If Trump’s anti-immigrant crusade had anything to do with protecting American workers, he would find a way to legalize work, make sure that undocumented immigrants who are exploited by employers like the Trump Organization and poultry processors get their fair wages and work in safe conditions. Then they would not compete with American workers, if there were any American workers who would, in fact, do this body crushing work in fields and factories.
With unemployment rates at historic lows (thanks, Obama!) the wonder is why wages have not significantly increased. The answer is that even after 600 federal agents swooped down on Mississippi poultry plants snatching mothers and fathers away from the line, jailing them in private prisons and deporting them without any concern for the infants and children left behind, none of the employers were prosecuted. They rather swiftly replaced the arrested with other undocumented workers they could exploit.
Today’s anti-immigrant crusades – mimicking the 1920s Palmer Raids – are more about white nationalism and white male supremacy, that virulent strain of depravity that has been as constant in American society as its original sin of slavery. In the 1920s and again in the 1950s McCarthy Era, under the guise of being anti-Socialist or anti-Communist (anti-Bolshevik), the Red Scare was really directed at women and Jews.
In Woodrow Wilson’s administration, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer arrested and held without trial more than 10,000 suspected anarchists and communists on the premise that they were not citizens and therefore not subject to constitutional protections. Many of the 500 who were deported were Russian Jews, including Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and Mollie Steimer.
Ten years before the Palmer Raids, in 1909, Jewish immigrant women who worked in the unsanitary, unsafe, sweatshops in New York City organized a strike of 20,000 – 80 percent of whom were women. The leaders had escaped pogroms in Eastern Europe but “had come from places like Poland, Russia, and Lithuania, where their families had been members of the Labor Bund, a secular Jewish socialist party with heavy union representation. So these women workers knew a thing or two about standing up to bosses, bargaining collectively, and playing on a businessman’s biggest fear: lost revenue,” writes Megan Day in Timeline.com (https://timeline.com/these-women-came-ready-to-fight-feb5b8eba4d6).
These themes came together after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in 1911, the deadliest industrial fire in New York City, causing the deaths of 146 Jewish and Italian immigrant women and girls, aged 14 to 43, who were essentially locked inside a sweatshop. It led to the founding of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union.
Indeed, women were the original instigators of the labor movement going back to the 1848 Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, on behalf of women workers from the knitting mills and factories who wanted equal pay and being able to control their own money and property.
The union movement has given all workers weekends, vacations, health benefits, child labor laws, collective bargaining, and safety regulations. But since Ronald Reagan destroyed the air traffic controllers union in the 1980s, Republicans have waged war on unions, which they perceive as being the political and financial backbone of the Democratic Party. The GOP has gone so far as to undermine public education with vouchers and charter schools in order to weaken the political power of teachers’ unions.
Republicans have fought against raising the minimum wage, undermined the ability of unions to get dues to cover collective bargaining that helps union and nonunion workers alike, blocked workers from forming or joining unions, and generally, like in Wisconsin, have engaged in union-busting. Indeed, the lure of Southern states has been their Right to Work laws (unions refer to these as “right to work for less” states).
Republicans’ opposition to universal health care – which would break the bonds between employers and health insurance – effectively keeps workers as indentured servants.
Union membership has declined from 30 percent of the workforce in the 1940s to 20 percent in the 1980s, to 10 percent today. Meanwhile, wages have essentially stagnated since the Reagan administration, while the gap between rich and poor has grown the widest since the Gilded Age. Whereas in 1965, chief executives’ salaries were 20 times the average worker, today CEOs make 278 times what their employees earn; between 1978-2018, top CEO income exploded by 1,008% (after accounting for inflation), compared to a measly 12% increase in the typical worker’s salary.
It is indeed baffling that Trump’s support has reportedly come from white, male, blue collar workers when they have been most harmed by Trump and Republican policies. As one example, investigations into worker safety by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration have plummeted under Trump.
Democrats seeking the 2020 nomination for president have come out firmly for workers, with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders perhaps the most aggressive (progressive):
“Corporate America and the billionaire class have been waging a 40-year war against the trade union movement in America that has caused devastating harm to the middle class in terms of lower wages, fewer benefits and frozen pensions,” the Vermont senator said. “If we are serious about rebuilding the middle class in America, we have got to rebuild, strengthen and expand the trade union movement in America.”
Sanders has issued a “Workplace Democracy Plan” that would strengthen unions by ending right to work laws, giving every union worker in America the right to strike and banning the replacement of striking workers. He would sign an executive order preventing large, profitable corporations that engage in union busting, outsource jobs overseas or pay workers less than $15 an hour from receiving federal contracts.
His plan would also make it substantially easier to form a union and stop employers from ruthlessly exploiting workers by misclassifying them as independent contractors or denying them overtime by falsely categorizing them as a supervisor and require companies that merge to honor existing union contracts, protect workers’ pensions and establish federal protections against firing of workers for any reason other than just cause.
