"You're never strong enough that you dont need help" Why business wants you to fear the Latino

The quote is from Cesar Chavez. Solidarity is the key to overcoming poverty and wealth disparity, the two greatest ills our country faces. That is why those who enjoy being on the rich side of the disparity equation are using the tactic of Divide and Conquer---and one of their goals is to take down our nation’s labor unions.

In the last year of his life, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, expanded his struggle beyond Civil Rights for African-Americans to economic justice for the world’s poor. You probably do not hear much about this, for a reason. It is a sore topic with this nation’s elite. Much safer to portray King as a man looking out for his own ethnic group. Too much altruism for Native Americans or Hispanics or people from other countries might encourage Americans to become altruistic.

In a speech given in 1967, King said

http://www.counterpunch.org/mlk04042007.html



He started the “Poor People’s Campaign”.

http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=70249dbd9fda62fb3096809b559bfdbf



King’s last speech was to striking sanitation workers, whom he urged to remain steadfast in spite of temporary hardships.

In an interview, Angela Davis suggests that King’s assassination may have occurred because of the redirection of his movement.

http://www.marxists.org/history/usa/workers/black-panthers/1998/01/x01.htm



Over a century ago, Engels predicted that labor would have a stormy course in the United States, due to problems caused by race and immigration.



Engels underestimated the crafty American bourgeois, which did not wait passively. Nowadays, it hires union-busters almost 90% of the time if a new union is forming at a plant. And throughout the course of U.S. history, it has fomented racial divides and animosity between immigrant groups, in order to create one underpaid “serf” class after another. This has also served to refocus working class anger away from the real causes of the people's economic suffering and onto a vulnerable scapegoat. For, as Max Webber stated so perceptively, in the U.S. businessmen approach money making as a game devoid of all moral rules.

An example which has lessons for us today can be found in the case of Chinese immigrant laborers of the 19th century who were imported by businessmen. Because of their very obvious physical and ethnic differences, they became convenient scapegoats whenever there was a downturn in the economy. This lead labor unions to enact boycotts, riots and to support legislation that made life in the U.S. a living hell for Chinese immigrants. Meanwhile, those who arrived on the nation’s eastern coast had a much easier time. This legal second class citizenship proved to be a self fulfilling prophecy. Chinese workers, whose families had to stay at home in China where a very small amount of money provided a living wage and who were forbidden by law from marrying White women, could then be counted upon to work for low wages. No union would have them.

http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/chinese-boycott/

This is just the way that some people---especially Republicans pushing for “guest worker” visas would like to see Latino workers treated in this country. Note that the presence of the contract Chinese, those who made low wages, stigmatized the free laboring Chinese as well. Angry White workers did not reserve their prejudice for those Asians who were actually driving down wages. Racism does not work that way. Soon, they believed that all Chinese were bad for the country.

As I demonstrate in my most recent journal, the anti-Latino-immigrant movement in this country has a sub text that is racist, using the classic arguments that Nazis have used against Jews and the Klan has used against Blacks and everyone made against the Chinese in the last century.

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/McCamy%20Taylor/98

In large parts of the South, where it is still socially acceptable in many circles to preach open racism or ethnic prejudice, and in a few other parts of the country, too, you can witness Klan rallies and skinhead marches and hear people calling for the extermination of these “pedophiles” and “terrorists” and “genetic inferiors”. Since this is a country where messages spread, via the internet and word of mouth and right wing radio and Fox News and more subtle propaganda on the corporate news, a watered down version of this racist style message is making its way through the country. And, as with the treatment of the Chinese in the last century, which did not limit itself to prejudice against the indentured, this new anti-Latino racism does not stop with the so called “Illegals”. Prejudice is irrational. Hate crimes have been committed against citizens, because they have Hispanic surnames. If this racism is allowed to go unchecked, job discrimination can be expected to become more common against Latinos, as well as education discrimination, housing discrimination----who wants to be required to prove that their employee or tenant is legal in the face of draconian laws requiring proof of citizenship? How many Americans have the courage to stand up for strangers they do not even know when their neighbors are ranting about them?



This is a quote from someone who should have known better. The issue of poverty and income disparity, both here and in Mexico does not suffer because we also discuss the racist style attacks which members of the KKK and the NeoNazis are making against Latinos. The issue of union busting through the creation of a serf class of laborers is not removed from the table, because we consider what it does to the national psyche to teach our children to hate another group for the crime of being different.

I want to talk first about the issue of scab labor, since this is one which many people on the left bring up, when they claim that immigration is a clear cut economic issue. As I mentioned above, racist messages are not targeted. Soon, all Hispanics, particularly those in the South, will find themselves ostracized. This will make them easy pickings for employers looking for cheap labor. As even legal and citizen Latinos are forced into second class status, they will assume the place which African-Americans have been abandoning, as the underpaid, scab workforce which employers have used to bust unions and keep labor down---and this is the saddest irony of all----sometimes with the help of the union members themselves.

Divide and conquer tactics only work if you let them. Time after time, workers in America have given in to their own prejudices and in the process have shot themselves in the foot. Or, they have sought to make gains by denying others opportunities, even though this has ended up creating a class of virtual serfs with whom they have had to compete.

The history of American labor unions and African-Americans provides a good example of that.

http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1997/summer/american-labor-movement.html

This document describes how, after Reconstruction, unions deliberately excluded Blacks. This allowed industry and business to employee Blacks at reduced wages. White workers would complain and insist that the bosses fire the Blacks and hire Whites at increased wages. In one such case, the courts said “No, the only legal remedy is for the employers to keep the Black employees and pay them wages equal to the Whites.” The White union members did not want to hear this, since their racism was so deeply ingrained that they could not bear the thought of a Black making as much as them and working alongside them, even though the court’s solution would have corrected the underlying problem of an oppressed exploited class driving down wages.


Since Blacks were alienated from White workers and since they were paid low wages, they were often called in as scabs or strike breakers. This only made things worse. In addition, many African-Americans were in low paying jobs in the agricultural sector, which did not get Social Security or other protections during the Depression. It wasn’t until WWII, when the country needed all the labor it could get that the feds began mandating equal pay for equal work.

There is also a more cynical theory, namely that some union officials deliberately excluded certain groups from their ranks in an effort to reduce the labor supply.

http://s50780.sites40.storefront-hosting.com/detail.aspx?ID=173



While this might have been effective on a micro scale---say in a certain mill or mine---in a macro scale, the policy was nothing but trouble for labor in this country. The capitalist could always call upon an underclass of oppressed Black workers to break a strike if he wanted to. He could keep down wages by threatening to hire Blacks---who could be beaten to a pulp by police if they tried to organize. All the boss had to do was to make sure that the African-American workers were never hired long enough at high enough wages to emerge from poverty, since a Black middle class working class would have been the end of anti-Black racism in this country.

Since the 1960s, African-Americans have begun joining the nation’s unions. They have also been allowed, finally, to vote, receive educations, compete on a much more equal basis for jobs. This has robbed the nation’s employers of a powerful union busting tool and a cheap source of labor. Plus, the AFL-CIO has begun to make a push towards unionizing Latino immigrants, including undocumented or “illegal” immigrants in recent years.

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?articleId=12297



Here is a recent example.

The Smithfield Company has a long troubled history of union busting activity much of which involves having a large police presence at its facility every time a union vote is taken. Finally a court ordered that the company had to allow a union vote away from the company’s work site. Two months later, the company joined the ICE and IMAGE program of the federal government, which would allow it to send in the IDs of workers it suspected of being “illegals.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/28/AR2007012801172.html




Just to prove that this is not an isolated case and that the Bush administration was not used, check out this quote from an a government official:

http://la-nueva-raza.blogspot.com/2007/11/article-ties-between-immigration-raids.html



Funny, the way I understand it, the law says that it is illegal for ICE to arrest people who are turned in because of their union activity.


Predictably, ICE and IMAGE have received a lukewarm reception from business leaders who do not have a union problem which they have to take care of.



While the AFL/CIO is trying to organize all immigrants, regardless of status, in order to keep Latinos from being used as a serf or scab form of labor, some of its members are drinking the anti-immigrant Kool Aid.

http://aseonline.org/main.cfm?ShowNav=ASEPubs&article_id=3015&edition_id=37§ion=news2



Even some African-Americans are sipping that Kool Aid (ain't the politics of Divide and Conquer something). Below is an excerpt from New Orleans Racist Atrocity—One Year After: Race, Class and the Fight for a Workers America :Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!



There are only two solutions to the problem of undocumented immigrants that are practical (the border fence is not). The guest worker program is the dream of the employer. We will have a legal serf class of low wage workers, just like the "Coolies" from the 19th Century that everyone in the U.S. can hate. The other solution is that of the AFL-CIO, Dennis Kucinich and me---that is put immigrants who are needed for jobs in the U.S. on the road to citizenship and allow them to join unions with full protection against harassment. At the same time, eliminate "Right to Work Laws" and other union busting tactics that keep workers in this country living in relative poverty (which means getting out and voting for candidates that represent your interests and not the interests of your corporate masters). That will do a lot more to improve our lives than calling Latinos "dirty" and "pedophile" and putting them on buses bound for Mexico.

Cesar Chavez was correct. United we stand. Divided we fall. The workers of the world have never benefited by going at each others' throats.

early 1970's. He was truly a great soul.

Excellent piece, McCamy! :applause:


Is the grape boycott Chavez started over yet? I really miss my Waldorf!:hi: