|
For
over two centuries America has lived in deep denial about the
fundamental inequalities that call into question its democratic
commitments. Every so often, however, the true state of things erupts
into public view. Hurricane Katrina was such an eruption. Even the
mainstream media was shocked into reporting in chilling detail how,
again and again, the storm found its victims among the racially and
economically exploited and marginalized people of New Orleans. African
Americans, and other poor people as well (the dirt-poor Cajun population
of coastal Louisiana), were left defenseless thanks to generations of
discrimination and exclusion, and the malignant indifference of a
government preoccupied with its imperial adventures abroad and the
welfare of its corporate benefactors here at home.
Writing months after
Katrina, what more is there to say?First of all, we can add an important
footnote to the grim record of that horrific natural and social
disaster. Two paramedics attending a conference in New Orleans at the
time, made a salient observation that reminds us that American culture
suffers from class as well as racial blindness. While stories about
heroic soldiers rescuing the imperiled multiplied, the unsung and
invisible heroes of those trying days, according to these two
eyewitnesses, came from the working class of New Orleans: “The
maintenance workers who used a fork lift to carry the sick and
disabled. The engineers, who rigged, nurtured and kept the generators
running. The electricians who improvised thick extension cords
stretching over blocks to share the little electricity we had in order
to free cars stuck on rooftop parking lots. Nurses who took over for
mechanical ventilators and spent hours on end manually forcing air into
the lungs of unconscious patients to keep them alive. Doormen who
rescued folks stuck in elevators. Refinery workers who broke into boat
yards, ‘stealing’ boats to rescue their neighbors clinging to their
roofs in flood waters. Mechanics who helped hot-wire any car that could
be found to ferry people out of the City. And the food service workers
who scoured the commercial kitchens improvising communal meals for
hundreds of those stranded. Most of these workers had lost their homes,
and had not heard from members of their families, yet they stayed and
provided the only infrastructure for the 20% of the New Orleans that was
not under water.”
Then there’s the
question about the role of government. Many have singled out the
systematic denigration and dismantling of the public sector over the
past quarter century as a major contributing cause of the horror of New
Orleans. Clearly, there is much truth to that. But it is necessary to
point out that those who have belittled and attacked “big
government”—both Republicans and Democrats—have done so selectively. The
rebuilding of New Orleans is a case in point. On the one hand, among the
very first measures taken by Washington was the suspension of the
Davis-Bacon Act protecting the wages of construction workers, and the
lifting of wage supports for certain public service workers. Right away
the Bush Administration floated the idea of suspending various
environmental regulations to speed up the rebuilding process. That’s the
kind of “small government” companies like Halliburton and Bechtel are
after. But they also expect some serious heavy lifting from “big
government” in the form of tax breaks, subsidies, cost-plus and no-bid
contracts, Federal funds to support the infrastructure of waterways and
highways that the oil and gas refineries and chemical plants of the Gulf
Coast rely on, and the kind of rezoning of waterfront areas for luxury
redevelopment that helped make New Orleans so vulnerable to flood waters
to begin with. The question has never been simply big versus small
government, but who the government is going to serve, the Old Deal vs.
the New Deal. Whatever the immediate outcome in New Orleans, regional
renewal is a class as well as a racial question, and without a mass,
multicultural labor movement, odds favor the Old Deal.
Finally, there is the
looming specter of the next New Orleans, for who can doubt that there
will be a next one. Natural disasters are, at least some of the time,
predictable. It’s the convergence of a natural with a social calamity
that our pundits rarely forecast, but which makes New Orleans not so
much a dreadful accident as a kind of collective homicide. In future
issues, New Labor Forum will try and zero in on those sites where
accumulated neglect, exploitation, and exclusion are likely to turn a
bad enough “act of God” into a far worse human tragedy, singling out for
special victimization the poor and defenseless.
* * * * * *
On September 27, 2005, a
new national labor organization was born, the Change to Win Federation.
No crystal ball can tell us its future, or the future of the rival
AFL-CIO. Harsh words have been exchanged by partisans of the two sides,
although cooler heads have also surfaced, helping to staunch what could
easily have turned into internecine raiding parties. New Labor Forum is
dedicated to keeping open the lines of communication and to making its
pages available for productive dialog. With that in mind, we invited
Ruth Milkman and Jeff Crosby to comment on the nature of the split in
the labor movement, what the big issues are, and who’s right and who’s
wrong. We invite our readers to respond to the arguments of Milkman and
Crosby. And New Labor Forum will continue to probe the concrete
implications of the split, at the local as well as at the national
level, as developments warrant.
Both sides agree that
the past policy of the AFL-CIO on immigration was wrong and
exclusionary. But the immigration question is a complex one. In our next
issue, we will explore the way it threatens to break apart the
Republican Party coalition between the Party’s corporate elite, which
favors the influx of a vulnerable and easily exploited labor pool from
abroad, and the Party’s conservative populist base which has become
increasingly resentful and xenophobic, blaming immigrants for its own
economic and cultural dispossession. In the current issue, Stephen
Steinberg suggests that there is another dangerous division, this one
between African Americans and immigrants. He argues that immigrant
job-seekers have moved into the labor force at the expense of African
Americans, and do so in part and, ironically, thanks to the gains of the
civil rights movement. We invited Adolph Reed, Maria Elena Durazo, Gary
Gerstle, and Peter Kwong to respond to Steinberg’s provocative article,
and Steinberg is given the last word. His article appears here in
collaboration with the journal New Politics, where the article first
appeared in the summer 2005 issue. New Politics will run a different set
of responses in its forthcoming issue. We encourage our readers to
follow the debate in both journals.
Corporate-dominated
globalization is the two-ton gorilla threatening working people
everywhere, blithely eluding the efforts of labor here and abroad to
restrain it. For this reason, the journal is committed to expanding its
international coverage. In this issue, Jeremy Brecher, Brendan Smith,
and Timothy Costello explore what might be done from a practical
standpoint to enhance the prospects for international labor solidarity.
Any progress in this direction must address the China question. The
Chinese economy is the engine room of globalization, its vast labor
force exerting a tidal influence over economic developments both in the
industrialized West and throughout the Third World. Jenny Chan, a
Chinese graduate student and secretary of the Chinese Working Women
Network, continues our ongoing discussion of “the China question” in her
analysis of the vast migration of women from rural China into the
Special Economic Zones of the coastal cities where these women are
systematically exploited by domestic Chinese and foreign manufacturers
and retailers.
The practical
difficulties of fostering international solidarity are mirrored here at
home where ethnic and racial divisions have always posed a serious
dilemma for organized labor. While the debate over the Steinberg article
examines the problem at a rather general level, Rinku Sen offers a more
ground-level view of how new forms of organizing in the restaurant
industry have successfully tackled racial and ethnic hierarchies that so
often divide the workforce. Restaurants, in particular, employ thousands
of new immigrants, often undocumented. In this issue’s “Working-Class
Voices of Contemporary America” column, Debbie Nathan provides a
compelling evocation of the life and work of Latino restaurant workers
in New York City. Coincidentally on the restaurant theme, we also offer
Bill Morgan’s “The Yummy Pizza Curriculum,” a story about a bunch of
elementary school kids running a mock pizza parlor in their classroom.
Morgan’s ingenious lesson reintroduces questions about labor and capital
into an educational system grown virtually indifferent to such matters.
Friends and enemies,
rightly and wrongly, often accuse the labor movement of being out of
touch with the information age. Arthur Shostak, a long-time friend of
labor, argues here that trade unions can and must take far greater
advantage of the Internet, and he makes some concrete suggestions about
how they might go about it. Of course Kim Phillips-Fein also believes in
the value of the Internet and her “Caught in the Net” column for this
issue singles out a number of particularly valuable sites for those
interested in the why the U.S. economy seems to systematically generate
low-wage jobs, how the union-busting industry does business, and other
matters.
In keeping with this
issue’s concern with immigrants, the section also includes a review of
Immigrants, Unions, and the New U.S. Labor Market, a book by Immanuel
Ness which argues that today’s new immigrants are more likely to
organize than other workers, but that unions are more often their enemy
than their ally. Wallace Katz’s review of the movie Crash looks beneath
the film’s compelling account of ethnic and racial collisions in L.A. to
discover signs of the opposite; a promising new multi-cultural coming
together to form a more humane global city. Max Fraser continues New
Labor Forum’s explorations into the origins of working-class
conservatism, by reviewing a history of the construction trades unions
by Grace Palladino, entitled Skilled Hands, Strong Spirits: A Century of
Building Trades History. As always, we conclude with some poetry, this
time by two West Coast poets, Wanda Coleman and Jimmy Santiago Bacca.
 |
