A ‘Union’ That Pushes to Deport People Is the Labor Movement's Opponent by Alexandra Bradbury, Labor Notes, Feb. 18 https://labornotes.org/blogs/2021/02/viewpoint-union-pushes-deport-people-labors-opponent
What if I told you an employer had agreed that it could no longer make any change to policies affecting members without “prior affirmative consent” from the union? Wow, you might say—that’s what I call worker power! But hold your applause till you hear who the employer is: Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency that detains and deports immigrants. The eight-year agreement, signed by an outgoing official on the eve of Biden’s inauguration, was a booby trap, an attempt to lock in Trump’s anti-immigrant regime. It’s hard to imagine any other situation where an employer would be eager to accept such terms. Meanwhile many public workers don’t even have the legal right to bargain over their wages. ICE agents are aggressively pro-deportation, more so than their new boss. When a judge temporarily blocked Biden’s moratorium on deportations (not on labor grounds) they wasted no time before they rushed two dozen children to Haiti and tried to send an asylum-seeker back to torture in Cameroon. Since Biden took office they have deported 26,248 people. It makes me angry to see the trappings of unionism deployed to prop up racist violence and thwart reform. But can we criticize this “union” without slipping into anti-union talking points? Yes. . . . A recent study from the University of California, San Francisco, reviewed Covid deaths in the state by occupation and industry. Surprisingly, the largest increase in mortality was not among health care workers. The five deadliest jobs were line cook, warehouse worker, farmworker, baker, and construction laborer—jobs that, in California, are often done by immigrants. You could lay out the same case about mass incarceration; about poverty, urban and rural; about “right-to-work” states. When one group is kept desperate, it undermines standards for all. Our economy runs on this exploitation. We have to transform it—that’s the role of the labor movement. A union that instead props it up is acting as our opponent. So when cops use their “unions” to protect racism and immigration agents use theirs to promote deportation, they’re fighting for the employers’ interests—and they’re no brothers or sisters of mine. # -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#6889): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/6889 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/81022271/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
