Texas Trade
unionists ready to join Season of Struggle
By Jeremy Ryan
AUSTIN: -- About 50 Texas trade unionists, fed up with pay cuts, give backs,
and concessions, came to a Jobs with Justice workshop at the recently concluded
state AFL-CIO convention to hear about and make plans for the upcoming Season
of Struggle.
The Season
of Struggle is comprised of three mass mobilizations that will take place this
fall: the Immigrants Rights Freedom Rides, the demonstrations in Miami during
the Free Trade of the Americas Agreements meeting, and the December 10 Human
Rights Day actions aimed at exposing the failures of the business dominated
National Labor Relations Board.
These actions are being called because as Mary Beth Maxwell, a national leader
of Job with Justice, told the audience, "the law doesn't serve us. What
we need is a huge outcry from the community."
The Immigrants
Rights Freedom Ride, which begins in late September, is being called because
U.S. law discriminates against immigrant workers. They are denied basic civil
and human rights. Because they lack legal protection, they often must work for
low wages with no benefits. This pool of low-wage workers drives down pay and
working conditions for the rest of us.
The freedom rides will demand that immigrant workers be given the right to become
US citizens. Doing so will protect their civil rights, especially the right
to join union, to some degree and make them eligible to vote, which will swell
the pool of potentially progressive voters.
Paul Vasquez,
national representative in Texas of the AFL-CIO, compared these freedom rides,
which will begin in different cities across the country and end up together
in Washington D.C. and New York, to the Freedom Rides of the 1960 when African-Americans
and their supporters rode through the South challenging its Jim Crow laws. "We
have the opportunity to be part of another historic event," Vasquez said.
A Freedom
Ride bus will leave Houston on September 26. Another one originating in Los
Angeles will make stops in El Paso, San Antonio, Austin, and Dallas. Support
rallies will be held in all these cities. Workers at the workshop signed pledge
cards and began making plans to build local rallies.
In November,
finance ministers from all over the Western Hemisphere will meet in Miami to
discuss Free Trade of the Americas. FTAA would extend the protocols of NAFTA
throughout the hemisphere, except, of course, for Cuba. As one participant put
it, FTAA is NAFTA on steroids.
Jobs with Justice and the AFL-CIO will be in Miami to tell the ministers and
the world, "No to FTAA" because FTAA will spread the job losses and
community devastation caused by NAFTA throughout Central America, South America,
and the Caribbean.
Jobs with
Justice and the AFL-CIO will hold mass demonstration in Miami. There will be
support demonstrations in cities throughout the US. At the workshop, those attending
completed ballots voting no on FTAA, which along with hundreds of thousands
of others will be presented to the ministers in Miami.
The last event
of the Season of Struggle will be held on Human Rights Day on December 10 when
workers across the country will confront the National Labor Relations Board,
which has become so pro-business and anti-worker that it should be renamed the
National Anti-Labor Union Board.
The message
at these actions will be that the government has become the biggest obstacle
to workers joining unions and winning collective bargaining rights. The AFL-CIO
and Jobs with Justice will organize large, militant, and non-violent actions
to confront the NLRB and its corporate masters.
Layoffs, pay
cuts, and the bosses' never ending demand for more concessions have made the
Season of Struggle necessary. "The labor movement is under attack,"
said Rudy Anderson, the Texas organizer for Jobs with Justice at the workshop.
For us not to realize that, we have
to be sleeping."
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