The UMWA was probably the most immigrant friendly of all the big American unions during this time. As you may or may not know the USWA was created by UMWA money and organization. The UMWA was also the force behind the organization of the CIO.
My Dad and my Grandad could make themselves understood in any number of Eastern and Southern European dialects and languages. I always got a big kick out of this when I was a young kid. This I guess you would call a cultural heritage?:o)
We may need to put the brakes on immigration today?
Nathan, posted some AFL-CIO boilerplate on H-1B; it's worth taking a look at.
Tom
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> Tom:
> >Yoshie, be a little careful on this one. One thing that I'm reading about and
> >hearing about is the use of these H-1B visa's to break union organizing
> >campaigns in the so-called high tech computer industries. A scab's a scab no
> >matter how you cut it.
> >
> >Our own Senator Mike Dewine and Senator John "Conflicted" McCain, two of my
> >favorite Republicans have been pushing to get more of this type of visa
> >issued!
> >The H-1B besides being used to bust union organizing drives and is also a
> >racket
> >for high tech coyotes.
>
> No doubt such instances exist, but as you say, a scab is a scab with _or
> without_ an H-1B visa, whether s/he is a citizen, "guest worker," or
> illegal alien. The question is how we uncouple union organizing from
> anti-immigrant sentiments. In some workplaces, the majority of workers
> must be immigrants (close to our home, many factory farms in Ohio, for
> instance), many of whom are illegals. Unions can't organize them while
> calling La Migra on them at the same time, no? Besides, hi-tech computer
> industries, to take your example, can relocate wholesale, right? In fact,
> that's even cheaper than importing workers, given differences in living
> standards between the USA and India, China, Poland, etc (whether you are
> talking about the production of hardware or software). "Why bring them
> here and pay them American wages? Pay them Polish wages," or so would the
> ruling class think, eventually.
>
> Max and higher-level union officials probably think that the U.S.
> government can, should, and will apply judicious immigration control and
> fair-trade economic sanctions (including import bans) to benefit American
> workers permanently. I'm saying the U.S. government won't. And it can't
> -- I think that under capitalism we at the capitalist core will either get
> a high-unemployment, high-wage, expensive-welfare economy (W. Europe) or a
> low-unemployment, low-wage, cheap-welfare economy (USA), with or without
> immigrants, however you control them. And the former is in the process of
> transforming itself into the latter, and in fact, the U.K. has already done
> so, to a large degree. (Japan will probably have to do so to get out of
> deflation and stagnation; it hasn't yet -- hence the immense fiscal stimuli
> and low interest rates producing little signs of robust recovery.) In any
> case, both are dead ends for workers.
>
> Steelworkers and other mass production workers were once predominantly new
> immigrants, no? (In fact, the ratio of the foreign-born to the native-born
> workers was much higher in the early decades of this century than now.)
> But the unions organized them anyway. That's the spirit we need.
>
> Yoshie