Unions are right to stand with immigrants against ICE deportations
Conservatives and anti-union forces are hammering labor unions for our role in the demonstrations against Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and Saturday's 'No Kings' rallies. But unions, including controversial Service Employees International Union California president David Huerta, are doing what we should be doing — standing up for our members and for workers as a whole against the enemies of labor.
Labor's biggest mistake of the modern era was to allow the destruction of millions of industrial jobs without effective resistance. President Trump spoke the truth about deindustrialization in his 2017 Presidential Inaugural Address when he said, 'Rusted out factories [are] scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation … One by one, the factories shuttered and left our shores, with not even a thought about the millions and millions of American workers that were left behind.'
It was Big Labor's disgraceful acquiescence to this catastrophic assault on American workers' livelihoods that has allowed Trump to pose as the friend of the American worker. He has successfully channeled workers' legitimate anger and resentment in the direction of immigrants instead of against the big businesses who destroyed America's industrial working class.
While the labor movement in Los Angeles and in California is being criticized for our sympathies for so-called 'illegal aliens,' immigrants (legal or not) make up one-third of California's labor force. Most of California's 'illegals' arrived in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, many fleeing horrific U.S.-backed Central America dictatorships and the civil wars those regimes created. Most came too late to take advantage of President Ronald Reagan's 1986 immigration amnesty but are law-abiding and pay taxes in numerous ways and forms. Why would we turn our backs on them?
As a trade unionist, the immigration status of my union brothers and sisters is of no import. The Trump Administration and the big business interests it serves seek to divide working people, but workers as a whole will either move forward together or fall back together. Attacks on one part of the working class cannot, over time, benefit the other parts.
A major line of attack against labor argued by Aaron Withe, CEO of the anti-union Freedom Foundation, conservative investigative reporter Robert Schmid and others is that the average American is being forced to help finance the anti-ICE movement because the SEIU other unions resisting ICE 'rely on taxpayer-funded dues.' But this is not taxpayer money. It is workers' wages, and we have the right to do whatever they want with it, just as if we worked in the private sector.
Moreover, union dues is money well spent. For example, in March, 2023 the SEIU and United Teachers Los Angeles jointly struck the Los Angeles Unified School District. Our picket lines held, SEIU won large pay increases and an extensive expansion of healthcare benefits for part-time employees, and UTLA won a good contract as well.
Conservatives are almost unanimous in their condemnation of Huerta, who spent three nights in detention and is charged with conspiracy to impede an officer — a felony carrying a sentence of up to six years in prison. But Huerta was doing exactly what a good labor leader should be doing — putting himself out front and, if necessary, in harm's way for the benefit of his members and of workers. The fact that people on both the left and the right were so surprised by Huerta's incarceration is reflective of modern America's ignorance about labor history–effective labor leaders have usually had to risk incarceration.
During the massive strikes that built organized labor in the 1930s, there were many workers and union leaders attacked, jailed, and even killed by police and National Guard. In 1948, John L. Lewis, combative leader of the United Mine Workers, was found guilty of criminal and civil contempt of court for failing to end a coal strike.
In 1964, under then-Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa, truckers won the first National Master Freight Agreement, a national over-the-road contract said to have brought more workers into the middle class than any other single event in the history of labor organizing. In a long-running, politically-motivated prosecution by Robert F. Kennedy, who called the Teamsters the 'enemy within,' and others, Hoffa was convicted of jury tampering, attempted bribery, and fraud and incarcerated from 1967 until 1971. However, in the eyes of authorities, Hoffa's real crime had been his effectiveness as a labor leader.
During the 1966 New York City Transit Workers Union strike, union leader Mike Quill led his 36,000 workers in shutting down the world's largest subway and bus system. Just as Huerta and unions are vilified today, Mayor John Lindsay called the strike 'defiance against eight million people' and, as British labor writer Ronan Burtenshaw explains, 'the New York Times called for the police and army to run the buses; William F. Buckley Jr wanted the National Guard.'
A judge issued an injunction to stop the strike, but Quill tore it up in front of the media, saying, 'The judge can drop dead in his black robes. We will not call off the strike!' Quill and other leaders were arrested and jailed, but the TWU lines held, and they won the strike.
The Trump Administration's assault on immigrant workers might be the catalyst for a revitalized labor movement with the kind of power unions like the TWU and the Teamsters once wielded. If so, all workers — immigrant or native born, male or female, white, Black, Latino, or other — will be the winners.
Glenn Sacks teaches Social Studies and represents United Teachers Los Angeles at James Monroe High School in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
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