ON THE LINE: LATINO'S ON LABOR'S CUTTING EDGE
While it's too early to talk about a new movement, it's certainly encouraging ful municipal unions, to the AFL-CIO itself, new leadership has revived labor's historical mandate to organize the...
...This is encouraging because a strong global labor movement is the only long term answer to the slash-and-burn labor discipline that characterizes the economic policymaking of the 1990s...
...Now the big unions are fighting for their lives, and the comfort of organizing only the well-off part of the working class is no longer an option...
...AFL-CIO unions are thus moving into the territory worked by the radical movements of the past few decades-movements < the old guard always kept at arm's length...
...And right in the middle of this revival are U.S...
...The Latinos behind these large drives are accomplishing two things: they are gaining first-time union representation for workers who have never been organized-the "farmrnworkers, drywallers, janitors, hotel workers and other low-wage workers" who Hector Figueroa tells us are spearheading the Latino labor movement-and they are revitalizing the movement as a whole...
...And sure enough, many of today's unionists were forged in the crucible of yesterday's radical struggles...
...Under the Keynesian model, sometimes dubbed "security capitalism," which ruled from the mid-1930s to the mid-1970s in the United States, a kind of truce existed between big capital and big labor...
...As labor mobilization bubbles up from below, the reformed leadership of organized labor is clearly taking note...
...cheap labor...
...Latinos now constitute about 10% of the U.S...
...Under an older form of Latin American capitalism, at least a sector of the working population had to be paid well enough to bolster a modicum of national purchasing power...
...The rebirth of militant trade unionism has a lot to do with the changing model of U.S.-and global-capitalism...
...Under the new export-oriented model, the buyers are all abroad and what counts are low costs of production-i.e...
...population, 10% of the labor force, and roughly 8% of unionized workers...
...The rebirth of a militant unionism may well mark the rebirth of a progressive political project in the United States...
...One of the labor organizers profiled in this issue, Edgar deJesus of UNITE, wrote ten years ago that Latino activists "must insist that our particular concerns...become the general demands of all labor...
...That last number may rapidly increase as the newly energized labor movement casts its sights on the country's most marginal, lowest-paid workers-workers previously ignored by the largest, most powerful unions...
...At the same time, the state provided a modicum of social security-especially unemployment insurance and old-age, survivors and disability insurance-in return for a basic loyalty to state institutions...
...and Latin American trade unionists and workers, Latin American activists have become rank-and-file U.S...
...While it's too early to talk about a new movement, it's certainly encouraging ful municipal unions, to the AFL-CIO itself, new leadership has revived labor's historical mandate to organize the unorganized and rally the oppressed...
...When you look at any large organizing drive going on today," says Linda Chavez Thompson, the new Executive Vice President of the big labor federation, "you will always find Latinos...
...The election last year of a reform slate to head the AFL-CIO has galvanized trade-union activists and may soon lead to the reversal of a three-decade decline in union membership...
...And no one has been more galvanized than Latino workers...
...labor activists who got their start not only in labor strongholds like New York and San Francisco, but in further-off coalitions by U.S...
...workers-and trade unionists...
...The most powerful unions were concentrated in the most lucrative industries-auto, steel, oil, transportation-where decent wages and benefits were traded for a quiescence on issues regarding control of the workplace, as well as a tacit agreement not to organize the unorganized...
...And Latino workers are on the line...
...It is a sign of increasingly desperate times...
...All that has broken down over the past 20 years...
...As a result of such grass-roots organizing, we will produce real militant leaders and fighters for our rights...
Vol. 30 • November 1996 • No. 3
