Unions and the Immigration Protests

That David Huerta, who heads SEIU in California, was arrested during the immigration protests in Los Angeles has galvanized a lot of attention on the relationship between unions and immigration. There’s a number of stories about this. Here’s one in the Times. Here’s the one in the Wall Street Journal. And here’s the Post. The Hill has published a full fascist anti-union screed about this.

Here’s a few points:

First, it’s not surprising that Huerta and SEIU would be leaders here. SEIU came to prominence on unionizing immigrant workers during the Justice for Janitors campaign, which remains the most important moment in that union’s history. That was also a critical moment in the history of the AFL-CIO, as the labor movement was turning away from its long-time anti-immigrant stance to becoming, officially in any case, pro-immigrant. So this is an existential crisis for SEIU and also an opportunity. Unions in Nevada are operating on the the same principles here and have been leading protests in that state. This is great stuff.

Second, we need to see a lot more from the AFL-CIO. Federation head Liz Shuler has issued statements opposing Trump’s actions and that’s fine as far as it goes, but how far does it go? What is the AFL-CIO actually going to do here? Understand that the federation cannot order its members around. It’s a federation, not a union. But calling for a one-day boycott of the economy or something would be a real action. Right now, this all feels way too much like everyday politics that doesn’t meet the moment from the union movement at large. We need more.

Third, we will see if the principle of solidarity that even right-leaning unions talk about means anything at all. In short, has any of this made any difference with the Teamsters? The answer is probably not. But the imprisonment of union leaders and deportation of union members really does cut against the internal principles of even unions that are not very good politically. We’ll see.

Fourth, the lack of member education from unions over the past decades is a big problem here. We know that, despite the ridiculous assertions about union members too often made by purportedly liberal commenters here, unions vote for Democrats at rates a good bit higher than the population as a whole and now way above the rest of the working class, even if it’s not at rates high enough. And unions do deserve some of the blame for this. Political education has been a real problem. It barely happens at all. This is part of the reason why Sean O’Brien did what he did in supporting Trump–he knows that the majority of his members love Trump and he was a democratically elected leader who promised to represent his members. The Hoffa administration would never have supported Trump but it also didn’t do much at all to educate members. We see this in union after union. So to actually get union members to do the right thing here, well, it’s going to be tough outside of unions that have done a better job on political education, i.e., SEIU, the teachers unions, and much of the public sector unions.

So we’ll see how this goes and what happens. All kudos to David Huerta though, a good man doing the right thing and embracing the situation. Good for him.