Racism & Sexism: Major Pillars of the Crisis in the U.S. Trade Union Movement
By Clarence Thomas and Saladin Muhammad
Published July 28, 2005
Black workers make up 30 percent of the total union membership in the AFL-CIO. People of color and women workers are a large percentage of the membership of the non-affiliated “independent unions.”
Yet, despite the major divisions among workers caused by institutionalized racism and gender discrimination that weaken the unity of workers and the power of the trade unions, the struggles against racism and sexism in the labor movement are not taken up as priorities. Nor are they viewed by either camp reflecting the current major divisions within the AFL-CIO as major sources of labor’s crisis.
Racism and sexism have been the two major pillars of business unionism. They are fundamental to the lack of rank-and-file union democracy and to labor’s weakness in organizing the unorganized, especially in the U.S. South. Labor’s greatest compromises with capital have been around issues of improving conditions of wages, training, promotions and job classifications for Blacks, workers of color and women workers.
Black and Brown Unity: An Alliance for Justice and Human Rights
by Saladin Muhammad
Published April 18, 2006
Hurricane Katrina was a 21st Century snapshot of the genocidal direction of the US government. It exposed the reality of US democracy for working class African Americans and peoples of color. There has yet to be a massive upsurge that expresses the deep outrage of the African American masses against the US government for this crime against humanity.
The refusal of the US government to allocate funds to repair Gulf Coast levees to keep water out that lead to hundreds of avoidable majority African American deaths and massive destruction of homes and social institutions. Now the government proposes HR 4437 that will to allocate funds to construct a 700 mile along the US-Mexican border to keep Mexican and Latino workers out.
The upsurge among Latinos throughout the US against the criminalization and attacks on undocumented Mexican and Latino immigrants and the political tone of resistance it is setting, must be seen as a direct challenge to the Bush led government and corporate agenda that left thousands of African Americans to die in the Gulf Coast. The Reconstruction movement developing in the Gulf Coast and among African Americans nationally must embrace and unite with this mass upsurge as a call to action for all of the oppressed to boldly resist repression and genocide.
Forging the Fightback
The Million Worker March Movement Calls for Rank and File Unity in the Struggle for Workers’ Rights and an End to the War in Iraq
By MWMM – ILWU Local 10
The Million Worker March Movement emerged from a historic summons to working people by ILWU Local 10, calling upon the rank and file of the labor movement, organized and unorganized, to mobilize in our own name and to challenge the passivity of the AFL-CIO leadership in the face of unrestrained class warfare waged by the captains of capital against the mass of our people.
Working people need to have a political expression of our own which is an alternative to the U.S. corporate sector that both the Democrats and the Republicans represent. The timing of the March on Washington was to prepare the beginning of a fight-back precisely because the two political parties, acting as one, were confining political discourse to the corporate agenda of permanent war, destruction of all social services, and a relentless assault upon the union movement itself.
It was clear to us that the crisis in a labor movement whose numbers had dwindled to under 12% of the work force in America, was linked directly to the business unionism that has done everything possible to stifle rank and file leadership. It is reflected in the wholesale concessionary bargaining that has produced setback after setback and led to the dismantling of the trade union movement. Pension funds go belly-up, workers’ rights are eroded and, while all this unfolds, dependence upon the Democratic Party deepens — a Party whose funding, personnel, track record and program are at the very center of the assault upon our class.