Ah, the New Year. Time for renewal and hope. Time for new beginnings. Time for some New Year’s Resolutions. Here are some from a LaborLeft perspective.
Organize downtown hotels Since the internationals won’t do it, the Fed needs to establish an independent organizing committee to target unorganized shops. Recruit and train salts and establish internal organizing committees in a half-dozen hotels. Aim to have (non-majority, if necessary) unions in place and negotiating contracts by this time next year.
Start a free, weekly Union Labor News Kinda like Isthmus, but about working people, with news and views from the local, national and international labor movement. Bilingual, of course. Start with a monthly and build up to weekly. Hit up unions to defray costs.
Run independent labor candidates Start with one or two statewide or national offices. Any run would generate a Labor Platform and establish the idea that working people don’t need the “twin-parties of Big Business” to do our politics for us. Cavanaugh for Congress.
Floss This year for sure, we should all start flossing regularly. You know it’s the right thing to do. And, not just before the annual check-up either.
At last count, over 200 Madison area labor activists receive these emails. If you have some New Year’s thoughts or would like to read some recent labor-related articles from the left press, click here.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
IMMIGRATION: FROM A WEDGE TO A BRIDGE
Just as past elections have been driven by Republican-stoked fears about terrorists and gays, we can expect that the 2008 election will be shaped by GOP efforts to stir up hatred against immigrants, especially the increasisngly-demonized brown-skinned people from Mexico.
If progressives hope to prevent the Republicans from prevailing once again through the manipulation of irrational fears, then we had better help to develop a more compelling answer to the immigration issue than the feeble ones used thus far by leading Democrats.
We need to offer a clear explanation for the tide of immigration and a bold, coherent plan to counter the devastation caused by NAFTA on both sides of the rio Grande.
DEMS' WEAK APPROACH
Some Democrats simply avoid discussing the situation of some 12 million people forced to live outside the law. That leaves millions of immigrant fanilies in a permanent state of insecurity, afraid that a badly-needed visit to the hospital with a sick child will get the whole family deported back to Mexico.
Other Democrats talk about the immigration issue within the corporate framework of immigrants being essential to fill low-wage jobs in the economy.
Worse, these Democrats evade the questions of a)the urgent need to restore the effective right to organize unions to lift up pay for these jobs and b) give immgrants legal protections from their employerss threatening to tunr them over to the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
WHY THE IMMIGRATION 'FLOOD'?
Moreover, these Democrats and the corporate media have avoided an examination of why so many Mexicans have felt compelled to leave their families and home communities to seek work in the US.
Essentially, the same NAFTA that destroyed industrial communities trought the US has devastated the agricultural and retail sectors of the Mexican economy. Some 2 million Mexican agricultural workers have been driven off the land by a combnation of regressive Mexican laws and the importation of cheap corn and other farm products, heavily subsidized by US taxpayers.
Meanwhile, the small businesses of Mexico were pitted against Wal-Mart and other gigantic US big-box stores, driving some 27,000 firms out of business. Some estimates place as much as 40% of Mexican retail business as now under the control of Us-based corporations.
In the fight against NAFTA, US labor chiefly focused on the impact of NAFTA encouraging the proliferation of US-owned "maquiladora" plants along the border.
Ineed, employment in these plants shot up about 50% within a few years of NAFTA's passage, intensifying pollution, congestion, and absysmal living conditions.
As Cidudad Jarez Mayor Mayor Gustavo Elizondo, poignantly noted, "Every year, we get poorer and poorer even though we create more and more wealth."
However, local Mexican public officials and workers are hesitant to seek tax revenues or higher wages because the US corporations have the leverage to shift the work to even lower-wage China. While wages in Mexico are about 1/10 of those in the USm the are just 3% in China.
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE NAFTA COIN
At least 879,000 US jobs have been lost due to NAFTA, according to calculations by the Economic Policy Institute in 2003. (That data is several years old, so the toll is even worse now.)
Just drive through any industrial community in the US,and you will find them pock-marked with ghostly factories factories, boarded-ups torefronts, and often abandoned homes. These are the concrete results of Bill Clinton givng a US government stamp of approval (and investment protections) to the conversion of family-supporting jobs in the US into susbsistence jobs in Mexico.
Further, the threat of moving to Mexico is being used to intimidate workers in about 68% of union organizing drives where that possibility is credible, according to Prof. Kate Bronfenbrenner of Cornell University. This same threat is routinely utilized at the bargaining table to hold down wages or extort concessions, so it comes as no surprise that US wages have been stagnating.
Unlike the stringent protections of corporations' "rights" on intellectual property (eg., for drug patents), labor and environmental violations of NAFTA have never produced any penalties, according to economist Jeff Faux in his superb book, The Global Class War.
LATINO-AMERICANS BEAR BRUNT
Ironically, much of the brunt of NAFTA-caused job displacement in the US has been borne by workers of Latino descent who work in industries like garments,textiles, electronics, auto parts, etc.
Specifically, a stuning 47% of the total number of workers certified as having suffered job loss due to NAFTA were Latino! (Source: Government Accountability Office, "Trade Adjustment Assistance…" report GAO-01-59, Oct. 2000, Appendix 1)
SCHIZOID VIEWS ON NAFTA, IMMIGRATIOM FED BY DEMAGOGUES
Unfortunately, the obvious linkage between NAFTA and illegal immigration has rarely been noted in the establishment media, with exceptions like a piece by Louis Uchitelle in the 2/18/07 NY Times.
Thus, it should be no surprise that many Americans--following the incessant rants of demagogues like Lou Dobbs and Pat Buchanan--understand that NAFTA has ripped apart US industrial communities from Pitsburg to Los Angeles, but utterly have no clue that NAFTA's impact in Mexico has been mowed down economic opporunity south of the border.
Bizarrely, Dobbs and Pat Buchanan rightly decry the flow of US jobs to Mexico, and sometimes even--as when Buchanan spoke at Serb Hall in 1996 during his presidential primary run-- express sympathy for Mexican workers in the maquiladoras who are held underfoot by US multinationals thanks to NAFTA. But Dobbs and Buchanan are totally oblivious to the impact that understand that NAFTA has had on sections of the Mexican economy.
Instread, they blame utterly destitute and desperate Mexican workers seeking to simply survive by crosssing to the US. Blind to NAFTA's catastropnic impact in Mexcioc, they cruelly scapegoat immigrants and lend credibility to the most extreme, anti-Latino forces in the nation.
As a result, we hear many people simultaneously furious about NAFTA and yet blaming Mexican victims of NAFTA for job losses in the US.
A BOLD PROGRAM BASED UPON THE EU APPROACH
Under NAFTA, Mexico was esentially appended to the US as a low-wage suburb and dunping ground fof taxpayer-subsidized products of agri-business. The long-term development of Mexico was never a consideration, as negotiators for both the US and Mexico were preoccupied with the vast fortunes that the trade deal would produce for thier corporate allies and themselves.
What is needed, suggests Jeff Faux, is instead an approach much more akin to the integration of poorter nations like Greece, Portugal, Spain (these fisrt three suffered many years under US-backed dicatiorships), and Ireland.
The integration of Europe's poor cousins was premised, first of all,
on a thorough democratization, including fair elections, worker rights, and press freedoms--all lacking now in Mexico.
But in exchange for democratization, these nations received extensive grants from the Euoprean Union for roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, clean water, sewage treatment, and communications infrastructure.
This also represented a nassive jobs-creation program that put hundrdeds of thousands of the jobless immeidately to work in their home nations and created the basis for long-term development.
These once-impoverished nations became economicaly stronger and much more capable of offering opportunities that would keep their people at home.
Would such an approach work in North America? Would it be sold to Americans as simply a means of keeping "them damn Mexicans" at home? Would it encounter fury from Americans who see that much of New Orelans either stil lies in ruis or is being turned over to private spedulators more than two years after Hurrican Katrina?
Surely these are profound problems to anticipate. But the Democrats cannot afford to remain silent on the devastation and dislocation caused by NAFTA n both sides of the border.
Perhaps the full development of Mexico's infrastructure could be linked to an equally ambitious public-works program to rebuild America's sagging public infrastructure. This would put Americans to work building steel, concrete, amd cpmmunications cables for both nations, in some cases.
Such a strategy will face immense political, financial, and practical barriers. But until the Democrats--prodded forcefuly by progressives--begin to develop s bold approach to immigration, they are simply weighting for the Republicans to bring the hammer down on a wedge issue that could shatter the Democrats'muliracial coalition and its hopes to replace the ideological heirs of George W. Bush 2008.
Roger Bybee
Post a Comment