Re: Immigration Crisis Recalling leading up to Fast Track vote on NAFTA, Luddie Martin announcing I could support NAFTA if it included an International Minimum Wage as the CBTU delegation walked into newly elected Congressman Earl Hilliards office. Luddie had won the annual Addie L. Wyatt award of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU)that year and led the delegation of the Alabama chapter, the support of which had swung most of us* to support Hilliard over Hank Sanders, whose unbossed unbought campaign we preferred. Luddie had retired from her job in a Chicago window shade factory where she had been a Teamster Shop Steward and come back to Birmingham. We had recruited her to CBTU, but she also was breathing life back into the A. Phillip Randolph Chapter which met at the USWA (United Steel Workers of America) hall as did our local CLC (Central Labor Coincil). USWA was still the most powerful union in Alabama, tho its membership had already been severely cut by layoffs. ** Ralph Paige, President of Alanama CBTU pointed out that despite the most violent and racist tactics against union organizing in the South, white as well as black workers welcomed the South being covered by the national minimum wage and the National Labor Relations Act. Yes, NAFTA was pursued in the interest of Capital, just as the Civil War had initially been, but it was not enough to Just say no. It needed to be used to educate Americans to extract protection of US labor by expanding and raising labor rights and living standards of labor from yet further South, just as many, never all, Northern workers saw fighting for the Union and abolishing slave labor. Todays children from South of the border dying to get across it, may be like Southern slaves who were dying to fight for freedom. Most US union soldiers did not welcome them. My fear is few understand the sine qua non (the that without which it cannot be) of freedom is free time. It is as important for Labor where productivity is highly developed to demand and win reductions in the amount of labor time required to purchase our necessities as it is for Labor where its productivity is underdeveloped to win increases in wages to produce and purchase better goods and services. I pray for leadership to reduce hours at home and raise wages abroad, before all our children are begging to labor for longer and longer at stupider and stupider jobs for less and less pay to buy stupider and stupider stuff. *me, I know. My absolutely purer principled comrade Maralyn Mosely persisted with the strategy wed been following for several years to turn out enough white labor votes to tip the election of the first Black Congressman from Alabama to the unbossed unbought Hank Sanders **cf seldom noted 30s &40s history of USWA and UMA resorting in Birmingham to racist and red baiting to raid white members of Mine Mill; and 60s History of NAACP having to sue USWA as well as USSteel to abolish posting separate lists for internal job transfers
Posted on: Fri, 11 Jul 2014 14:24:59 +0000
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