Vol. 77/No. 17      May 6, 2013

Militant/Naomi Craine

March in Miami April 6 demands halt to deportations and legalization of immigrant workers.

The following statement was released April 23 by the Socialist Workers Party election campaign ticket in Seattle of Mary Martin for mayor, Edwin Fruit for City Council Position 6 and John Naubert for port commissioner.

Working people here in the U.S. and around the world face an assault by bosses on our living standards, working conditions, solidarity and very dignity under the impact of the deepening crisis of capitalism. Life and limb are at stake in the exploiters’ profit drive, as the explosion in West, Texas, has brought into stark relief. This poses the burning need to build and strengthen unions today.

Organized labor is in the center of their gun sights — from miners employed by Patriot Coal to bus drivers in New York City to sugar workers in the Upper Midwest. The aim is to crush our basic defense organizations, the unions, whose membership stands at its lowest level in nearly a century and whose fighting capacity has been sapped by decades of the officialdom’s collaboration with the bosses and their political parties.

Working-class unity is constantly interrupted by capitalists’ efforts to divide and weaken our ranks. Jobless and employed are forced to compete as commodities in the “labor market.” Denial of rights to some and other forms of oppression are used to sow divisions and drive down the wages of all.

Under Jim Crow segregation, African-Americans were legally branded as second-class citizens with fewer rights. While union officials refused to organize a social movement to support the struggle for Black liberation, the South remained unorganized with the lowest wages. All of labor throughout the U.S. suffered and this colossal failure still reverberates today.

Today there are more than 11 million fellow workers legally branded without the basic rights of citizenship, subject to arrest, harassment, deportation and separation from their families at any time. This is one of the biggest bludgeons wielded against the working class, used to substantially drive down our wages and working conditions over the last several decades.

Championing the fight for the rights of undocumented immigrants and legalization is a life-or-death question for labor today. This must go hand in hand with the call: “Wherever you were born, whatever language you speak, let’s organize, join together, stand up and fight. Let’s build our unions and bring union power to bear against the common exploiter.” A strong and united labor movement could fight for a massive government-funded public works program to put millions of unemployed to work and deal a further blow to capitalist-fostered competition among working people.

In 2000 the AFL-CIO set an important example when it reversed its decades-long anti-working-class position on immigration and called on the U.S. government to grant amnesty to all undocumented immigrants, as top labor officials began to grapple with steps needed to reverse declining unionization.

The reform bills under discussion today offer a road — a long and arduous one — to legal status for millions. They also include a raft of anti-working-class measures designed to maintain a pool of superexploitable immigrant labor for the bosses. These include expansion of “guest worker” programs, stepped-up enforcement and stiffer penalties for violations of immigration law, moves toward a national ID card and extension of E-Verify government database checks. The AFL-CIO’s support for the current bills under discussion in Congress represents a retreat from the example it set just 13 years ago.

The Socialist Workers Party urges all workers to join actions across the country on May Day to demand legalization. May Day — International Workers Day — was born in 1886 in Chicago as part of the struggle for the eight-hour workday. The historic working-class holiday was reborn in 2006 when some 2 million immigrant workers nationwide shut down factories and took to the streets to demand legalization. That kind of fighting spirit is exactly what we need today.

Capitalism’s thirst for immediate profit has brought workers together from every corner of the globe. This in turn has strengthened the working class with a breadth of class-struggle experience that helps broaden our world outlook and internationalist spirit. This makes it a little easier to see that, just as the penetration of capital and the bosses’ use of wage disparities respects no borders, neither can our struggles. There is no avoiding the reality that workers must organize not only across all divisions of nationality in the U.S., but across the border into Mexico and beyond.

The government’s immigration debate takes place as the fight for immigrant rights is winning broader sympathy among native-born workers. The door has been cracked open — now is the time to come into the streets and kick it down in the name of labor solidarity.

Full legalization for undocumented workers without restrictions! No more firings and deportations! End E-Verify! The working class must confront the bosses assault on labor under the banner of: Legalize! Organize! Unionize!
 
 
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