10.05.2006

US workers: end of isolation

View from the US left by Martin Schreader

It almost seems as if this article should begin with the phrase, 'Sorry we're late'. After nearly a 120-year absence, working people in the US have once again joined with their brothers and sisters around the world in celebrating May Day, International Workers' Day - a holiday that began here in 1886.

Moreover, like that first May Day, this year's celebrations and protests were organised around a single demand: defence of immigrant workers' rights. In hundreds of cities across the US, migrant workers and supporters of their rights marched and rallied for their demands, and in opposition to proposed congressional legislation that would criminalise workers who are undocumented or those who assist them.

This bill became the battle cry for the immigrant workers' rights movement, and served as the focal point for protest organisers and community leaders looking to build a nationwide mobilisation and strike. Protests and demonstrations began in the south-west of the country back in March, when over one million gathered in Los Angeles - incidentally, on the same day as the massive protests in France against the youth labour bill and the one-day general strike by Unison against pension cuts in Britain - to protest the congressional bill.

The scale and scope of the protests were expanded in early April, when hundreds of thousands once again took to the streets in cities across the US. However, these protests were all a prologue to what organisers were planning for May 1. The 'Gran Paro' ('Great Walkout') planned for May Day was intended to do more than just make a moral stand. Billed as a "Day without immigrants", the protests were also designed as a display of economic power. They were meant to show that, without immigrant workers to superexploit, the US capitalists would not have the relative prosperity they do.

While it was not as effective as organisers originally thought, it did have a powerful and profound impact. Conservative estimates, based on police reports, place the number of people participating in the protests and rallies at over 1.7 million; community organisers estimate double that amount. As well, those same community leaders estimate that an equal number took part in strike actions by either staging pickets or simply staying at home and honouring the economic boycott.

In fact, the strike aspect of the May Day protests was not widely reported. The port of Los Angeles, the busiest on the west coast of North America, was shut down for the entire day and did not return to normal functioning until the next afternoon. The cross-border truck drivers, the troqueros, set up picket lines that the longshoremen's (dockers') union refused to cross.

The choice of May Day for the date of the mobilisation and strike was conscious. It was not chosen simply because many migrant workers are already familiar with the significance of the day. Rather it was chosen because it sends a message to the American chauvinists and nationalists backing their criminalisation.

This was made especially clear in interviews with organisers and leaders in the migrant workers' community when they described immigration as "the other side of globalisation". That is, the closer integration of capital on a world scale also leads to a closer unity of working people on a world scale.

This is done through immigration of workers from the global south as well as through cross-border solidarity. From the perspective of the organisers, if we want to reverse the rising tide of attacks by capitalists on working people's standards of living, then a closer unity, regardless of 'homeland', is necessary.

This understanding was seen in the composition of the protests themselves. In Chicago, where close to 500,000 marched, working people from Latin America were joined by Irish and Polish workers and community leaders. In New York, Chinese, Caribbean and African immigrant workers marched alongside Latinos, African-Americans, lesbians and gay men, and union leaders.

As should be expected, however, the growing movement of migrant workers and their openly internationalist outlook has intensified a backlash among American chauvinists and nationalists. This movement has been fuelled by media figures like CNN's Lou Dobbs, who has made it a personal mission to defend 'American workers' on behalf of his Wall Street friends and corporate masters. Indeed, Dobbs has become something of a beacon for 'America first' nationalists and organisations like the so-called Minutemen.

The Minutemen have been threatening to build a barbed-wire fence along the US-Mexico border, and have carried out armed patrols of the southern frontier for the last two years. These elements, made up mostly of the dispossessed 'middle class' - independent producers and professionals who have been undercut by more 'competitive', larger capitalists using immigrant labour - have provided the support that Republican politicians are resting on.

This backlash has even seen itself spill over into the reactionaries' 'culture war' against bourgeois-democratic practices. For example, when a group of Latino artists wrote a Spanish-language version of The star-spangled banner, the US national anthem, capitalist politicians, Republican and Democratic, lined up to denounce the effort. George W Bush called it "inappropriate"; Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said he was "offended" at the translation. Congressional politicians proposed legislation banning the singing of the anthem in any language other than English.

Now, in the wake of this chauvinistic onslaught, the reactionaries and corporatists are looking to take it a step farther. Legislation is now pending to end the decades-old practice of multilingual ballots and language assistance at the polls. If it passes, this new bill would mandate English-only ballots and voting information, and the abolition of translators available for those who do not speak English. This would effectively disenfranchise millions of citizens.

May Day 2006 was an end and a beginning for working people in the US. It was the end of more than a century of a consciousness of nationalist isolation, and the beginning of recognition among workers that our struggle is international in character. This new chapter in the history of working people in this country may be unwritten, but it will no longer be assumed that this chapter will be written only in English.

La lucha continua.