A More Perfect Union

Our Opinion/Equality requires honesty

By Cindy Gomez-Schempp
Editor

The preamble of the constitution speaks about the creation of a “more perfect union” for the common good of all people. Lately the dog-eat-dog world we live in seems to have forgotten all sense of perfecting society for the common good. Poverty and unemployment are at an all time high in America precipitating strife and collective resentments of shared injustices. The evidence is everywhere.

Approximately 40 percent of black and Latino children live in poverty, with white children at 12.5 percent. The network nightly news says one in six seniors are still working past retirement age, the highest recorded number since 1960.

Unemployment is highest among youth in their 20s to 30s, a disproportionate number of those people of color. Ironically, the 20s or 30s were the last time in history when so many of our young people had to give up their dreams by holding off college or marriage.

A sign of the times (or our unfettered stupidity): Understanding unions improve wages, safety, and working conditions for labor, people still rate them at an all time low in the last 70 years. How can anyone oppose labor unions when statistics clearly show a direct correlation between the steady decline in union memberships (since the late 1960s until now) and the plummeting wages of the middle class?

It is because we lack two things: historical perspective and racial sensitivity. This became very obvious recently when HPR received responses to last week’s editorial “The Illusion of Inclusion” dealing with racism. Specifically referring to racial epithets, nooses, and hanging monkeys by ALF-CIO union members at American Crystal Sugar, responses were extreme but not in the conventional sense. To be precise, they ranged from those who acknowledged race and racism as a factor and those who did not - at all. Some people only discussed specifics of contracts, union policies, and the distinctions between “strikes” and “lock-outs,” but managed to turn a colorblind eye on discussing race. Others excused overt racism as a “fact of life” in the world of the locked-out workers while, in the same breath, exacerbating racist stereotypes by describing the mostly black and brown replacement workers as dirty, dangerous and uncivilized. Sound familiar?

If it doesn’t, it should. Since emancipation, people of color excluded from white unions have had to fight their way into industrialized jobs as strikebreakers. Black and brown workers were frequently murdered for taking jobs as strikebreakers. Survivors were later denied entry into unions as punishment for being “rats” during union strikes, hence the historical reference to “rats” used in inflatable form throughout the country to shame those who cross picket lines. Freed black slaves and brown immigrants were so feared in the new labor market by whites President Lincoln assured whites promoting colonization and limiting immigration. This, after he “emancipated” people of color from chattel slavery and eschewed them into wage slavery saying, “[w]ith deportation, even to a limited extent enhanced wages to white labor is mathematically certain. Labor is like any other commodity in the market —increase the demand for it, and you increase the price of it. Reduce the supply of black labor, by colonizing the black laborer out of the country, and, by precisely so much, you increase the demand for, and wages of, white labor.”

Race divisions have been used throughout organized labor history to topple successful organized labor movements and pit the working and poor classes against each other. That same fetid bigotry of the past
that helped choke out unionized labor in America is now helping to slowly kill unions and the middle class.

Schmoop US History Guide on Labor Unions showed the AFL craft unions were “solidly racist” and in 1902, 43 national unions had no black members, 27 others barred black apprentices. The move proved foolish for the AFL because refusing to admit blacks assured they could be used as replacement workers during strikes. “It wasn’t until later in the twentieth century that union leaders began to look beyond their own prejudices to see that solidarity across racial lines made sense.” See Race in history of Labor Unions : http://tiny.cc/AFLrace

According to the professional firefighters of Caldonia website (see: http://tiny.cc/CIOrace), “[t]he CIO also had to confront deep racial divides in its own membership”, particularly in many United Auto Workers (UAW) plants the U.S. where white workers opposed to blacks getting promoted to production jobs staged strikes against their own brown and black union bretheren. While some CIO leadership took bold steps to exterminate hate strikes, others used weak approaches which led to plummeting union memberships among people of color at precisely the time when labor unions were at their most powerful!

These examples typify the long list of failed opportunities to unite workers against unjust employers despite examples in history of successful organized labor movements which included people of color. The steel workers industry coup by CIO members in the 1920s could not have won but for the more than 500,000 black CIO union members. Unions helped organize the Montgomery bus boycotts and Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated during a union strike. Does anyone remember the American Farm Workers of Cesar Chaves?

They do in the Red River Valley. American Crystal Sugar capitalized on beet grower fears of unionized black and brown farm labor by starting a campaign to “mechanize” in an effort to eliminate the need for people of color on their farms. With a slogan reading “The Wise have mechanized,” the propaganda circulated featured a beet farmer reading an alarming headline about California’s farm labor strikes while he placidly overlooked his perfectly manicured and mechanized fields, sans the brown or black people. Flash forward and today the headlines about union members seem to echo the same old racism of the past. For more:  http://tiny.cc/BeetBargain

The AFL-CIO leadership and American Crystal Sugar union members have to face their local history on racism and unionized labor. The wishy washy ‘we don’t condone’ the behavior sound bites heard from AFL-CIO members and the leadership is a whimper compared to the physical threats and racism roared at the mostly black and brown replacement workers. Without courageous leadership, fierce education and erradication of racism from unions, the future of organized labor is tenuous. And, the AFL-CIO already knows that.

At their 2005 convention, the AFL-CIO set forth a resolution “A Diverse Movement calls for a Diverse Leadership” in which it states people of color—admittedly the group mostly likely to benefit from unionizing —were the most underrepresented group within the AFL-CIO and the most shortchanged in the workplace. See ALF-CIO report on race here: http://tiny.cc/Diverseunion

The AFL-CIO should boldly be condemning and removing people wearing KKK garb, seen intimidating people of color or any similar monkey business instead of merely detaching themselves from the behaviors of its mostly white membership and articles like this one titled “Oh Sheet! Union Tries to Distance Itself From Racial Noose, Monkey & Rat Incident”. http://tiny.cc/OhSheet

With an American labor force increasingly comprised of people of color and white population on the decline unions don’t have a prayer of staying alive without people of color and if hanging monkeys from nooses on giant rats with demon eyes is a recruiting tactic, it’s not working.

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