Labor history plus current events equals deeper student understanding

Immigrant Labor and Worker Solidarity: A Teachable Moment
A statement by the CFT Labor in the Schools Committee

"An injury to one is an injury to all!"

This traditional call to honor the fundamental value of solidarity amongst all workers means two things: directly facing the divisions in our culture, and taking a hard look at 'who built America,' past and present. Both of these issues are taking center stage today in the swift rise of a movement by immigrant workers to oppose congressional initiatives that would deeply harm communities within and outside the United States. Many high school and college students are quite interested in this development. Hence, we have a "teachable moment."

Here we highlight some of our own work along these lines. At the bottom of the page we list more resources available from elsewhere.

The CFT's Labor in the Schools Committee has developed materials that illuminate the multinational and multi-racial character of the labor that has built California. Our curricula are designed to help students see that historic struggles against racism and xenophobia in California have often been supported by the working class in its efforts to create organizations such as unions and political parties. We believe that by bringing labor history and current events together into classroom discussion, we will help our students to understand both more deeply.

For instance, in Golden Lands, Working Hands, our video history of the California labor movement, there are several segments illustrating how the role of immigrant workers becomes contested political terrain between people who would embrace immigrants and their contributions, and those who would exclude them from any role in our society except that of super-exploited labor.

In Part Two, “No Danger From Strikes Among Them,” the video explores the rise of the Workingmen's Party of California in the 1870s, the platform of which was split between progressive working class demands (free public education, regulation of the special interest railroad corporations, taxing the rich, etc.) and racist, xenophobic exclusion of the Chinese workers who largely built the Central Pacific Rail Road and did the hard work of draining the swamps in the Sacramento Delta.

Part Three, “Bombs and Ballot Boxes,” features the story of the Oxnard Beet Workers' strike. In1903, Mexican and Japanese workers in Oxnard, in response to wage cuts, formed the Japanese-Mexican Labor Alliance. This was the first time in the state's history that a multi-racial group of immigrant workers managed to form a union and go on strike. These immigrant workers found that once they begin to defend their own rights, they were joined by leaders of the Los Angeles Labor Council, but opposed by national labor leaders.

In Part Four, “Not so Jazzy,” the video sets the context for the twentieth century's first major “Red Scare.” We see how the threat of a post-war economic downturn feeds anti-immigrant hysteria, leading to incarceration and deportation of immigrant worker activists.

Some in the new immigrant worker movement have called for general strikes to back up their demands for fairness. Although they occur in other countries from time to time, here have been no city-wide general strikes since 1946 in the United States. While not directly related to immigrant worker issues, Parts Five and Seven of Golden Lands, Working Hands examine the general strikes of 1934 and 1946 in the Bay Area, thus introducing the concept for a generation that has never witnessed one.

And finally, Part Eight focuses on the decade-long effort to pass the Fair Employment Practices Act, which brought together a coalition of labor, community, religious and immigrant groups to ensure equitable hiring and promotion policies in private sector employment.

Today, the era of the globalization of capital means that labor is becoming truly international. In California, immigrant labor—especially but not exclusively of Latin American and Asian origin—continues to flow into the state to perform jobs no one else wishes to perform. These workers have also been organizing themselves into unions in many industries, including construction, garment production, hotels, custodial services, and more. Some of these struggles are examined in Parts Nine and Ten of Golden Lands, Working Hands.

In the last few weeks, immigrant workers and their supporters have taken the lead to mobilize publicly against the vicious and racist HR 4437 (Sensenbrenner), which would make felons of immigrant workers without documents and criminalize those who assist them as well.

The widespread and often enormous demonstrations of recent weeks reflect the continued resistance of segments of the global working class who refuse victimization, demand dignity and equity, and call for the best practices of solidarity from the rest of us. There is a continuity between these current events and labor history. The members of the CFT Labor in the Schools Committee see the current events as a “teachable moment,” and hope that educators across the country take the opportunity to engage students in appropriate discussions about what it means to be a worker in the United States and in the world economy today.

Teaching Resources

• The Line Between Us: Teaching About the Border and Mexican Immigration
  By Bill Bigelow
• Golden Lands, Working Hands, California Federation of Teachers
• Teaching About Immigration and Organizing, Teaching for Change
  

Articles

• “The rollback of immigrant workers’ civil rights,” AFL-CIO website
• “Communities at work: How new alliances are restoring our right to organize,” New Labor Forum
• Stories on immigrant workers by labor reporter David Bacon
• “Farm labor contractor, union in pact,” Los Angeles Times
• “Out of the Shadows,” Washington Post
• "Throngs show their potent role in the economy," Los Angeles Times
• "How grandma got legal," Los Angeles Times

Organizations

• National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights
• Immigrant Solidarity Network
• Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition
• United Farm Workers of America