An article in the most visible national newspaper in the United States, The New York Times, recently reminded us of the ‘Gilded Age of America’ 100 years ago when billionaires like Rockefeller and Carnegie flourished and mansions of the fantastic rich multiplied. This ‘Gilded Age’ gave way by the 1950s to an American society where a significant middle class grew as a result of the affects of the ‘new deal’, in which the government allied with the labour movement to unionise low-wage workers and redistribute wealth. The article heralded the comeback of the ‘Gilded Age’ today: “We are now living in a new Gilded Age, as extravagant as the original. Mansions have made a comeback.” It is now the age of the ‘imperial CEO’. Thirty years ago, the top 100 CEOs used to get paid 39 times the wages of the average worker in the US. Compared to the average low-wage worker, CEOs made 475 times in 1999.

The billionaires of 100 years ago could not have built their wealth without huge government subsidies or the steady flow of cheap and exploited immigrant labour from China and Europe. Much of the militant labour organising then was led by independent unions, such as the Industrial Workers of the World or the ‘Wobblies’ as they were called. They were outside the AFL (the American Federation of Labor), the formal trade union entity, with a racist, sexist and anti-immigrant reputation. The ‘Wobblies’ organised thousands of strikes across trade lines, racial and gender lines and immigration lines, and were a source of great inspiration.

Much like 100 years ago, immigrants today are again the backbone of the US economy in the ‘Gilded Age’ of imperial CEOs. The largest number comes from the southern neighbours of the US — from Mexico and Central America - ravaged by the US-led exploitative trade agreements and US-backed dictatorships. As US prescriptions for the global economy spread further, the migrants arrive from the states that the IMF has funded and devastated—Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Peru. They are Middle Eastern, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Africans.

A 2,000-mile border through a desert separates the US from its southern neighbours, particularly Mexico, its immediate ‘backyard’. The heat in the summer goes up as high as 130 degrees F. It is the most militarized border in the US. Each year, scores of migrants die as thousands cross the border from what they increasingly experience as a land of poverty to the so-called ‘land of opportunity’. They are often without legal immigration papers because US immigration laws do not favour low-wage, and so-called unskilled labour, even though that very labour is the backbone of its economy. Every year, on the ‘Day of the Dead’, an important Mexican tradition for honoring the dead, community members and activists hold vigils along both sides of the border to remember the migrants who have died in defiance of the US crackdown on illegal crossings.

Those who survive (thousands do) enter the so-called ‘land of opportunity’. They work as agricultural workers, clean hotels, work in restaurants, hospitals, and meat-packing plants, clean people’s houses, and perform scores of other low-wage jobs. They are changing the composition of the American workforce. They are also the hardest to organise given their vulnerable legal and social status. An apple picker in Washington tells the Human Rights Watch that during an organising drive, the striking apple workers were told, “You have thirty minutes to get back to work or you will be fired.” Other apple growers sent trucks and vans full of workers, escorted by a convoy of police cars, to intimidate the workers and break the strike.

In August 2000, Human Rights Watch released an unprecedented report, ‘Unfair Advantage: Workers’ Freedom of Association in the United States under International Human Rights Standards’. It reports on labour rights violations in the US, widespread retaliation against workers who complain, talk to other workers, speak in languages other than English to other workers, organise, and so on. Retaliation can be wage cuts, firing, police intimidation, detention and deportation in the case of immigrant workers, and workplace raids. In addition, union-busting activities by employers have grown rapidly and become more inventive.

Although on paper the US workers theoretically have the right to organise, to bargain collectively, and to strike, according to the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), in essence, the process of unionising and resisting is almost completely stacked against them. Contradictory laws, weak and lengthy monitoring and accountability provisions, under-funded labour agencies, a pro-corporate judicial system, and laughable penalties allow employers to block legitimate union recognition elections, discipline union organisers, violate basic labour laws and get away with impunity. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the primary body charged with implementing the provisions of the NLRA, is a five-member Board that is essentially appointed by the President with Senate ratification. Fred Azcarate, the Executive Director of Jobs with Justice (JwJ), a national labour organisation says, “It’s very difficult for activists in other countries to realise the state of labour law in the US. The Europeans, for instance, have trouble understanding the degree to which our government penalises, let alone supports, labour organising. This is also a country in which the notion of class solidarity is fundamentally lacking.”

Manipulation and abuse of workers extend to the hallowed walls of high-tech companies such as Microsoft which is increasingly replacing full time employees with extensive benefit packages with ‘perma-temps’, that is workers hired through temporary employment agencies who work without any benefits. ‘Perma-temps’, as the name suggests are hardly temporary and may be workers who work for several years in one place. Microsoft avoids labour law compliance by claiming that it is not the employer, the temp agency is and the agency claims that the workers can form a union only if they organise all the workers of the agency, not just in one company. The Washington Alliance of Technology Workers (WashTec) with the help of the Communication Workers of America (CWA), have recently begun an organising effort.

Sub-contracting is another method through which companies avoid responsibility to workers by passing it to layers of subcontractors. Sweatshops in the garment industry are one of the best- known examples. Los Angeles has the largest concentration of garment manufacturing with Latinos (especially Mexicans) and Asians (especially Chinese) leading the workforce. In 1992, the average salary of a Chinese woman worker was 5,464 dollars annually while the owner of Guess got to take home 8.7 million dollars. Home workers can earn a measly two dollars per hour working without overtime and organisers say home sewing involves child labour. Garment workers in the San Francisco area carried out one of the most visible campaigns against Jessica McClintock when they were fired without backpay. The workers won. They were helped not by conventional trade unions but by Asian Immigrant Women Advocates, one among many community-based workers’ centres that have emerged in the US over the last 20 years to respond to workers whom organised trade unions have long ignored.

State of Organised Labour

Today, the unionised workforce in the US stands at approximately 13 per cent compared to 30 per cent in the 1950s. This is the lowest level of unionisation in the industrialised world and rivals that of many developing countries. The AFL-CIO, which is the federation of labour unions in the US and a few other independent unions constitute the trade union movement with 16 million members. It is losing members and in the better years just managing to stay even. Militant or strategic organizing is at an all time low.

The mood among the progressive movements in the US is mixed with regard to the AFL-CIO. Can it change to rejuvenate and build a genuine and vibrant labour movement or should one look outside it? The mixed feelings in themselves, however, are an improvement from the far more unambigiously negative feelings that labour invoked before the 1990s. The change is due to the historic election in 1995 of John Sweeney as the President of the AFL-CIO. Sweeney, the former president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the union that is credited with the dramatic ‘Justice for Janitors’ campaign, for the first time challenged the incumbent president. Sweeney promised to do what many believed the AFL-CIO needed to do in order to survive and build a genuine labour movement for the working class: focus on organising the unorganised workers, and reconstruct the AFL-CIO’s international affairs department (that had a notorious reputation as a close ally of the US State Department in the so-called anti-communist witch hunts, resulting in anti-union and undemocratic, if not criminal, practices in other countries, especially in South America).

New Movements, Signs of Hope

What are some of the hopeful signs today in building a genuine labour movement for the working class in the United States? One phenomenon that sticks out is the increasing involvement of people, who would be traditionally considered “non-labour,” in issues and concerns of labour and the unlikely alliances that have sprung up at local and regional levels between them and labour.

In the last ten years, community and labour organisers have begun using a splendid hook to build a more positive image of labour for ordinary Americans and to broaden the landscape of all that constitutes labour. Campaigns for a ‘living wage’ sprang up in different parts of the country, first originating in Baltimore near the nation’s capital, Washington DC. A ‘living wage’ is one that a working family can live on and that went well beyond the minimum wage that is stuck at a long-outdated level. A living wage campaign typically again brought together union locals with different sectors of society to fight for a cause that affects the poor, the working class, and the communities they live in. The target was public sector jobs and jobs that resulted from government contracts to private corporations. Numerous living wage campaigns succeeded and the associated gains in some cases have been actual increase in union membership and a place at the table where decisions regarding economic development are being made.

Worker Centres is another phenomenon that arose in the last ten years. They began as a way to respond to workers ignored by traditional unions – contingent workers, immigrant workers, workers of colour, workers in small workplaces and so on. They are community-based organisations which have developed innovative formations such as workers’ associations. They address a gamut of issues, maybe ethnicity-based (e.g. Asian, Latino) or multi-ethnic, may also provide several direct services, do leadership development, advocate for policy changes, and so on. They have enriched the labour movement, put pressure on traditional unions to pay attention to previously ignored constituencies, and helped broaden the parameters of labour organizing beyond wages and benefits at the workplace.

A common thread running through all these new efforts is an unambiguous position of solidarity for immigrant workers. Given the pre-Sweeney AFL-CIO days of hostility and scapegoating of immigrant workers, this is an important shift for the labour movement. The AFL-CIO itself finally came out with a long-due resolution in 2000 in support of immigrant workers and the legalization campaign for the “undocumented”.

Today’s challenges

What are some of the issues facing the labour movement today? Now that the rhetoric about organising has won the day within the formal trade union structure, the debate is on how - and indeed the more radical issue, on whether at all - the AFL-CIO is up to the task. Visible proponents of organising point out that increase in membership in itself is not a sign of strength unless such increases are concentrated in targeted industries and help build union density. SEIU Director of Building Services Stephen Lerner lays out the arguments in a much-talked-about paper, “Three Steps to Reorganising and Rebuilding the Labour Movement.” Labor Notes, America’s progressive labour magazine, notes, “Organising is important. Density is important. But these are just two variables in a complex equation that adds up to workers’ power. Democracy, militancy, and a broader social movement orientation will all be essential components in a revival of the US labour movement’s fortunes.”

Some may say scale is so important now that increasing numbers and activities in any fashion can only be a good thing. Yet others who have lived through worker centres and living wage campaigns may ask, how do these new movements help to build a unified and numerically strong movement as opposed to one that is innovative but fragmented, develops positive political culture but does not build enough power?

This indeed is a central question as the Bush administration is ruthless in its single-minded effort to destroy trade unions, an effort that dates back to Ronald Reagan in the 80s when he summarily fired air traffic controllers for exercising their right to strike. Bush is trying various tactics, the more visible among them being the aggressive privatisation of public services, demanding that security workers have their labour rights suspended in the interest of preserving ‘national security’, supporting firing without compensation of workers in union drives, summoning up his legal powers to break strikes, and mandating new federal micro-audits of every local union financial transaction over a few hundred dollars to harass and intimidate labour. More and more people have no access or cannot afford health care and this in a country that already had the worst record among developed countries with regard to health care for its people. Poverty and unemployment are on the rise, with the Bush administration channeling billions of dollars into the wars and further cutting back safety nets for its people. Immediately after coming to power, Bush passed the boldest tax cut bill in US history, which solely benefited the wealthy.

Though the US government has done its best to thwart labour rights within its borders, it has been vocal in the call for integrating human rights and labour rights in international venues such as the WTO and multi-lateral trade agreements. The issue of social clauses is a complicated debate and has often ended up pitting Global North workers against Global South workers – the latter suspecting protectionist motivations. As the Human Rights Watch report says, “to give effective leadership to this cause that is not undercut by hypocrisy, the United States must confront and begin to solve its own failings when it comes to workers’ rights.”

The good news is that growing numbers of organised trade unions are facing up to the fact that change is necessary and some are even beginning to agree on what that change might be. There is also a growing number of people, thanks partly to the anti-globalisation or global justice movement and the anti-war movement, invested in changing the terms of the equation in this neo-liberal world and who believe that labour’s role is central. Can all this add up to build ideological and strategic unity? The jury is out but observing closely.