New Clear Vision

Protecting Workers from the Dangers of a Broken System

by Diane Lefer

“Regulation kills jobs.” We keep hearing that mantra from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. What became clear at the forum called on Tuesday evening by the Southern California Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health is that we need to say loud and clear that “Lack of regulation kills people.”

According to “ Dying at Work in California,” recently released by SoCalCOSH and Oakland-based Worksafe, 40 years after President Nixon signed the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA), an estimated 6,500 workers in California die from chronic exposure to chemical, biological, or physical agents each year and in 2009 (the latest year for which data is available) there were over 300 confirmed worker deaths and 491,000 reported work-related injuries. (The report can be downloaded here.) (more…)

Charting the Growing Ties Between Mexican and U.S. Labor

by David Bacon

One indispensable part of education and solidarity is greater contact between Mexican union organizers and their U.S. counterparts.  The base for that contact already exists in the massive movement of people between the two countries.

Miners fired in Cananea, or electrical workers fired in Mexico City, become workers in Phoenix, Los Angeles and New York.  Twelve million Mexican workers in the U.S. are a natural base of support for Mexican unions.  They bring with them the experience of the battles waged by their unions.  They can raise money and support.  Their families are still living in Mexico, and many are active in political and labor campaigns.  As workers and union members in the U.S., they can help win support from U.S. unions for the battles taking place in Mexico.

This is not a new idea. (more…)

The War on Workers Undermines Economic Justice

by Robert Reich

Marchers Take on History, Confront Mountaintop Removal

by James Russell

Cooperative Efforts Link U.S.-Mexico Labor Movements

by David Bacon

The growth of cross-border solidarity today is taking place at a time when U.S. penetration of Mexico is growing — economically, politically, and even militarily.  While the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico has it’s own special characteristics, it is also part of a global system of production, distribution, and consumption.  It is not just a bilateral relationship.

Jobs go from the U.S. and Canada to Mexico in order to cut labor costs.  But from Mexico those same jobs go China or Bangladesh or dozens of other countries, where labor costs are even lower.  As important, the threat to move those jobs, experienced by workers in the U.S. from the 1970s onwards, are now common in Mexico.  Those threats force concessions on wages. In Sony’s huge Nuevo Laredo factory, for instance, that threat was used to make workers agree to an indefinite temporary employment status, even though Mexican law prohibited it. (more…)

Labor, Solidarity, and the Future of Public Education

by Diane Lefer

Two weeks ago, I walked into an alternate universe. While the rights of American workers are under attack all over the country, I found myself at the 3rd Annual Labor, Social & Environmental Justice Fair — a whole-day event at California State University Dominguez Hills where students have been able to earn a Bachelor’s Degree in Labor Studies since 1977.

Hundreds of community members and students heard speakers and live music, attended film screenings and standing-room-only workshops, and visited more than two dozen booths set up along the East Walkway in front of the Loker Student Union.

They could register to vote, learn about community gardens, protest the sale of sweatshop clothing in the university store, learn how the UFCW can fight to protect workers in the food industries, support health care for all, sign postcards to Senators Feinstein and Boxer urging a vote against the Free Trade Agreement with Colombia (where 51 union leaders were assassinated in 2010), petition the university for a Women’s Resource Center (for a campus where 70% of the students are women), and meet a beaming Madelyn Broadus who is now a proud member of Sheet Metal Workers, Local 105, thanks to the apprenticeship she was able to access through the efforts of the Black Worker Center in South LA. (more…)

Decades After General Strike, Bay Area Workers Continue Struggle

by David Bacon

In the 150-year history of workers in the San Francisco Bay Area, the watershed event was one that happened over 70 years ago — the San Francisco general strike. That year, sailors, longshoremen, and other maritime workers shut down all the ports on the West Coast, trying to form a union and end favoritism, low wages and grueling 10- and 12-hour days. Ship owners deployed tanks and guns on the waterfront and tried to break the strike [3].

At the peak of this bitter labor war, police fired into crowds of strikers, killing two union activists. Then workers shut down the entire city in a general strike, and for four days, nothing moved in San Francisco [4]. The strike gave workers a sense of power described in a verse in the union song Solidarity Forever[5]: “Without our brain and muscle, not a single wheel can turn.” (more…)