Labor worldwide must mobilize for the environment

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10 SOCIALIST ACTION MAY 2013 The following presentation was given in the labor workshop at the April 20 confer­ ence at Barnard College in New York City sponsored by the Eco-Socialist Contingent.

The conference was endorsed by 29 orga­ nizations, including Socialist Action, and brought together 240 participants in lively debate and discussion concerning an effec­ tive strategy to combat climate change.

W hen Hurricane Sandy hit New York on Oct. 29, transit workers were busy securing the city’s transit lifeline. Both the city and the Metropolitan Transit Authority were forced to acknowledge that the real story of the almost super-human, super-fast hurricane recovery of the na­ tion’s biggest transit system belongs to tran­ sit workers. After the wreckage, just as it did in the aftermath of 9-11, transit workers pitched-in. Local 100 members joined Oc­ cupy Sandy in delivering aid and supplies to the Rockaways.

What a powerful social force transit work­ ers can be! Think back to December 2005 when transit workers brought the ruling class—the Wall Street crooks—to its knees with its heroic strike. We were white, black, Hispanic and immigrant. We shut the city down tight!

Public transit workers, with the rest of the working class, are a mighty force for change. Transit work is Green Jobs. Yet, the nation’s 1% refuses to fund public trans­ portation adequately. In Obama’s so-called stimulus package, public transportation spending by states averaged a scandalous ... Immigration (continued from page 12: “Immigration ‘reform’ proposal: More repression & red tape”)

Guest worker programs since the Bracero age have been little better in terms of worker abuse. So what’s the incentive to change this time around? It all comes down to economics in the end.

The U.S. economy remains heavily dependent on the low-wage labor of a super-exploited class of work­ ers—undocumented immigrants who have no rights and who are kept too afraid to fight back. The new immigration reform bill simply serves to legalize that system of economic exploitation, guaranteeing superprofits for agricultural, industrial, and meatpacking giants.

However, the bill does nothing to address the rea­ sons that immigrants are forced to come to the U.S., including poverty and war (often created by U.S. in­ terventions, or economic policies such as NAFTA).

Undocumented immigrants who come into the U.S.

after the new bill is implemented would be forced to live and work even farther outside of the more tightlycontrolled wage system, making them more vulner­ able to exploitation and repression and leaving them less recourse to fight back.

At the same time, the private prison industry would 1.7%, according to a sample study by the very mainstream “Smart Growth America.” The study also noted that each dollar spent on public transportation was 75% more ef­ fective in putting people to work than high­ way projects.

Domination of the transportation discus­ sion was sown years ago by the barons of the auto industry, in league with the petroleum industry, which demanded more roads for its gas hog autos. For decades, federal trans­ portation aid has been about 80% for roads, with the rest for green public transportation. And even that meager aid is rigged to cheat transit workers of adequate pay.

It is no secret that mass transportation is identified in the minds of racists with Blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities; hence Obama’s cowardly flight from these issues—not to mention Obama’s failure to address the vast environmental racism en­ dured by minorities in other sectors. Obama’s new budget projects a minuscule $2 billion in research (not for actual produc­ tion of alternate energy) over a 10-year pe­ riod, to be funded by expanded oil drilling. Obama brags that under his watch drilling has expanded at a greater pace than ever— as the earth is being poisoned. Obama and the Democrats are no less the assassins of our planet than George Bush and the nuts of the Tea Party.

We must seize the moment to act against climate change. We must address mass un­ employment and dread over climate change by demanding a federal Emergency Energy Reconversion Act tied to job creation in actually producing and installing alternate energy equipment that use wind, solar, and water turbines. Obviously, the rulers will re­ act with fury to such measures, yet they are only the necessary first step toward achiev­ ing climate justice and saving our planet.

When the U.S. entered the war in Decem­ ber 1941, auto production ceased and only war materiel was made. The GDP doubled in three years, bringing the U.S. out of de­ pression. Back then industry was mobilized to produce the machines of death; this time it will be to produce the tools for life!

The workers movement and its allies are the most potent force for achieving these goals. The moribund United Auto Workers was virtually smashed by the new Obama administration when half-pay for new workers and pension cuts were rammed down their throats. But these workers can play a key role in the environmental move­ ment. They can lead marches; a massive jobs march on Washington is certainly over­ due (also to stop cuts to Medicare and So­ cial Security!).

And while demanding the nationalization of Big Auto, not far down the road they could also take over the factories and de­ mand green production jobs! That would certainly be a welcome return to the glory days of their union.

That renewed militancy goes for other workers, like my TWU, who face zero contracts at the hands of Democratic Gov.

Andrew Cuomo and millions of others who face similar layoffs and cuts.

How to get there? One way to begin would be to convene massive rank-and-file union congresses to democratically discuss and implement a class-struggle strategy. That would require, in most cases, the construc­ also be guaranteed super-profits as immigrants con­ tinue to be detained and deported at ever-higher rates.

This entire infrastructure has received explicit union approval from the AFL-CIO and SEIU. Like the bill itself, these unions are pitting “good” immigrants against “bad” immigrants, as if some were more de­ serving of legalization than others. For example, the SEIU states on its website that it supports “earned le­ galization with a pathway to citizenship” so undocu­ mented immigrants can “get right with the law.”

Both of the big, bureaucratic unions also back border security, worker authorization, and the new guestworker programs. Have they forgotten the thousands of immigrant workers who were fired in 1-9 audits? What about the military-style raids in Postville or at the Swift plants? Unfortunately, it appears that many big unions are so beholden to the Democratic Party that they are urging their rank-and-file members to support this immigration “reform.”

But immigrants, indeed all workers, deserve bet­ ter than this proposal we are being offered by those in power! Immigrants deserve legalization without chains—a legalization that allows them to reunite broken families, to live in their communities without fear, to work with dignity, to join unions and defend their rights.

proven, brought on a cholera epidemic by dumping human wastes into a much used river. The epidemic has killed more than 8000 Haitians.

In 2010, Obama cynically used the hor­ rific earthquake to militarily re-occupy Haiti. Some of us protested right here in New York. One of the occupation’s many crimes—this one approaching genocide— is that it has ignored the fact that cholera is easily treatable; clean, available water is what’s needed as well as medical assistance, which only the Cubans have been consistent in providing.

On top of this, hurricane Sandy devastated Haiti once again, killing over 50. Despite the hoopla over international aid, 400,000 Haitians still live in flimsy post-quake shel­ ters in Port au Prince.

In October, a new sweatshop park was opened in Haiti in the northern town of Car­ acol, with $124 million in U.S. tax subsidy. Bill and Hillary Clinton and Hollywood ce­ lebs were on hand for the ceremony. What went unsaid was that 300 peasants lost their land in what is considered a fertile, ecologi­ cally fragile region. The nearby port at Fort Liberté is Haiti’s only UN-designated eco­ logically “protected” area.

These horror stories are similar to others in the Third World. International links with worker and peasant organizations must be made, accompanied by active solidarity.

Building eco-socialist revolutionary par­ ties worldwide is essential to our task. Revolutionary parties will encourage and develop mass movements of working peo­ ple and the oppressed, as part of a transi­ tional strategy toward socialist revolution. Struggle alone will save our planet. There is no hope under capitalism. Workers of the world, unite! n Immigrants deserve a legalization that is not tied to militarization of the border, that doesn’t force them to trade the deaths and detentions of their brothers and sisters for a chance at a green card. They deserve a legalization that doesn’t force them to wait in line for decades, that doesn’t force them to trade their la­ bor so big corporations can make millions of dollars in profits while they struggle to send money to their families back home.

We all deserve to live in a world without borders— where we are free to move or stay as we wish, where we can be with our loved ones—no matter what their legal status or their sexual orientation, where we can work with dignity for a living wage.

This can only be achieved through the unity of the working class. We must not fall victim to the false ideas we are fed every day by corporate media—that undocumented workers are criminals, that they are here to steal “American” jobs, that some immigrants are somehow more deserving of citizenship than oth­ ers or that they have to “earn” their status. We must remember that immigrant rights are workers’ rights, that an injury to one is an injury to all.

The immigrant rights movement has the potential to push the government to give them something better, and the working class must join with them in solidar­ ity to help achieve that goal. n

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Marc Rome / Socialist Action