TRANSNATIONAL LABOR, THEN AND NOW: Century Old IWW

Century-old Industrial Workers of the World Still Offer Prescription for World Peace

The IWW is one hundred years old this spring but its political goals are just what we need today to promote peace and justice in the world. Farmworker organizer and musician Baldemar Velasquez continues the legacy of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). In 1905 the IWW founders saw themselves as an alternative to the American Federation of Labor (AFL). While the AFL generally confined itself to organizing white, male, skilled non migrant urban workers, the IWW members, or “Wobblies,” as they were dubbed, opened up their unions to women, African Americans, Mexicans, and people working temporary and “unskilled” jobs like ditch diggers and crop harvesters. While the American Federation of Labor was busy lobbying for immigration restrictions, the IWW conducted meetings in several languages, printed their publications in Spanish and English, and focused on recruiting new arrivals to the United States. The AFL organized along the lines of particular trades which made it easy for the bosses to pit one group of workers against another in a particular industry. In contrast, the IWW’s goal was to organize whole industries. The AFL put the national interests of U.S. workers above all others, but IWW promoted ONE BIG UNION, a labor federation that crossed all national borders. One century later workers face multinational corporations who use organizations like the IMF and the WTO to protect their global interests. Companies like Halliburton wave the red white, and blue to recruit soldiers to fight their battles for them, while pledging allegiance to the flag of cheap labor. One hundred years after the founding of the IWW, we need that ONE BIG UNION more than ever. Imagine if there was no place for oil companies, sneaker manufacturers, and agribusiness to go for cheaper labor; if every apple harvester from Chile to Minnesota belonged to the same labor federation; if every worker in the global soccer-ball industry carried the same union card; if every worker made a living wage, with safe and dignified working conditions; if no community was toxic-waste dumping grounds. Who would need barbed wire borders? What reason would there be to go to war? Is this a utopian pipe dream? No. In the last ten years AFL-CIO locals have been taking the first steps toward realizing this vision. They are organizing immigrant workers, with or without documents, and working with unions in other countries to build cross-border solidarity to stop runaway shops. One of the leaders of both of these progressive labor trends is Baldemar Velasquez, the president and founder of the Midwest Farm Labor Organization Committee AFL-CIO, based in Ohio. Velasquez has been working within the AFL-CIO to organize those sectors of the worker forces left to the marginalized Industrial Workers of the World 100 years ago. In addition, he is a leader of international efforts to promote labor solidarity across borders. Velasquez thinks and works locally and globally. Like the legendary IWW singer and songwriter Joe Hill, Baldemar Velasquez is a musician as well as a labor organizer. On April 9 Velasquez came to the Twin Cities to do a concert to raise funds for Centro Campesino, an organization by and for migrant workers in Southern Minnesota.Velasquez and his Aguila Negra Band sang old labor songs, Mexican folk ballads and new music of the labor and antiglobalization movements. Velasquez sprinkled stories of current struggle between his songs. His performance feeds the brain, the heart, and the soul.

IMMIGRATION, GLOBAL VIEW: When the Walls Come Tumbling Down

Dateline: June 7, 20XX:

Jerusalem is aglow with color and light; teeming with people from every corner of the globe. The third annual international labor convention, GLOBAL3, is about to begin.
GLOBAL1 set worldwide wage and benefit standards, making it impossible for corporations to find cheaper labor costs by moving to impoverished regions or inducing super-exploited workers to migrate for jobs offering substandard wages. Overnight, centuries of inequalities began to vanish as workers everywhere began receiving just wages for their work. But there was still much to be done.

GLOBAL2 set about designating reparations needed to adjust for centuries of environmental devastation, neglect of health and education and other basic human needs, and robbery of natural resources in oppressed regions. Creating sustainable local economies enhanced by global fair-trade networks is the focus of GLOBAL3.

The delegates are easily identified. They all wear colorful ribbons designating their union, ethnic group, and country. They all have wires attached to their ears, since everything that is said is simultaneously translated into any language, and all are carrying tote bags, with the number 3 in rainbow colors against a tan background. The bags hold conference schedules, guides to Jerusalem, commemorative coffee cups and two little pebbles. One represents the wall that once divided Israelis from Palestinians, the other—the wall that once divided Mexico from the United States.

The walls came down a few months after GLOBAL2. Without inequitable wage scales and with reparations there was no longer a need for walls to hold people from each other. The guns and army tanks that fortified these walls have also been removed. People began crossing borders to resolve conditions of the heart and soul rather than for economic need. Loved ones were reunited. Others moved to “find themselves” in the places that suited their temperaments best.

The delegates’ first task is to decide how best to spend their three weeks at the conference. There are thousands of workshops to choose from. Only one is required, it is entitled: “Never Again: Learning from 2006.”

There is no set canon for this workshop. Many presenters offer their evidence and theories for the delegates to consider. Still, there are some common themes, and the basic facts to review. 2006 was the year the United States sent the armed National Guard to protect the United States from working people in Mexico seeking jobs across the border. That was when construction began on a 350-mile wall between the two countries. It was the same year that Israel built its so-called “separation barrier” walling in Palestinians, depriving them of water rights and access to productive land, and blocking essential food and medical aid.

Many panelists are quick to point out that the walls were only symptomatic of long-term policies in Israel/ Palestine and the U.S./ Mexican border: seizing land, stealing natural resources like water and oil, creating wage differentiations based on race, ethnicity, nationality, and religion, and a super-exploited migrant labor system. Always, state-supported violence was needed to hold these systems of inequality in place. In addition, many panelists emphasize the role of racism in upholding these systems of inequality. They argue that negative stereotypes kept working people across borders of race, nationality, religion, and ethnicity from uniting.

One panelist provides a quick review of the history of the immigration debate in the United States in 2006. She shows slides of “minutemen” volunteering to build the wall in San Diego on the Mexican border. The crowd breaks into peals of laughter when someone cracks that they don’t even appear to have a minute’s worth of humanity.

The panelist does not laugh. She holds up her hand to silence the crowd. “Yes, we can laugh now,” she says. “But we must not forget how easy it is for people to be fooled into thinking that those with a different language, religion, ethnicity, history, are to blame for the oppressed conditions imposed by elites. For example,” she continues, “remember that in 2006 government officials and citizens’ groups were calling for an English-only United States.” She pauses for effect, as the crowd gasps and guffaws. “Yes, I know it sounds absurd now . . .”

She pauses to let the point sink in and then ends with: “My friends, the events of 2006 are now a receding nightmare. To keep the walls and wars from happening again, we must learn to forgive these trespasses against humanity. But making sure that it is never again will also require that we never forget.”

The next speaker takes an entirely different tack. “The second half of 2006 was the beginning of the Great Coalition. Antiwar forces came together with immigrant-rights advocates. The labor movement, already showing its backbone in the early months of the year through its participation in the burgeoning immigrant-rights movement, began to see itself as the glue that connected peace and immigrant-rights causes. They began to speak of a ‘human-rights movement without borders.’ Many of the policies passed during GLOBAL1 and GLOBAL2 were beginning to be discussed during that long summer. The mass mobilizations of that fall were unprecedented in size and diversity. We must never forget how, in one local community after another, turf and territory receded and solidarity moved from slogan to core emotion. We would do well to study this transformation so that we never move backward.”

The workshop ends there, and the delegates, exhausted but enlightened, head for the best potluck in the history of the world.

LATIN AMERICA LEFT: Thoughts about the Mexican Election on September 11, 2006

Thoughts about the Mexican Election on September 11, 2006

When I used to teach U.S./ Mexican relations at the University of Minnesota, there was always a student who would brush his or her hand in the air dismissively and pronounce, sometimes with a smirk, other times with a look of genuine concern and frustration: “Why don’t the Mexicans care for their own people? Why do Mexicans put up with so much corruption?” In response I would acknowledge that Mexican history is indeed rife with examples of government corruption. I would then embark on a semester-long project to erase two areas of ignorance, common to so many of us educated in the United States. 1. Ignorance of the United States. The comments assume that Mexican corruption and inequality make it a society apart; that its history can not be compared to that of one’s own, in this case, the United States. There is a racist assumption here: that what is wrong with Mexico is cultural. But mostly there is a profound ignorance of U.S. history. As we make our way through the semester and through the decades, comparing and contrasting the U.S. and Mexican experiences, the parallels are astonishing. From the U.S.-Mexican War when both governments were motivated by a desire to conquer indigenous groups and both woefully mistreated their conscripts, to the Bush/Fox administration under which privatization is the watchword, and electoral victory at any cost is the practice. Overlaying these parallels is a consistent tale of robbery. The United States government, in cahoots with big business, steals Mexican land, oil, food, and workers, impoverishing the Mexican majority, depleting resources for generations to come, while a tiny Mexican elite holds the door open and shares in the profits. One hundred and sixty years ago Mexico lost half its territory to the United States. Today Halliburton and other oil interests wait eagerly for the new president, Felipe Calderon, to fulfill his promise to privatize PEMEX, Mexico’s state-owned oil company, cutting the heart out of Mexico’s economic sovereignty. 2. Ignorance of Mexican social movements. The student’s remarks also reveal a common false assumption about the Mexican people; that they are docile, willing to put up with ever greater amounts of corruption. It has to do with conflating the Mexican government with Mexican people, and with a misunderstanding of how in Mexico, as in the rest of the world, class interests usually trump national ones. Then there is our basic ignorance of the remarkable history of Mexican resistance. Not that we have learned much about U.S. resistance either. When we study both together we can see that here too, there are historical parallels. At the end of the 19th century U.S. workers and farmers rebelled against railroads conglomerates, many of whom were the same companies and individuals that gained control of Mexican mines and agriculture, inspiring Mexicans to engage in revolution. In the 1930s, U.S. workers, farmers, farm workers, students, and veterans engaged in mass protests and Mexican workers, peasants, and students took over takeovers of mines, universities, and plantations in response to the Great Depression. Likewise, in the late 1960s, huge demonstrations against U.S. imperialism occurred in both nations. However, there is no denying a general difference of degree: The people in the U.S. protest; Mexicans revolt. While students in the United States might be able to stage a one-day sit-in to protest a tuition increase, or effort to break a union on campus, in Mexico, teachers, students, and workers shut down the national university (UNAM) for months at a time on a regular basis, to protest wage decreases, tuition increases, or efforts to curtail academic freedom. Today, as Mexico faces a fraudulent election, the losing candidate, Lopez Obrador, is promising to create a parallel government. If that sounds unlikely to those of us who grew up in the United States, it is because we have no experience with that level of political action. We can hardly imagine Al Gore or John Kerry making such a declaration. The Democratic Party is too invested in the status quo to risk unleashing such a social movement in the U.S.. In Mexico, however, there is a long tradition of parallel governing structures, erected when the powers that be are unresponsive to the demands of the people. According to the Associated Press (August 29, 2006), Lopez Obrador likes to see himself as the modern-day Benito Juárez, who ran a parallel government during the French occupation of Mexico in the 1860s. There are many other precedents, however. During the colonial period up until the eve of the revolution in 1910, regional indigenous political structures existed parallel to the official colonial and post-colonial government. Emiliano Zapata himself was one of those local leaders whose power was legitimized by his ability to address the demands of his people. During the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) there were no less than four parallel governments at one point. And of course the Zapatistas in Chiapas have been operating since 1994 within their own regional autonomous governing structure. As I write, what began as a teachers’ strike in Oaxaca has become a regional revolt. The coalition of teachers, students, indigenous groups, and others has wrested control of the region from the official government. Now there is talk of throwing their support behind Lopez Obrador’s “legitimate government.” Why is the soil so much more fertile for grassroots democracy in Mexico? I can’t tell you for sure, but I don’t believe it has anything to do with superior ethnic or cultural ways. Rather it has to do with the hundreds of years of Spanish colonialism and U.S. imperialism that have left Mexicans with less to lose and more to win when they unite and fight. We, the ordinary people in the United States, have always been in an awkward in-between position. We are oppressed by multinational corporations who lower our wages to increase their profits, yet at the same time we profit from sweatshop conditions in places like Mexico that provide us with lower consumer prices, and Mexican workers who cross borders and provide cheap labor that lowers the cost of food and services in the United States. Understanding the complex economic relationship between Mexico and the U.S. without blaming Mexican workers (for leaving home to seek better-paying work) is a huge challenge. Instead of feeling threatened by Mexican immigrants, U.S. workers would be better served by analyzing the commonalities they have with the Mexican working class. If racism was not part of the equation, Mexican and U.S. workers working together would prove a formidable bloc to the globalized corporate structure that defines so much suffering and exploitation in North and South America.