An Injury to One is an Injury to All? US Labour's Divergent Reactions to Trump

Abstract

6 | International Union Rights | 24/2 FOCUS | UNITED STATES An Injury to One is an Injury to All? US Labour’s Divergent Reactions to Trump Arshiya Chime is a union member helping to rescue the world from climate change. Once she gets her doctorate degree later this year from the University of Washington, she will become a highly prized mechanical engineer, helping economies become less dependent on oil while protecting the environment and creating jobs. But Chime, a leader in her graduate student employees union, United Auto Workers Local 4121, is not welcome in Donald Trump’s vision of America. As an Iranian immigrant, she’s denied the right to freely travel. If Trump’s Muslim travel ban orders ultimately are upheld, Chime would probably have to take her expertise to another country, because US firms won’t want to hire someone unable to work on foreign projects and attend international conferences. Chime is not alone. About 30 percent of her fellow graduate student employees at the University of Washington are international students, many of them from countries included in the Trump travel ban. When the White House announced the ban in late January, Chime’s union rallied with other labour groups, immigrant rights organisations, faith allies and political activists, staging impromptu airport mass marches and shutdowns. Chime and other UAW 4121 leaders mobilised public opinion1 by speaking out at press conferences, organising teachins , and by joining the lawsuit that ultimately blocked Trump’s ban. Other union leaders, unfortunately, seem to have forgotten the picket line refrain, ‘an injury to one is an injury to all’. The same month, but a political galaxy away from the boisterous airport demonstrations, construction union leaders exited an Oval Office meeting to rave about the new president’s pledge to boost infrastructure spending. ‘we have a common bond with the president’, gushed Sean McGarvey, head of North America’s Building Trade Unions2. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka praised Trump for talking up jobs in his first joint congressional address3 and could barely manage a milquetoast riposte4 to Trump’s xenophobic attacks on people like Arshiya Chime. The divergent labour reactions frame the stark choice facing the US union movement: build fighting working class solidarity, or a hunker down in a desperate every-union-for-itself strategy. Today’s situation is perilous. US unions represent barely 10 percent of the US workforce, down from 33 percent in the 1950s. Union leaders across the political spectrum are quick to pin blame for the present crisis on relentless union-busting and hostile politicians. That’s accurate – but not a complete explanation. Corporate America’s insatiable profit drive is only half of our problem; the other half is the movement itself. The disastrous situation didn’t materialise overnight. Rather, the seeds of today’s ruinous harvest were planted 70 years ago. An Era of Union Complacency By the end of World War II, US union membership had soared, reaching a third of all workers. In manufacturing, fully 69 percent of production workers were covered by union agreements. Militant strikes during and right after the war pushed demands for a greater share of the economic pie along with social demands like price controls. In 1946 alone, 4.6 million workers went on strike – about 1 in every 20 in the paid US workforce. But rather than build on that nascent power, most union leaders determined to make peace with political and business elites, believing – incorrectly – that the tripartite domestic détente of World War II was still alive. Even before Senator Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunts, unions started purging communists and other suspected radicals from their ranks, seeking to demonstrate their loyalty to government and business. The leadership of the labour federation that emerged in the 1950s steered away from organising more workers. AFL-CIO president George Meany famously declared, ‘I used to worry about the size of the membership. I stopped worrying because to me it doesn’t make any difference. The organised fellow is the only fellow that counts’. Most union leaders focused on securing economic gains for their largely white memberships, tamping down militant insurgency in the ranks, giving lip service to the emerging civil and...