For this year’s holiday honoring Dr. King, we are printing 3 commentaries on King’s political thinking that are important for understanding today’s situation – Fight Back! editors
In 1967, exactly one year before Dr. King was assassinated, he made an impassioned plea to stop the War in Vietnam. “Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor in Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hope at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.”
Fight Back! interviews Carlos Montes on the next steps in the struggle for immigrant rights. Montes is a veteran leader in the Chicano liberation movement and is an important leader in the struggle for immigrant rights.
May 1st, International Workers Day, is a day of struggle. Around the world, working people will march against imperialist war, to defend the rights of immigrants and to fight to protect their jobs and communities. Here in the United States, May Day has been reborn as millions of Chicanos, Mexicanos and Central Americans, as well as other immigrants and their supporters, have poured into the streets to demand legalization, and an end to raids, deportations and militarization of the border.
For this year’s holiday honoring Dr. King, we are printing 3 commentaries on King’s political thinking that are important for understanding today’s situation – Fight Back! editors.
May Day is a day to stand up and fight back. Millions will take to the streets – from Los Angeles to Mexico City, to Manila, to Moscow and points in between – placing demands on the rich and powerful and to look forward to a day without exploitation or oppression.
‘You have to make a commitment, if we want to make changes’
On July 5, writers for Fight Back! interviewed Dolores Huerta. Huerta is a longtime organizer best known as a co-founder of the United Farm Workers of America, AFL-CIO (UFW). She is vice president and secretary-treasurer emeritus of that organization, and currently heads the Dolores Huerta Foundation.
Ten years ago, John Sweeney was elected president of the AFL-CIO. Supporters of his New Voices slate rallied to oust the stale leadership of his predecessor, Lane Kirkland. Under Kirkland, workers had seen 20 years of declining wages, benefits and working conditions. For 20 years, attacks by the capitalists had come down, and the defenses put up by the unions failed to turn them back. In fact, most unions hadn’t fought at all.
In addition to the internal debates over the future of labor, there are two struggles over foreign policies that will happen at the July convention of the AFL-CIO. One is a campaign underway to get the AFL-CIO to break its ties with the National Endowment for Democracy. A second is to end AFL-CIO support for the state of Israel’s occupation and oppression of Palestine.
Currently, as the top AFL-CIO officials discuss the future of the labor movement, management is attacking one of the few remaining densely unionized, high wage sectors. Airline workers are suffering a devastating attack on wages, pensions and work rules that are gutting union contracts over 50 years in the making. In the last several years, by using the bankruptcy courts and under the threat of financial liquidation, management has slashed billions of dollars out of airline workers’ pockets.
At the top levels of the labor bureaucracy in Washington D.C., a debate is raging about the future of the labor movement. Underlying the debate is the failure of the top labor officials to stop the decline of organized labor. When John Sweeney was elected president of the AFL-CIO in 1995, he pledged to increase organizing. Since then, despite a push to organize, the percent of union members organized has dropped.
In the midst of the Great Depression of the 1930s autoworkers organized into the United Auto Workers (UAW) through a wave of sit-down strikes and pitched battles with local police and company goons. For almost two generations autoworkers defined what a good job was: relatively high wages, health and retirement benefits and protection against unemployment. Unionized autoworkers set the pace for other workers to improve their standard of living in the years after World War II. But over the last 30 years, the concessions and give-backs by the leadership of the UAW have frittered away these gains. Plant closings and outsourcing have slashed the number of unionized autoworkers from almost 400,000 to less than 60,000 today.
Gregg Shotwell, a key leader of rank-and-file autoworkers was interviewed by Fight Back! shortly before the ratification of the Chrysler contract. The contract at Chrysler passed by a relatively narrow margin following an aggressive campaign by UAW officials.
New jobs and new ‘opportunity’, but at what cost? There isn’t much talk anymore about Honda’s new plant or the “new jobs” and the “opportunity” that Indiana was supposed to get from it. Indiana gave $141.5 million in incentives to Honda, which included tax credits and abatements, training assistance and a promise to expedite the long-sought interchange upgrade at US 421 onto I-74. The Indiana plant will be Honda’s sixth North American plant.
Interview with Rank-and-File Leader Gregg Shotwell
Fight Back! interviewed Gregg Shotwell, a key leader of the rank-and-file movement that is growing inside the United Auto Workers. A worker at the Delphi auto parts plant in Cooperstown, Michigan, Shotwell helped organize the mass meetings of autoworkers that took place over the past two months. These meetings led to the formation of the rank-and-file organization, Soldiers of Solidarity.
After decades of concessionary contracts, rank-and-file United Auto Worker activists have worked tirelessly the last two months resisting attacks on auto parts workers at Delphi Corporation.
The workers at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago are calling on supporters in Chicago to join them at a protest at Bank of America, 231 S. LaSalle today, Wednesday, December 10 at 12:00 noon.
Around the country, organizers and leaders of the immigrant rights movement are discussing and making plans for another round of May 1 protests. Last year millions of immigrants and their supporters took to the streets on International Workers Day. This powerful upsurge, which extended for many months, defeated legislation that would have further criminalized undocumented workers in the United States.
May 1 marks International Workers Day around the globe. Here in the U.S., immigrants’ rights coalitions called for a National Day Without An Immigrant, advocating no work, no school and no buying to show the impact that the immigrant community has. Millions of undocumented workers and their supporters took to the streets.
