the working class - including whites.
It's not going to be easy. Labor union membership dropped by almost 50% between 1983 and 2018 and basic economic issues remain fairly low on the liberal agenda. Like Hillary Clinton, many liberals consider the white working class to be made up of "deplorables."
But one of the best ways to improve not only economic conditions but ethnic relations is for blacks, whites, and latinos to find something in common. And this would be a great cause.
As Kim Kelly wrote last year:
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spent his final full day on earth advocating for the rights of workers in what's now known as his "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech. It was April 3, 1968, and King stood up at the Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee, and spoke in support of the city's 1,300 sanitation workers, who were then on strike fighting for better safety standards, union recognition, and a decent wage.
His emphasis on supporting striking workers helped to illustrate just how firmly enmeshed the labor movement was with the greater struggle for civil rights. The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (generally known as the March on Washington) was organized by a coalition of six organizations, known as the Big Six - the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Congress on Racial Equality, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and the National Urban League. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was the first predominantly black labor union to be chartered by the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and was founded by A. Philip Randolph, a major leader in both the civil rights movement and the wider American labor movement.
In what may be a lone example of interracial solidarity in the early 20th-century labor movement, racial equality (and gender equality) was written into the constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World industrial union when it was founded in 1905; the very first bylaw read, "No workingman or woman shall be excluded from membership in local unions because of creed or color." …
In 1850, Frederick Douglass helped to organize one of the country's first black labor unions, the American League of Colored Laborers, in response to the difficulty that black workers had in joining white-led unions…
After the two men met and became fast friends in 1959, United Automobile Workers (UAW) president Walter Philip Reuther marched alongside Dr. King at Selma and Birmingham and bailed him out of jail. The UAW was a huge supporter of the March on Washington as well as other civil rights actions: In the 1950s, the union donated funds to the Montgomery Bus Boycott and paid bail for Freedom Riders arrested in 1961. The union offered Dr. King and the other organizers their union headquarters as a base of operations to plan the 1963 march and chartered trains, buses, and planes to get workers there.
And there is a latino history in labor as well. In fact, as Stephen Nuno-Perez has pointed out, "Labor organizers point to unions' growing dependence on brown and black members, including a significant number of immigrants, particularly in the service and health care industries.
"With the growing dependence of Latino families in their ranks, unions have been more vocal about immigrant rights and legislation, for instance praising the passage of the House's bill to give citizenship to the so-called Dreamers and temporary protected status, or TPS, holders. …
"Latinos make up almost 17 percent of the workforce, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and are projected to be more than 20 percent by 2026. Currently, 9.3 percent of Latino workers are in unions."
Organizing around a broad issue - such as workers' needs - is significantly more powerful than than just working for one ethnicity's rights. There has been too much silence on these issues of late and black and latino organizers can change that by taking the lead on matters that help everyone in the workplace while improving ethnic relations at the same time.
1 comment:
I liked this article. I am in the IBEW but was not aware of some of the information. The decimation of all unions and the low opinion of unions shows the strength of propoganda and or the lack of good educational policies in my opinion. I think unions will be the vehicle of any fix for the country. No other group has done as much for the betterment of all workers than the unions. The big costs of the court battles could not have happened without unions and any other groups would have put limitations or been after money or controls into the legislation. Unions fought for all workers including non union workers.
Post a Comment