Vol. 77/No. 18      May 13, 2013

The world capitalist crisis is intensifying competition among working people and driving the propertied rulers’ unremitting assaults on us. Millions are unemployed. Those with a job feel the lash of employer speed-up. From Bangladesh to West, Texas, we’re paying with life and limb for the bosses’ profit drive.

The employing class is looking to weaken our solidarity and to pit worker against worker: employed against jobless, young against old, Caucasian against Black, male against female, native-born against foreign-born. Meanwhile, the size and strength of our unions continue to decline, as they have for decades. Less than 7 percent of privately employed workers in the United States are union members, the smallest percentage since before the battles that built the industrial unions in the 1930s.

These facts and the working-class resistance taking place today — from fights by the United Mine Workers union in Appalachia and Utah to battles of sanitation workers against Republic Services — sharply pose the need to build and strengthen our unions. We need to bring union power to bear, to reach out and organize the tens of millions of unorganized and to champion social struggles that cut across boss-fostered divisions. We need to strengthen the unity, confidence and combativeness of the working class.

That’s why it’s a life-or-death question that all of labor join the fight against the firings, deportations and criminalization of the more than 11 million workers who lack “proper” government papers.

To the capitalist rulers all working people are “illegal.” We’re all a class of outlaws — from immigrants to “felons,” from striking or locked-out employees, to African-Americans stopped and frisked for making “furtive movements,” to “white trash” who in the words of the U.S. president “cling to guns or religion.”

We are one working class. We need to act as one and say with a united voice:

“We don’t care what language you speak, what side of the border you were born on or whether you did time in prison. Your ‘papers’ have meaning only to the bosses and their government.

“Let’s organize, stand up and fight together. For higher wages, for health care for all, for a massive public works program to put the jobless to work at union-scale wages, and for knocking down any kind of prejudice and discrimination, all of which strengthen the hand of the bosses against the working class.”

The Democratic and Republican party politicians who wrote the immigration reform bill now before Congress have a different goal: maintaining a super-exploitable layer of workers with fewer rights, as the rulers step up their policing of working people.

That’s why the bill expands so-called guest worker programs, allocates billions for more la migra cops and stricter border enforcement, and imposes mandatory E-Verify by bosses to check the immigration status of every worker they hire. It’s why the bill takes steps toward a national ID card to use to blacklist and victimize militant workers. All this while holding out a decade-plus-long, twisting, pothole-filled “road to citizenship.”

From the coal mines to the fields, from meatpacking plants and garment shops to steel mills and fast-food restaurants, we need to demand: No firings or deportations. No E-Verify or other “background checks.” No “guest worker” or other second-class status. Release the tens of thousands of workers detained by the immigration cops.

Strengthen solidarity in action.

Organize! Unionize!
 
 
Related articles:
May Day actions across US defend immigrant rights
 
 
 
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