In Holcomb, Kansas, Tyson Foods was forced to close its nonunion beef processing plant on April 10 because so many workers joined a rally in nearby Garden City. The 3,100 workers at that massive slaughterhouse are fighting to unionize. This show of strength in a broader social struggle invigorated their organizing fight. It put a lie to the earlier claim by plant manager Paul Karkiainen that union supporters in the factory don’t “represent the majority of our employees.”

Such stories have been repeated at workplaces around the country. Many in the labor movement are pointing out that these walkouts are worth emulating.

And the bosses are getting uneasy.

The April 11 Wall Street Journal noted that “employers across the country got their first taste of worker absenteeism and lower sales” from the April 10 rallies. “They’re nervous. They could be crippled,” David Whitlock, an Atlanta attorney for a number of bosses that employ immigrants, told the big-business daily. The paper warned that the demonstrations “could foreshadow what may be a bigger national boycott planned for May 1.”

The sheer size and spread of these protests have forced a deadlock in the debate in Washington on the various immigration “reform” measures under discussion. The legislation that has galvanized the protesters, the Sensenbrenner bill, which would criminalize all undocumented immigrants, has effectively been scuttled. Whatever law that is eventually passed will undoubtedly include restrictions favoring the employers. But Washington is hesitating on how far to go in face of what millions of workers are accomplishing through sustained mobilizations.

Richard Lowry, writing in the March 28 issue of the conservative magazine National Review, noted with alarm that the rallies are “ominous” because of “their hint of a large, unassimilated population existing outside America’s laws and exhibiting absolutely no sheepishness about it.”

It is precisely “sheepishness” that bosses try to instill by keeping a large pool of immigrants with fewer rights than the rest of the working class. They know that large influxes of labor due to unceasing immigration increase competition for jobs and put downward pressure on wages—as the law of supply and demand dictates under capitalism.

At the same time, the masses of foreign-born workers entering the U.S. are enriching the political and union experience of the working class, broadening its historical and cultural horizons. U.S.-born workers are learning important lessons from the unity and determination immigrant workers have displayed in their recent walkouts and demonstrations. Foreign-born workers are strengthening the fighting capacity and battle experience of the entire labor movement, as they are themselves changing by beginning to shed anti-Black and other prejudices.

The struggle for legalization of all the undocumented is now intertwined with the fortunes of the U.S. labor movement. The next national mobilization is called for May 1. There is no better way to celebrate the international day of the working class than to join the May Day walkouts and rallies that Wall Street so fears.
 
 
Related articles:
Half million in D.C.
125,000 in New York
Hundreds of thousands skip work to join rallies
April 9-10 Actions for Immigrant Rights by State and City  
 
 
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