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It is time to update the database.
The "immigrants vs. American workers" thing is as bogus as "civil liberties vs. security." Yes, corporations want a guest-worker program because they want to keep their labor costs down. Yes, owners and employers routinely avoid paying a living wage to their workers by exploiting undocumented immigrants who can't afford to protest their dangerous working conditions, long hours, low pay, and lack of benefits. Yes, one of the things that traditionally blocks the progress of labor is the fact that there is always a poorer, more desperate, more exploitable population that can be brought into the country to do the same work for less money. The manufacturing sector has dealt with labor costs by exporting jobs to the third world; the service sector has dealt with them by bringing the third world to the jobs. That's not the immigrants' fault; that's capital's fault.
The solution to this problem is not to turn on the immigrants. People will continue to come into this country, legally or illegally, as long as it's better for them here than it is in their home countries. The more useful and less painful way to approach this problem is to say, sure, go ahead and bring in your guest workers--and we will organize them.
That, at least, is the attitude that now seems to be prevailing in the unions that are organizing in the service sector. It drives me nuts to see people just assuming that immigrants are always going to be scabs when I know from the stories my partner tells me that many of the people who are helping organize the housekeepers, the custodians, the waitresses, and fight for a living wage and fair working conditions for people in jobs which have traditionally exposed them to being treated like dirt by management and customers alike are recently-arrived immigrants. It is dangerous for anyone to get involved in organizing and it's even more dangerous for people who are always vulnerable to harassment by the INS. But they do it, and their courage and determination in putting their jobs and their futures on the line to make things better for their brothers and sisters is an inspiration and an admonishment to me.
The problem is coming from the top, not the bottom. When I was doing my union-themed 40 Ways entry a couple days ago I called my partner up to ask her whether something I was planning to say about the Taft-Hartley act outlawing sympathetic strikes was right. She said no, the Taft-Hartley act doesn't outlaw sympathetic strikes. But, she said, I'll tell you what the real problem is with strikes in this country: the National Labor Relations Board has decided to allow companies to permanently replace striking workers. This, according to her, should be considered a coercive practice and therefore illegal under the National Labor Relations Act--but the NLRB, dominated as it is by Republican appointees, doesn't choose to interpret the law that way. So as soon as union local goes on strike, the company is free to hire as many replacement workers as it wants, thanks to its friends in Washington.
This is the kind of thing we should focus on changing--the roadblocks that have been generated since the 1930s to make it harder and harder for workers to organize and harder and harder for unions to make a real impact. The manufacturing sector in America is dying fast, with or without a guest worker program, because everything that can be sent to Mexico or China or Indonesia has already been sent there. The only thing that's going to bring those jobs back to the US is either--as we like to say in the Plaidder household--HUGELY PUNITIVE TARIFFS!, or an increase in the global standard of living that makes overseas labor more expensive. I don't see either happening any time soon, though we might hope. The service industries, however, cannot be outsourced; you cannot ship a hotel room to China. Organizing those workers is the real future of labor in America and it cannot be done without the active participation and leadership of workers who have come to this country as immigrants.
The problem comes from the top, not the bottom. The rules are made at the top. If you turn on the people below you because you're afraid they will steal the pittance that has been allotted to you, all you're doing is accepting big capital's terms. As long as you accept the rules, you will never change the outcome of the game.
C ya,
The Plaid Adder
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