The slogan of a fighting labor movement should be: "Organize immigrant workers into the unions now!" This can be a big step toward ending the divisions between "legal" and "illegal," and native and foreign-born that can cripple union power and the potential for struggle by working people. The anti-immigrant campaigns by the employers, their governments, and rightist forces, such as Patrick Buchanan in the United States and Jörg Haider in Austria, are deadly threats to all working people.

Continuing to deny immigrants equal rights subjects a layer of the working population to extreme exploitation at the hands of the bosses, denial of rights by the government, and victimization through summary deportations and rightist attacks.

Despite their intentions, the propertied families the world over are internationalizing the working class. The capitalists do not set out to do most of the things that inevitably result from the way their system works. But from one end of the globe to the other, toilers are migrating in larger numbers than ever before in human history, drawn by the changing needs of capital. Once in the United States, New Zealand, Austria, or other imperialist centers, the employers seek to make super profits off their labor by justifying a second-class status for immigrants. The bosses then begin organizing to deny them schooling, medical care, and social benefits.

Vanguard militants and all working people should welcome this internationalization of our class and the crumbling of borders. Despite the intentions of the capitalists, breaking down the borders weakens the employer-fostered competition between workers of different nationalities, and widens the cultural scope and world view of the working class. It brings new experiences into the workers movement and strengthens the potential fighting power of our organizations.

Immigrant workers are showing by their actions that this is true. Fighting for equal rights for immigrants and the ending of all aspects of second-class status imposed on them under capitalism will be a big blow to the employers, and widens the possibilities for expanding and making stronger the unions today. It will increase the potential for the unions to "act deliberately as organizing centers of the working class in the broad interests of its complete emancipation." This is the course Karl Marx, the founder of scientific socialism and a determined and unswerving leader of the early working-class movement, outlined in "Trade Unions: their past, present, and future," a resolution adopted by the first congress of the International Working Men's Association in 1866. This course holds true today.  
 
 
 
And show union power on the job!  
{editorial} 
 
 
There is one overriding fact about the employer's offensive against the unions and working people: they are pushing workers to the brink on the conditions of work and life on the job. From longer hours, to the pace and intensity of work, to the gutting of minimal safety procedures, to plain backbreaking labor, the bosses are making it nearly physically impossible for tens of millions keep working.

There is a pressing need to bring union power to bear on the job to gain control over the pace of work and the ability of the bosses to crank up the pace of production at will. The seeds of the ability to do so lie in the growing number of strikes and skirmishes where workers insist the main issue is not wages, even though that is important, but dignity and respect. They demand to be treated by the bosses like human beings, not animals.

Productivity figures released by the Labor Department graphically show what is going on: workers produced 3 percent more per hour in 1999 than the previous year; for the fourth quarter the figure was an astounding 6.4 percent. This comes directly from the harsher conditions of labor that workers face and speedup on the job that is tearing apart bodies and lives of tens of millions.

In Capitalism's World Disorder, Jack Barnes makes the point that in many industries "thousands of immigrant workers and other workers who have become desperate for a job offer their limbs in exchange for a weekly wage. That is the bargain in more and more meatpacking plants in the country. The frequency of carpal tunnel and other repetitive motion injuries is staggering. Normal use of hands, shoulders, necks, vertebrae, and tendons is lost--sometimes forever. Not to mention injuries from knives and machinery. It is not just selling your labor power; it is selling life and limb.

"The working class fought bloody battles over the last two centuries, as industrial capitalism expanded, to make sure we would not face these kinds of conditions as a norm. We built unions and fought to end all forms of physical bondage. We fought for laws that took away the "right" for anyone to sell themselves--or any little piece of themselves. It was working people who fought for this: for human beings to not be treated like commodities."

The potential to wage this struggle today can been seen in countless ways: from longshoremen fighting the extension of nonunion labor on the docks, to women taking their place in labor struggles in steel and other industries, to the efforts to win union recognition by textile workers, truckers, airline workers, and others.

Such a struggle can also strengthen possibilities for workers and farmers to defend Social Security, which is also under attack by the bipartisan gang in Washington. Asserting our humanity, our right to cradle-to-grave protection against the vicissitudes of life under capitalism, and why workers should have a guaranteed income in retirement free from the fortunes of a particular company or union retirement plan, is central to the fight to keep the capitalists from tearing the working class apart.

Government officials complain that Social Security was never meant for a time when workers would live much past retirement. The fact that workers can on the average live past retirement age is a conquest of the struggles of working people, not a change of heart by the employers who are, in fact, driving in the opposite direction. Charting a course to use union power on the job is another front in transforming the unions into revolutionary instruments of the working class and champions of every cause that advances the emancipation of humanity from the brutal system of capitalism.  
 
 
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