While it’s too early to talk about a new movement,
it’s certainly encouraging
ful municipal unions, to the AFL-CIO itself, new leadership has revived
labor’s historical mandate to organize the unorganized and rally the
oppressed. And right in the middle of this revival are U.S. labor activists who got their
start not only in labor strongholds like New York and San Francisco, but in further-off
coalitions by U.S. and Latin American trade unionists and workers, Latin American activists have become
rank-and-file U.S. workers-and trade unionists.
Latinos now constitute about 10% of the U.S. population, 10% of the labor force, and roughly 8% of
unionized workers. That last number may rapidly increase as the newly energized labor movement casts its
sights on the country’s most marginal, lowest-paid workers-workers previously ignored by the largest, most
powerful unions. As labor mobilization bubbles up from below, the reformed leadership of organized labor
is clearly taking note.
The election last year of a reform slate to head the AFL-CIO has galvanized trade-union activists and may
soon lead to the reversal of a three-decade decline in union membership. And no one has been more galva-
nized than Latino workers. “When you look at any large organizing drive going on today,” says Linda Chavez
Thompson, the new Executive Vice President of the big labor federation, “you will always find Latinos.”
The Latinos behind these large drives are accomplishing two things: they are gaining first-time union rep-
resentation for workers who have never been organized-the “farmrnworkers, drywallers, janitors, hotel work-
ers and other low-wage workers” who Hector Figueroa tells us are spearheading the Latino labor move-
ment-and they are revitalizing the movement as a whole. This is encouraging because a strong global labor
movement is the only long term answer to the slash-and-burn labor discipline that characterizes the economic
policymaking of the 1990s.
The rebirth of militant trade unionism has a lot to do with the changing model of U.S.-and global-cap-
italism. Under an older form of Latin American capitalism, at least a sector of the working population had
to be paid well enough to bolster a modicum of national purchasing power. Under the new export-oriented
model, the buyers are all abroad and what counts are low costs of production-i.e. cheap labor.
Under the Keynesian model, sometimes dubbed “security capitalism,” which ruled from the mid-1930s to
the mid-1970s in the United States, a kind of truce existed between big capital and big labor. The most pow-
erful unions were concentrated in the most lucrative industries-auto, steel, oil, transportation-where
decent wages and benefits were traded for a quiescence on issues regarding control of the workplace, as well
as a tacit agreement not to organize the unorganized. At the same time, the state provided a modicum of
social security-especially unemployment insurance and old-age, survivors and disability insurance-in
return for a basic loyalty to state institutions.
All that has broken down over the past 20 years. Now the big unions are fighting for their lives, and the
comfort of organizing only the well-off part of the working class is no longer an option. AFL-CIO unions
are thus moving into the territory worked by the radical movements of the past few decades-movements
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