by Jeff Ballinger

http://www.flickr.com/photos/28876688@N03/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

“On the Media” with Brooke Gladstone in the anchor chair at NPR is always a good deal more than a diversion while cleaning the garage or running week-end errands; she explores many topics that you won’t see covered, or didn’t even appear to one as problems, opportunities, etc. But, when you do an interview with someone like Nick Kristof – whose audience dwarfs your own – you ought to be especially prepared to “afflict the comfortable.” She needn’t have searched too long to find controversy in this man’s last decade of columns and, no, it is not because he practices “advocacy journalism” unless – and here’s the point – he’s advocating for sweatshops.

He “flinches” when he hears his work called advocacy (I believe that he meant “wince” or “cringe” but, hey, who gets the big bucks for putting words together?); she countered by pointing out that he often directs readers to his favorite charities when riding his Sudan hobby-horse. This is certainly not to say that we hear enough about Darfur or even to denigrate the notion of journalist-as-advocate, but there is a back-story here.

The brutality of the global, outsource-everything economy was being covered very well by Kristof’s colleague, Bob Herbert. In nearly ten searing anti-sweatshop columns in the mid-Nineties, he captured Americans’ disquietude about corporate-led globalization while pointing out the tone-deaf callousness of Bill Clinton’s team; the latter was summed up nicely by James Carville when asked about his Nike deal (by another journalist, not Herbert): he berated the reporter for deigning to ask, snarling, “I own stock in Royal Dutch Shell, too.” This was just like saying that any Democrat who was internationalist and concerned with human rights ought to just get with the program; just go get “yours” and don’t worry about the other guy. Carville dismissed concern about abused workers as “protectionist.”

So, it was clear that Herbert was out of step — especially the trenchant truth-telling which left the named shoe and toy brands with nowhere to hide. When Phil Knight (Nike’s prickly CEO, at the time) asked for a meeting with the New York Times’ editorial board in 1998, the multi-billionaire was accommodated. Herbert never wrote another anti-sweatshop column and Nick Kristof reformulated the Times’ editorial page position to “pro-sweatshop.”

What do you think would happen if a consumer or anti-sweatshop group would demand a meeting with the Times’ editorial board to complain about Nick? This is the type of question one might ask to get down to the nitty-gritty (which OtM usually does). An additional quibble: Kristof explains his work as “reporting” and he is not challenged on it. In fact, he is an opinion-monger — with no need to apologize for advocacy, quite the opposite!

Jeff Ballinger is completing a Laborers-funded doctorate fellowship at McMaster University near Toronto. He can be reached at: jeffreyd@mindspring.com

If decent health care reform is to pass the Congress, President Obama and the Senate Democratic leadership must speak for the public interest instead of being toadies for the private insurers and the “moderate” Democrats they so generously fund.

The text above is the new DSA resolution that was approved without dissent over the weekend on the health care legislation being debated in Congress.

by Paul Garver

On December 18, 2009, caregivers at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital in Sonoma County, California, voted for representation by the National Union of Health Workers (NUHW). SEIU had poured in forty organizers to block NUHW’s electoral victory, but secured only 13 votes for SEIU against 283 for NUHW. However SEIU’s ham-handed intervention, which focused almost exclusively on attacking the NUHW, did succeed in boosting the No Union vote to 263, nearly frustrating the workers’ right to organize. For more details on the election outcome, see Randy Shaw’s article in BeyondChron.

NUHW’s narrow electoral victory was the first fruit of the six-year campaign to organize the St. Joseph’s Health System. After imposing its trusteeship over United Healthcare Workers-West, SEIU suspended the campaign, leaving the Santa Rosa Memorial caregivers in the lurch. Former SEIU organizer Fred Ross Jr. wrote an open letter describing this history that recently appeared on Talking Union.

However the newly-formed insurgent NUHW was able to file an election petition in April 2009 with majority support. Forming a de facto alliance with the hospital adminstration, SEIU managed to delay the election for five months, and blocked negotiations over ground rules that would have permitted the fair and free union election urged by religious leaders.

Talking Union has covered the unfolding story of the civil war between SEIU and the NUHW for more than a year. A superb analysis of the background for this conflict is Bill Fletcher and Nelson Lichtenstein’s article on the In These Times blog site entitled SEIU’s Civil War: American workers need a labor movement grounded in social justice, not fractured, fighting unions.

by Steve Early

Earlier this month, the “People’s Republic of Burlington” had a busy weekend mustering its “troops” for active duty on several fronts, one at home and the other abroad.

On Saturday, Dec. 5, two hundred labor and progressive activists gathered at the University of Vermont to plan more effective resistance to job cuts and contract give-backs demanded by recession-ravaged employers. The title of their conference –“Turning Crisis Into Opportunity: Building Democratic, Fighting Unions and Defending Public Services in Hard Economic Times”–was almost as long as the list of domestic challenges its participants face.

The very next day, on the same UVM campus, another group of working class Vermonters assembled to be fighters and defenders of a different sort. They were the first 298 of nearly 1,500 National Guard members who will be sent from here to Afghanistan between now and March. As reported in the Burlington Free Press, their unit’s largest deployment since World War II was celebrated at an “emotional ceremony,” attended by friends, neighbors, and family members at an indoor tennis court. Flags were waved, speeches were made, a military band played, and “farewells were the order of the day.” To keep things on an upbeat note, one Guard officer proclaimed, with great enthusiasm and to much applause: “The Green Mountain Boys are coming!”

Similar irrational exuberance, in 1775, led Ethan Allen to attempt a disastrous invasion of Quebec, which remains, to this day, part of a foreign country unoccupied by the U.S. Allen’s Taliban-like frontier home-boys did much better fighting royalist intruders from New York and, early in the Revolutionary War, seizing Fort Ticonderoga. In the run up to the UVM labor gathering, worker skirmishing with modern-day Tories was not going quite as well on the Vermont-side of Lake Champlain.

Joblessness in the Green Mountain state–while running lower than in the rest of the northeast–has been high enough to leave its unemployment fund nearly broke. The region’s largest telecom, Fairpoint, just declared bankruptcy, throwing 2,500 workers into an uphill fight to defend their contract and customer service quality. (For the back-story there, see “Broadband Redlining Targets Rural America,” The Nation, May 14, 2007, about the debt-laden Verizon sale to Fairpoint that has, as predicted, landed the latter in Chapter 11.)

And then on Dec. 3, the Vermont State Employees’ Association (VSEA) tentatively agreed to an unprecedented 3 percent pay cut for its 7,000 members, followed by a salary freeze. (Some VSEAers are currently campaigning for membership rejection of this unpalatable deal.) Already 580 state jobs have been eliminated through lay-offs or attrition, but Republican Gov. Jim Douglas says he still faces a projected $150 million state budget shortfall next year.

In the Free Press, Douglas Administration official Neal Lunderville called the VSEA capitulation “a common sense approach that should serve as a blue-print for teachers, municipal workers, and others who receive a paycheck from tax-payers”—a clear warning that they’re next in line for pay or job cuts too, like their public sector counter-parts all around the country.

At the Dec. 5 UVM conference, rank-and-file militants and campus socialists had a different message for Douglas. Summed up in the rousing chant that ended the final session, it was: “They say give-back, we say fight-back!” The difficult question that local teamsters, teachers, telephone workers, nurses, and state employees grappled with throughout the day was how to make that standard lefty bargaining position actually stick. Their strategy discussions were aided by Labor Notes, the 30-year old, Detroit-based labor education and research project, which publishes a monthly newsletter for “union troublemakers” of all stripes.

In the fifteen-minute talk I gave to the group, which included many local stalwarts of U.S. Labor Against The War (USLAW) and the Vermont Progressive Party, I tried to connect some dots, related to the back-to-back events on the same campus. I noted that everyone’s employer is chanting the mantra that times are tough, money is short, and there must be shared national (or local) sacrifice. In Vermont, that apparently means working class people must, in disproportionate numbers, fight and die in Afghanistan, foot the bill, as tax-payers, for a $680 billion a year Pentagon budget (including the soon-to-be-increased $130 billion annual cost of two wars), and endure cuts in the pay, benefits, jobs, or public services that they and their families depend on.

What’s wrong with this picture, I asked? The powers-that-be (or would-be) are saying, in their usual authoritative fashion, “there is no alternative!” But there is, in fact, an alternative. To avoid a 3 per cent pay cut for 7,000 state workers, we could shut down the war in Afghanistan for twenty minutes and, at the current rate of U.S. spending there, raise the $2 million that Jim Douglas seeks from the VSEA that way. To close the governor’s entire fiscal year 2011 budget gap would, of course, require the additional “sacrifice” of diverting 24-hours worth of Afghan war spending to help keep Vermont state government afloat for another year.

The following day, down at the Holiday Inn in South Burlington, where some National Guard families spent the weekend saying private good-byes, the logic of my brilliant anti-war math was not lost on a non-union waitress named Dawna. (For the record, there is no such thing as a “union hotel” in Vermont.) As she brought pancakes and syrup to my table late Sunday morning, everyone but Dawna was transfixed by the big flat-screen TV hanging next to the bar in the restaurant. There, we could watch real-time coverage of the National Guard deployment ceremony being held just up the road at UVM. All the Holiday Inn wait staff could recognize people they had served, in the same room, just a few hours earlier.

Now, these “citizen soldiers” who had been their breakfast buffet and overnight guests were among those standing stiffly at attention, wearing field caps, camo, and combat boots. On the platform in front of them, a parade of local politicians–pro- and anti-war alike, including Douglas, U.S. Senators Bernie Sanders and Patrick Leahy, plus U.S. Rep. Peter Welc—praised their patriotism and devotion to duty. Douglas has been a chicken hawk since his days as a late 1960s Middlebury College classmate of mine, when he was an outspoken, Richard Nixon-loving Young Republican. So from his usual perch, far from the front-lines, the governor assured the soldiers and their families that “while you are doing your duty, I promise you we will do ours, here on the home-front”—presumably by slashing state programs or UI benefits?

Meanwhile, my waitress Dawna was simply disgusted by the whole televised spectacle. “I’m tired of seeing a lot of guys marching around in uniforms,” she confided. “I wish they’d turn that off and go back to the ‘relax your muscles’ show”—a bit of self-help programming for sufferers of lower-back pain that was on the TV when I entered the restaurant. By this point in her Sunday morning shift, Dawna did not seem particularly relaxed herself, in her white shirt, bedraggled tie, and sagging black waitress apron. Although only in her 30s, she had the weary, weighed-down look common among the working poor struggling to survive in northern New England’s low-wage, service economy. Her cousin, the father of three, has been deployed overseas multiple times already. That’s why, she informed me, the war is “a sore personal subject” for her. “It’s ridiculous,” she declared. “We have people living on the street, who’ve lost their jobs, can’t pay for their homes. And now we’re sending more people over there to fight somebody else’s battles?”

Observing the somber family gatherings in the hotel over the weekend had clearly not been easy for some Holiday Inn staff members. Mistaking one mother and daughter in the dining room for a non-military family, Dawna had asked the child how she liked the hotel pool. “I’m here to say goodbye to my Dad,” the little girl sadly informed her.

“I’ll feel better later on, when I get off work,” Dawna assured me, as I paid for my breakfast. “You know—‘out of sight, out of mind, what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger?’”

At the same time, she didn’t seem very convinced about the truth of those two oft-repeated but oddly conjoined phrases. And one thing was certain: for some of the guests she had served earlier in the day, America’s troop build-up in Afghanistan will prove fatal, while leaving Dawna’s state, nation, and fellow workers a lot poorer and not any stronger.

Steve Early worked for the Communications Workers of America in New England for 27 years and, before that, was Vermont Field Secretary for the American Friends Service Committee. He is a longtime supporter of Labor Notes and author of Embedded With Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home from Monthly Review Press. He can be reached at Lsupport@aol.com.

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The health care bill being considered by the U.S. Senate is inadequate and too tilted toward the insurance industry, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said today.

In recent days, as the Senate has debated health care reform, small numbers of senators have held health care hostage by threatening to block a vote. The new proposal by the Senate puts the interests of insurance companies—and senators who would rather look out for the insurance companies—ahead of real reform.

Trumka said the top priority now is to fight over the rest of the legislative process to fix the bill and make sure we can pass real health care reform:

The labor movement has been fighting for health care for nearly 100 years and we are not about to stop fighting now, when it really matters. But for this health care bill to be worthy of the support of working men and women, substantial changes must be made. The AFL-CIO intends to fight on behalf of all working families to make those changes and win health care reform that is deserving of the name.

The absolute refusal of Republicans in the Senate to support health care reform and the hijacking of the bill by defenders of the insurance industry have brought us a Senate bill that is inadequate: it is too kind to the insurance industry.

Genuine health care reform must bring down health costs, hold insurance companies accountable, assure that Americans can get the health care they need and be financed fairly.

While the Senate’s bill makes a lot of important and necessary changes to our health care system, it falls short in three key areas, Trumka says.

It lacks a public health insurance option, to offer real competition to insurance companies to bring down costs.
It fails to make sure employers take responsibility and pay their fair share.
It’s funded through a new tax on working families’ health care benefits.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The bill passed by the U.S. House is far better than the Senate’s bill on these and other measures. The House bill finances health care through a small tax on the very wealthiest of earners—those who reaped vast benefits from the Bush tax cuts—and it includes a public health insurance plan and real responsibility for employers. Trumka says:

The House bill is the model for genuine health care reform. Working people cannot accept anything less than real reform.

Article printed from AFL-CIO NOW BLOG: http://blog.aflcio.org

URL to article: http://blog.aflcio.org/2009/12/17/trumka-senate-health-care-bill-must-change-to-be-real-reform/

Labor History in Schools Bill Becomes Law!
Calls for labor history to be state standard in Wisconsin

Governor Jim Doyle made it official Thursday, Dec. 10: He signed into law AB 172, the Wisconsin Labor History in the Schools bill, culminating 12 years of efforts by key legislators, workers, unions and others to pass legislation to assure the teaching of labor history and collective bargaining.

“Once again Wisconsin leads the way in progressive labor legislation,” commented Steve Cupery, president of the Wisconsin Labor History Society. “As far as we can tell, Wisconsin is the first state to have enacted such a law. We expect others will follow our example.”

More here.

by Marie Ernaux

On the evening of December 1, members of Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals (PASNAP) and union officials gathered together students, Temple staff and community members to educate the Temple community on the day-to-day realities of healthcare providers at Temple Hospital. President of AFSCME Local 1723 and Temple University Staff Paul Dannenfelser began the discussion by sharing that this was another chapter in the story of Temple University’s approach to Labor on campus. He shared that his union went through a similar two-year fight for a contract in which Temple University was “not only anti-union but anti-worker.” He expressed earnestly the energy of the room, saying, “The nurses’ fight is our fight, the student fight is our fight. We are all in this together.”

The panel of speakers consisted mostly of PASNAP nurses and allied professionals. Patty Eakin, an Emergency Room RN at Temple for the last ten years, and President of PASNAP, spoke about the importance of fighting for minimum nurse-to-patient ratios at Temple as well as state-wide. Recent studies by the US Department of Health and Human Services have shown that low nurse staffing levels have a direct impact on patient care and increase the likelihood of pneumonia, shock, cardiac arrest, and urinary tract infections  Hospital Nurse Staffing and Quality of Care). Eakin put forward that the importance of fighting back dangerous policies is part of a nurse’s job description. She explained that as such Temple University’s attempts to establish a “Gag Rule” function in complete opposition to the role of a nurse, which is to advocate on behalf of patient safety.

Maureen May, a nurse for the past 25 years — with 13 years at Temple’s Critical Care unit — and President of Temple Nurse’s Local, built upon Eakin’s comments. She shared how horrified she was when, after confronting Temple Hospital Management about the dangerously unsafe staffing levels of nurses, she was told, “Well [the nurse] will just have to do the best they can… [The patient] is just going to have to wait four hours.” She asked the crowd, “What if that was you, or someone you loved, who had to wait four hours for appropriate care?” May continued to express the important role nurses play as patient advocates and how their union gives them a protected voice to be able to fight for better standards of care. May added that PASNAP, after 10 years, is the strongest nurses’ union in the state and that Temple is attempting to establish policies to control and weaken the union’s strength. May ended her remarks by sharing feelings of solidarity with the students who came out to the support their struggle, “I’m excited to have this battle [with Temple]. We will certainly be there for you when your time comes.”

Three members of PASNAP’s Allied Professionals Local spoke about their struggles to become part of PASNAP and how those victories strengthened their relationships with nurses at Temple and their consciousness about what was at stake in the contract fight with the Temple Administration. Lorenzo Glover, a respiratory therapist at Temple for 14 years and Executive Board Member of the Allied Professionals Local, spoke about the day-to-day policies that put patients at risk and compromise healthcare providers’ control over care. Glover spoke of understaffing, lack of supplies paramount to care and how he experienced these policies as an explicit attempt by Temple to push out nurses active in the union. Selena Hodge, a Medical Laboratory Technician and Vice President of the Allied Professionals Local, spoke on the daily impact of profit-driven Temple Hospital policies. She shared that a big concern for members was Temple’s raising employees’ healthcare coverage costs to $300 a month. She felt that Temple was acting in a vindictive way in these bargaining sessions, behavior that she attributed to the strength of the Union at Temple. Hodge mentioned that Temple is no longer willing to extend tuition benefits to the children of Hospital staff but is willing to spend $3 million toward union-busting efforts. Hodge also finished her remarks on powerful note, “I sign my messages ‘Solidarity and Family’ because what Temple doesn’t understand is that we are a family, and when we’re outside we are all outside.”

Sarah Allen, executive board member of the Nurses’ Local, shared another policy that jeopardizes patient care while leaving nurses unable to fulfill their professional obligations. Allen talked about being floated to departments where she has little to no experience because of a narrow understanding by Temple management that nurses are exchangeable and not specialized. She also shared that with 12- and eight-hour shift rotations there will be four-hour windows in which staffing is extremely low. Recently, she shared, a nursing supervisor told her that her seventh patient could “just be put on a bed for two hours until more staff arrived.” Allen put this experience into context by adding that “patients admitted to Temple Hospital are very sick because the hospital only accepts very sick patients. Imagine if it was you being told to wait that long.” Like the other PASNAP members, Allen reaffirms, “[Our fight] is not about money, although we want a fair wage. We can’t provide the service patients need. It’s cruel and embarassing to not be able to provide the care because of lack of supplies.”

Students from the Temple College Democrats, Student Labor Action Project and the Temple Democratic Socialists were part of the coalition that Temple Nurses and Allied Professionals brought together to support their struggle. Dan Assaraf from Temple Democratic Socialists situated the Temple Nurses’ Union fight in the broader global economy and gave numerous examples of the impact of labor movement victories on the quality of life and labor standards for all people even outside of organized industries. Kate Harkin from the Student Labor Action Project encouraged students to hold Temple University President Ann Weaver Hart responsible for the bad faith bargaining that PASNAP articulated. She also joined with other student leaders to express the importance of joining the coalition of support for the Temple Nurses. Two Temple nursing students who were in attendance shared that they were encouraged by the community support as well as inspired by the strength and relevance of politicized healthcare providers.

As the event came to a close there was a strong sense of support and strength in the room. Lorenzo Glover reminded the Temple community members, “This is not about money. Temple University has tons of money. This is about power. They are trying to break the power of our union but we are not going to go away.”

Marie Ernaux is a Philadelphia-area activist.  This report originally appeared on the The Labor Justice Blog of Media Mobilizing Project.

by David Bacon

David Bacon

One winter morning in 1996, Border Patrol agents charged into a street-corner clinic where 40 day laborers had lined up to be tested for AIDS. One worker, Omar Sierra, had just taken his seat, and a nurse had inserted a needle for drawing the blood. As agents of the migra ran across the street and sidewalk, Sierra jumped up, pulled the needle out of his vein and ran.

Sierra escaped and made it home. Shaken by his experience and determined never to forget his friends who were deported, he wrote a song:

I’m going to sing you a story, friends
that will make you cry,
how one day in front of K-Mart
the migra came down on us,sent by the sheriff
of this very same place . . .
We don’t understand why,
we don’t know the reason,
why there is so much
discrimination against us.
In the end we’ll wind up
all the same in the grave.
With this verse I leave you,
I’m tired of singing,
hoping the migra
won’t come after us again,
because in the end, we all have to work.

This was long ago, but since then it’s gotten worse. In Los Angeles, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents (“the migra”) arrived a year ago at Micro Solutions, a circuit board assembly plant in the San Fernando Valley. After the workers were herded into the cafeteria, the immigration agents first told workers who were citizens to go to one side of the room. Then they told the workers who had green cards to go over. Finally, as one worker said, “It just left us.” The remaining workers were put into vans, and taken off to the migra jail. Some women were released to care for their kids, but had to wear ankle bracelets and couldn’t work. How were they supposed to pay rent? Where would they get money to buy food?

On May 12, ICE agents went to the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant. They sent 388 Guatemalan young people to prison for five months. The workers were deported immediately afterwards. One of them was a young worker who’d been beaten with a meat hook by a supervisor. Lacking papers, he was afraid to complain. After the raid, he went to prison with the others. The supervisor stayed working on the line. Here also women were released to care for their children, but again with the ankle bracelet. Their husbands or brothers were in prison or deported, and they were held up to ostracism in this tiny town of 2000 people.

They say it’s just “illegals” – that makes this politically acceptable. ICE says these raids protect U.S. citizens and legal residents against employers who hire undocumented workers in order to lower wages and working conditions. But very often immigration raids are used against workers’ efforts when they organize and protest those very same conditions. At the big Smithfield plant in North Carolina, where the workers spent 16 years trying to join the union, the company tried to fire 300, including the immigrant union leadership, saying it had “discovered” that their Social Security numbers were no good. Workers stopped the lines for three days, and won their temporary reinstatement. But then the migra conducted two raids, and 21 workers went to prison for using social security numbers that belonged to someone else. The fear the raids created was compared by one organizer to “a neutron bomb.” It took two years for the campaign to recover. The Agriprocessors raid came less than a year after workers there tried to organize. At Howard Industries in Mississippi, the migra conducted the biggest raid of all in the middle of union contract negotiations.

Why is this happening?

Former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said, “There’s an obvious solution to the problem of illegal work, which is you open the front door and you shut the back door.” Chertoff means by “opening the front door” that he wants people to come to the U.S. as contract workers, recruited by employers using visas that say a worker can only come to work. This is the logic and requirement for every guest worker program, going back to the braceros. And to make people come only through this employment-based system, he’ll “close the back door” by making walking through the desert across the border, or working outside of this contract labor system, a crime punished not just by deportation, but by prison. E-Verify, the high-tech immigration database endorsed by both the Bush and Obama administrations, is only the latest idea for enforcing this kind of criminalization. Behind E-Verify, behind the raids, and behind every other kind of workplace immigration enforcement, is the basic criminalization of work. Since 1986, federal law has said that if you have no papers, it is a crime to have a job. So you stand on the street corner, a truck stops to pick up laborers, and you get in. You work all day in the sun until you’re so tired you can hardly go back to your room. This is a crime. You do it to send money home to your family and the people who depend on you. This is a crime too.

How many criminals like this are there? Experts on immigration statistics say there are 12 million people without papers here in the U.S.

But it’s not just here. Manu Chao wrote a whole CD of songs about this: “Clandestino.” He sings about people going from Morocco to Spain… Turkey to Germany… Jamaica to London. There are over 200 million people, all over the world, living outside the countries where they were born. If all the world’s “illegals” got together in one place there would be enough people for ten Mexico Cities or fifteen Los Angeleses. If working is a crime, then workers are criminals. And if workers become criminals, proponents of this system say, they’ll go home. That’s the basic justification for all workplace immigration enforcement.

But is anyone going home? No one is leaving because there’s no job to go home to. Since 1994, six million Mexicans have come to live in the U.S. Millions came without visas, because it wasn’t possible for them to get one.

All over the world people are moving, from poor countries to rich ones. The largest Salvadoran city in the world is Los Angeles. More than half the world’s sailors come from the Philippines. More migrants go from the country to the city in China than cross borders in all the rest of the world combined. So many people from Guatemala are living in the U.S. that one neighborhood in Los Angeles is now called Little San Miguel Acatan. San Miguel was the site of the worst massacre of indigenous people by the U.S.-armed Guatemalan Army in that country’s civil war. Now more San Migueleños live in Los Angeles than in San Miguel.

The economic pressures causing displacement and migration are reaching into the most remote towns and villages in Mexico, where people still speak languages that were old when Columbus arrived in the Americas – Mixteco, Zapoteco, Triqui, Chatino, Purepecha, Najuatl. Why are so many people being displaced? NAFTA is just one element of those changes that have transformed the Mexican economy in the interests of foreign investors and wealthy Mexican partners. The treaty let huge U.S. companies, like Archer Daniels Midland, sell corn in Mexico for a price lower than what it cost small farmers in Oaxaca to grow it. Big U.S. companies get huge subsidies from Congress – $2 billion in the last farm bill. But the World Bank and NAFTA’s rules dictated that subsidies for Mexican farmers had to end. This was not the creation of a “level playing field,” despite all the propaganda.

In Cananea, a small town in the Sonora mountains and site of one of the world’s largest copper mines, miners have been on strike for two years. Grupo Mexico, a multinational corporation that was virtually given the mine in one of the infamous privatizations of former President Carlos Salinas, wants to cut labor costs by eliminating hundreds of jobs, busting the miners’ union, and blacklisting its leaders. If miles north.

If you were a miner with a busted union and no job to support your family, where would you go? No wonder they’ve been on strike for two years in Cananea. They’re fighting to stay home – in Mexico. NAFTA, and the U.S. and Mexican governments, helped big companies get rich by keeping wages low, by giving them subsidies and letting them push farmers into bankruptcy. But that’s why it is so hard for families to survive now. Low wages. Can’t farm any more. Laid off to cut costs. Your factory privatized. Your union busted. Salinas promised Mexicans cheap food if NAFTA was approved and corn imports flooded the country. Now the price of tortillas is three times what it was when the treaty passed. That’s great for Grupo Maseca, Mexico’s monopoly tortilla producer, and for WalMart, now Mexico’s largest retailer. But if you can’t afford to buy those tortillas, then you go where you can buy them.

The advocates of economic liberalization said an economy of maquiladoras and low wages would produce jobs on the border. But today, hundreds of thousands of workers on the border have lost their jobs because when the recession began in the U.S., people stopped buying the products made in border factories. Even while they’re working, the wages of workers are so low that it takes half a day’s pay to buy a gallon of milk. Most maquiladora workers live in cardboard houses on streets with no pavement or sewer system. When they lose their jobs, and the border is a few blocks away, where do you think they will go? If it was your family, if you had no food or job, what would you do?

And when people protest, the government and the companies bring in the police and the army. People are beaten, as the teachers were in Oaxaca in 2006. After the army filled Oaxaca’s jails, how many more people had to leave? When President Manuel Zelaya tried to point Honduras in a different direction, just raising the minimum wage so that families could have a better future, not as migrants but in Honduras itself, what happened? The U.S.-trained military, acting for the country’s wealthy elite, kidnapped him in his pajamas, put him on an airplane and flew him out of the country. Now how many people will leave Honduras, because the door to a future at home has been closed?

The lack of human rights is itself a factor contributing to migration, since it makes it more difficult, even impossible, to organize for change.

Migration is not an accident.

The economic system in the U.S. and wealthy countries depends on migration. It depends on the labor provided by a constant flow of migrants. About 12 million people live in the U.S. without immigration documents. Another 26-28 million were born elsewhere, and are citizens or visaholders. That’s almost 40 million people. If everyone went home tomorrow, would there be fruit and vegetables on the shelves at Safeway? Who would cut up the cows and pigs in meatpacking plants? Who would clean the offices of New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Chicago?

Immigrants are not the only workers in our workforce, the only people willing to work, or the only people who need jobs. Our workforce includes African American and Chicano families who have contributed their labor for hundreds of years. The vast majority of white people – the descendents of European immigrants – are historically workers, too. We all work. We all need to work, to put bread on the table for our families. But without the labor of immigrant people, the system would stop.

Those companies using that labor, however – the grape growers in Delano or the owners of office buildings in Century City, or the giant Blackstone group that owns hotels across the country – do not pay the actual cost of producing the workforce they rely on. Who pays for the needs of workers’ families in the towns and countries from which they come? Who builds the schools in the tiny Oaxacan villages that send their young people into California’s fields? Who builds the homes for the families of the meatpacking workers of Nebraska? Who pays for the doctor when the child of a Salvadoran janitor working in Los Angeles gets sick? The growers and the meatpackers and the building owners pay for nothing. They don’t even pay taxes in the countries from which their workers come, and some don’t pay taxes here, either. So who pays the cost of producing and maintaining their workforce? The workers pay for everything. For employers, it’s a very cheap system.

Here in the U.S., it’s cheap, too. Workers without papers pay taxes and Social Security but are barred from the benefits. For them there’s no unemployment insurance, no disability pay if they get sick, and no retirement benefits. Workers fought for these social benefits and won them in the New Deal. For people without papers, the New Deal never happened. Even legal residents with green cards can’t get many Social Security benefits. If they take these benefits away from immigrants, it won’t be long before they come after people born here. Why can’t everyone get a Social Security number? After all, we want people to be part of the system. All workers, the undocumented included, get old and injured. Should they live on dog food after a lifetime of work? The purpose of Social Security is to assure dignity and income to the old and injured. The system should not be misused to determine immigration status and facilitate witchhunts, firings, and deportations for workers without it.

Wages for most immigrants are so low that people can hardly live on them. There’s a big difference in wages between a day laborer and a longshoreman – $8.25/hour in San Francisco, where a dockworker gets over $25, plus benefits. If employers had to pay low-wage workers, including immigrants, the wages of longshoremen, the lives of working families would improve immeasurably. And it can happen. Before people on the waterfront organized the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, they were like day laborers, hired every morning in a humiliating shapeup where each person competed for a job with dozens of others. Dockworkers were considered bums. Now they own apartment houses. It’s the union that did it.

But if employers had to raise the wages of immigrants to the level of longshoremen, it would cost them a lot. Just the difference between the minimum wage received by 12 million undocumented workers and the average U.S. wage might well be over $80 billion a year. No wonder organizing efforts among immigrant workers meet such fierce opposition. But immigrants are fighters. In 1992, undocumented drywallers stopped Southern California residential construction for a year from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border. They’ve gone on strike at factories, office buildings, laundries, hotels, and fields. Those unions today that are growing are often those that have made an alliance with immigrant workers and know that they will fight for better conditions. In fact, the battles fought by immigrants over the last 20 years made the unions of Los Angeles strong today and changed the politics of the city. In city after city, a similar transformation is possible or already underway. So unions should make a commitment, too. In 1999, the AFL-CIO held an historic convention in Los Angeles, and there unions said they would fight to get rid of the law that makes work a crime. Unions said they’d fight to protect the right of all workers to organize, immigrants included. Labor should live up to that promise. Today, unions are fighting for the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), intended to make it easier and quicker for workers to organize. That would help all workers, immigrants included. But if 12 million people have no right to their jobs at all and are breaking the law simply by working, how will they use the rights that EFCA is designed to protect? Unions and workers need both labor law reform and immigration reform that decriminalize work. Employers and the wealthy love immigrants and hate them. They want and need people’s labor, but they don’t want to pay. And what better way not to pay than to turn workers into criminals?

This is an old story – what they’ve always done with immigrants.

In the early 1900s, California’s grower-dominated legislature made it a crime for Filipinos to marry women who were not Filipinas. At the same time, immigration of women from the Philippines to the mainland was very difficult. For the Filipino farm workers of the 1930s and 40s and 50s, it was virtually a crime to have a family. Many men stayed single until their 50s or 60s, living in labor camps, moving and working wherever the growers needed their labor. But those Filipinos fought to stay. They had to fight, just for the right to have a family.

During the bracero program from 1942 to 1964, growers recruited workers from Mexico who could come only under contract and had to leave the country at the end of the harvest. They said the braceros were legal, but what kind of legality is it where people had to live behind barbed wire in campsand go only where the growers wanted? If braceros went on strike, they were deported. Part of their wages were withheld, supposedly to guarantee their return to Mexico.

Half a century later, they’re still fighting to recover it. The braceros fought to stay. Some just walked out of the labor camps, and kept living and working underground for 30 years, until they could get the amnesty in 1986. Then, in 1964, heroes of the Chicano civil rights movement like Bert Corona, Ernesto Galarza, Cesar Chavez, and Dolores Huerta forced Congress to end the bracero program. The next year, Mexicans and Filipinos went out on strike in Coachella and Delano, and the United Farm Workers was born. That year, in 1965, they went back to Congress. Give us a law, they said, that doesn’t make workers into braceros or criminals behind barbed wire, into slaves for the growers. Give us a law that says our families are what’s important, our communities. That was how we won the family preference system. That’s why, once you have a green card, you can petition for your mother and father, or your children, to join you in the U.S. We didn’t have that before. The civil rights movement won that law.

That fight is not over. In fact, we have to fight harder now than ever, and not just against those who hate immigrants. We have to make sure that those who say they advocate for immigrants aren’t really advocating for low wages. That the decision-makers of Washington, D.C., won’t plunge families in Mexico, El Salvador, or Colombia into poverty to force a new generation of workers to leave home and go through the doors of furniture factories and laundries, office buildings and packing plants, onto construction sites, or just into the gardens and nurseries of the rich.

So what do we want?

First, we want legalization, giving 12 million people residence rights and green cards, so they can live like normal human beings. We do not want immigration used as a cheap labor supply system, with workers paying off recruiters and once here, frightened that they’ll be deported if they lose their jobs.

We need to get rid of the laws that make immigrants criminals and working a crime. No more detention centers, no more ankle bracelets, no more firings and no-match letters, and no more raids. We need equality and rights. All people in our communities should have the same rights and status. Families in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, or the Philippines deserve a decent life, too. They have a right to survive, a right not to migrate. To make that right a reality, they need jobs and productive farms, good schools, and health care. Our government must stop negotiating trade agreements like NAFTA and CAFTA and instead prohibit the use of trade and economic policy that causes poverty and displacement.

Those people who do choose to come here to work deserve the same things that every other worker does. We all have the same rights and the same needs – jobs, schools, medical care, a decent place to live, and the right to walk the streets or drive our cars without fear.

Is this possible?

Major changes in immigration policy are not possible if we don’t fight at the same time for these other basic needs: jobs, education, housing, health care, justice. But these are things that everyone needs, not just immigrants. And if we fight together, we can stop raids and at the same time create a more just society for everyone, immigrant and nonimmigrant alike.

Is this possible?

In 1955, at the height of the Cold War, braceros and farm workers didn’t think change would ever come. Growers had all the power, and farm workers none. Ten years later, we had a new immigration law protecting families, and the bracero program was over. A new union for farm workers was on strike in Delano.

We can have an immigration system that respects human rights. We can stop deportations. We can win security for working families on both sides of our borders. Is it possible? Si se puede!

David Bacon is associate editor at Pacific How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants; and a reporter and documentary photographer for 18 years whose work has appeared in such publications as  The Nation, The American Prospect, The Progressive, and the San Francisco Chronicle.  His writings and photographs can be viewed online at his website.

This article originally appeared in the fall issue of Democratic Left, the newsletter of Democratic Socialists of America.

by Dmitri Iglitzin

Dmitri Iglitzin

Labor’s number one legislative priority, the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), would enshrine the principle of majority signup (allowing workers to form unions based on a written showing of majority support), mandate binding arbitration for first contracts where the parties cannot agree and impose financial penalties on employers for firing pro-union employees. This could dramatically improve the ability of workers to unionize and improve their working conditions. An April, 2007 study by the Campaign for America’s Future estimates that passage of EFCA would increase private sector union membership by 10%, providing an additional 3,537,625 people with health insurance and 2,773,045 more people with pensions.

Yet EFCA is currently stalled behind health care and climate change legislation, and nobody knows when it might actually be considered by Congress, much less if it will be enacted in anything like its present form. In the face of that legislative inaction, it may be that the best available solution is for the administrative agency with authority in this area, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), simply to impose some badly needed fixes.

Most legal scholars believe that the NLRB has the authority to enact procedural changes that would, among other things:

• drastically shorten the time frame for holding the elections that determine whether or not a group of workers are entitled to unionize;
• eliminate cumbersome pre-election procedures that allow employers to dispute who is eligible to vote in such elections;
• require the employer to turn over employee names, addresses and phone numbers early in any union organizing drive; and
• require equal access to both workers and the workplace for unions during campaigns.

All of these changes, of course, are eagerly sought by unions and their supporters.

Traditionally, the NLRB has not exercised its rulemaking authority this broadly, but instead has impacted labor struggles by adjudicating disputes on a case-by-case basis. But the NLRB’s historical reluctance to make policy through “rules” rather than case decisions may soon change.

President Obama has nominated Democrats Craig Becker and Mark Pearce, as well as Republican Brian Hayes, to join the two sitting members, Wilma Liebman, a Democrat, and Peter Schaumberg, a Republican, on the five-member NLRB governing board. Thus, if and when these three new nominations are approved by the Senate, a majority of the members of the NLRB board will be Democrats.

And not middle-of-the-road, pro-business Democrats, like the financial gurus who have steered President Obama away from trying to implement any structural changes to the country’s economic and financial systems.

Liebman, formerly with the Bricklayers and Teamsters unions, is a long-time hero to organized labor for her eloquent dissents from numerous anti-labor decisions issued by the prior, “Bush” board. She has signaled her desire to overturn many of the NLRB’s recent major decisions. Pearce is also a long-time union advocate.

But it is not Liebman or Pearce who has business interests petrified, but Becker, who currently serves as Associate General Counsel to both the Service Employees International Union and the AFL-CIO. In Becker’s writings, he has argued that employers “should be stripped any legally cognizable interest in their employees’ election of representatives.” In May of this year, the Wall Street Journal called Becker “labor’s secret weapon,” and accused him of wanting to “rig the rules to favor unionization.”

Even if Liebman, Pearce and Becker do not pursue or achieve all of labor’s goals, an NLRB board in which they constitute a majority is likely to overturn a number of significant decisions issued by the previous board. They could, at a minimum, narrow the definition of who is considered a “supervisor” (and therefore has no legal protections under federal labor law), restrict an employer’s right to limit the use of company email systems for solicitation, restrict a company’s right to file a lawsuit against a labor organization, and increase the penalties on companies that violate their workers’ legal rights.

Due to opposition from business interests, none of the three new appointees have been confirmed by the Senate, which has left the NLRB with only Liebman and Schaumberg to serve as an often-deadlocked caretaker board. Sooner or later, however, Becker and Haye’s appointments will be voted on by the full Senate, and when that happens, they will undoubtedly be confirmed. At that time, there is reason to believe that much of what organized labor hoped would be accomplished through EFCA could be accomplished through the rulemaking power of the newly constituted NLRB board.

Should this occur, the right will denounce the NLRB for reforming the country’s labor relations scheme without Congressional authorization. On the left, there will be those who feel that by acting through administrative rulemaking, the NLRB will be giving Congress yet another excuse to avoid passing EFCA.

Should the NLRB act in this way, however, it will be remedying some of the worst features of the status quo, providing needed relief in the reasonably immediate future, rather than in the roseate, hypothetical post-EFCA world. That is a result that is either fervently sought or opposed by both those who favor, and those who oppose, giving workers the ability to organize and bargain collectively through unions to increase their market share of the American dream.

Dmitri Iglitzin practices labor law in Seattle, Washington, with the firm of Schwerin Cambell Barnard Iglitzin & Lavitt. He is a frequent commentator on issues of interest to unions and working people.

by Matt Schlobohm and Charlie Urquhart

On Friday October 23, 2009 the delegates at the Maine AFL-CIO’s 27th Biennial Convention unanimously passed a resolution calling on the AFL-CIO to convene, after the current healthcare reform process in Congress concludes, a democratic strategic planning process to develop a long term strategy to win Single Payer national health insurance.

The resolution was enthusiastically supported by the delegates and is rooted in the belief that to win a Medicare for all single payer system the labor movement needs to pursue a different strategy – one that is rooted in building a broadbased social movement, taking a long term approach to this fight, organizing around basic principles and pursuing relentless rank & file education and mobilization.

Maine AFL-CIO Vice President & IBEW 567 Training Director Don Berry laid out the Federation’s position, “Most union leaders are clear that we need a single payer system to solve the healthcare crisis. Yet as a labor movement our strategy has not been clearly, solidly and unambiguously behind single payer. We think it is time for us to commit to and stick with a long term strategy to win Medicare for All. That’s the only thing that’s going to get us out of the healthcare crisis we face at the bargaining table and in society at large and its high time we put our full force behind it.”

Building on the momentum of the National AFL-CIO’s historic and unanimous passage of Resolution 34 that called for the creation of a Medicare for All, single payer social insurance program, the Maine AFL-CIO saw this resolution as an important step to making that resolution real and pursuing some important next steps.

In this spirit the Maine AFL-CIO unanimously passed the following resolution:

RESOLUTION # 5 Single Payer Healthcare Resolution

Whereas the National AFL-CIO unanimously passed Resolution 34 strongly endorsing a Medicare for All single payer health care system; Whereas 39 State AFL-CIO Federations, 134 Central Labor Councils, and 572 different labor organizations have endorsed HR 676;

Whereas as a State Federation we strongly believe that a Medicare for all national health insurance system with single payer financing is the solution that is required to solve the healthcare crisis union members face at the bargaining table and that we face collectively as a society;

Whereas regardless of how the current healthcare reform effort concludes in Congress it will not come close to solving the current healthcare crisis; Whereas historically, significant structural changes in this country have occurred when progressive forces have built powerful social movements that organize around a long term strategy that involves relentless rank & file education, organizing around basic fundamental principles, having rank & file leaders lead the movement and committing to a long term approach to the issue;

Whereas we strongly believe that to win a single payer national health insurance system the labor movement needs to pursue that kind of strategy and work to build a broad based working class social movement and; Whereas we believe that had we collectively pursued such a strategy after the last healthcare policy failure in Congress in the mid 1990s – by staking out a strong single payer position, educating our membership as deeply as possible, pushing for political support of single payer legislation and sticking with that approach for the last fifteen years – we would be in a much stronger position today to win meaningful healthcare reform;

Therefore, we call on the National AFL-CIO to convene, after the current healthcare reform process in Congress concludes, a democratic strategic planning process to develop a long term strategy to win Single Payer national health insurance. We think this process should: 1. Start with a Single Payer labor movement summit

2. Involve, among others, Central Labor Councils, State Federations and rank & file single payer union activists in the planning process

3. Do an assessment of how we’ve historically built powerful social movements in this country and put our best thinking forward about what would need to be done today to build a social movement powerful enough to win single payer

4. Include a commitment of resources from the AFL-CIO of no less than the resources that have been devoted to the current health care reform effort

5. Include a commitment from the AFL-CIO to support state’s efforts to pass single payer legislation

Matt Schlobohm is  Public Policy & Poltical Mobilization Director for  Maine AFL-CIO; Charlie Urquhart is  Organizer for the Maine Labor Group on Health