Immigrants and Los Angeles labor unions: Negotiating empowerment, politics, and citizenship (original) (raw)
Related papers
Popular discourse and academic scholarship both accent divisions between African American and immigrant workers. These debates most often focus on the question of job competition, positioning African Americans and immigrant workers as a priori adversaries in the labor market. We take a different tack. Drawing upon a case study of hotel workers in Chicago, we identify ways in which workers themselves challenge and bridge these divisions. Specifically, we reveal how union organizing activities, such as diverse committee representation and inclusion of diversity language in contracts, counter notions of intergroup competition in an effort to build common cause that affirms rather than denies differences. We argue that these activities represent political efforts on the part of workers to contest and even reshape the racial and ethnic division of labor, thereby revealing competition as a socially contingent and politically mediated process.
2024
The U.S. is seeing a wave of unionization as workers unite and levy collective power in labor disputes from universities to auto-plants. In light of this widely documented wave, this research attempts to evaluate labor unions on their effectiveness as a form of resistance to racial capitalism. The epistemological framework of this thesis is rooted in the work of Cedric Robinson, who among other scholars of Marxism, capitalism, and the Black Radical Tradition, have put words to an understanding of our world grounded by its historical path of capitalist expansion, spatialized domination and racialization, and extraction and exploitation in all forms. Through primary, secondary, and media source reviews, this research intends to qualify the strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities of labor unions, contextualizing their victories and downfalls among other forms of historic resistance and collective organization.
Labor: Studies in Working-Class History, Volume 19, Issue 4, 2022
In 2000, the AFL-CIO officially embraced the call for amnesty for undocumented immigrant workers, reversing long-standing policy in favor of greater restriction and border enforcement. The roots of this new approach stretched back to the 1970s, when the growing presence of undocumented workers in the industrial workforce challenged organized labor's nationalist orthodoxy. Taking the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) in Los Angeles as a case study, we show how one union confronted new demographic and organizing realities and recognized the demand for unionization among new immigrants. Radical community organizers, legal advocates, and union organizing staff created a practice of labor citizenship, the recognition of the immigrants’ right to remain by virtue the demand for their labor. The promise of belonging through organizing and collective bargaining was limited by state power and the structural weakness of organized labor in the emerging neoliberal economy. Nevertheless, ILGWU campaigns trained a cohort of organizers that would become central to the union upsurge in Los Angeles during the 1990s.
Is Organizing Enough? Race, Gender, and Union Culture
2000
[Excerpt] We argue that the quantitative interpretation of Changing to Organize is self-limiting, if not selfdefeating. If unions hope to attract a mass influx of new members, they must first address seriously the internal transformation required to build a labor movement of all working people. The highest priority should be on creating a culture of inclusion. We envision a movement that embraces, attracts, and promotes women, people of color, immigrants, and lesbians and gays. We reach this conclusion in large part based on work with local unions that have endorsed the change to organizing. Although national unions play a central role in establishing the organizing priority and coordinating the organizing efforts, the changes that affect the day-today life of unionism occur at the local level. And the reality is that locals engaged in organizing face a host of substantial internal challenges. To the extent that these challenges relate to the organizing itself, they are well understood and are receiving attention at the national level (for example, the shortage of trained organizers and experienced lead organizers is widely recognized).
Black longshoremen and the fight for equality in an 'anti-racist' union
2020
Abstract: This paper uncovers the contradictions between official 'anti-racist' union principles and local practice by exploring the ways that racism shaped a racially progressive union's politics. Using interview material, it centres on the past and present experiences of African American union members working as longshoremen in southern California. Contrary to accounts that locate racism and the racial division of workers solely as a practice utilised by capital, the author argues that it was the labour union local itself, not capital, that readily relied on racism to undermine Black workers, thereby recreating the very same destructive forces that the International Longshore and Warehouse Union's principles purported to oppose.
Women's Studies International Forum, 2014
a r t i c l e i n f o s y n o p s i s Available online xxxx This article engages the subject of labor movement 'revitalization' in the United States (U.S.), and considers the integrated challenge of building the representation and leadership base of females of color in labor organizations. The project methodology draws on participant data gathered from the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) Union Summer programa national campaign that brought mostly college student interns to work on campaigns throughout the U.S. beginning in 1996. The author finds that the AFL-CIO was unable to maintain longer-term commitment or 'buy-in' from most activists of color as subsequent labor movement actors. Furthermore, working class females generally, and working class females of color particularly, were very under-represented among those retained as emergent activists. The study highlights the need for strenuous consideration of the racial and gender dynamics entrenched in labor movement culture.