The rights of immigrant workers in the U.S. have long been closely tied to the progress of so-called “right to work” laws and the second-class status of the southwest. After the U.S. Civil War, the oligarchy developed and maintained the agricultural South and Southwest as low-wage areas.
Later this tactic was threatened as the U.S. moved towards participation in World War II and needed to ensure calm on the home front. In 1935 the national Congress passed the Wagner Act which encouraged unionization throughout the U.S.
The more radical trade-union movement (CIO) worked to organize workers in the South and southwest.
After World War II, the oligarchy was again free to attack labor and in 1947 adopted the Taft-Hartley Act to rein in the labor movement and return to the tactic of protecting the South and southwest as low-wage areas.
That is why the “right to work” aspect of this national law was made a state option, which is unusual for a federal law. “Right to work” laws were adopted in all Southern and most southwestern states (and in many of the agricultural states of the West), but not in the industrial states of the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast). As a result “right to work” laws probably affected a disproportionately high number of Latino workers.
As part of its social contract with the oligarchy, the captive AFL-CIO after World War II essentially walked away from unionizing the South and southwest, for which it got what for a while were the world’s best wages and working conditions. . . and the illusion that they had political power through the Democratic Party.
Passing a “right to work” law in 2012 in the northern state of Michigan is a frontal attack on workers in the area where they were strongest and a demonstration of the oligarchy’s intent to drive those workers—and all workers in the U.S.—down to the level of China and Mexico.
This is part of the oligarchy dispossessing the working class in the U.S., and it goes hand in hand with the loss of jobs and benefits, all the foreclosures, and the razing of education.
The oligarchy is able to do this, and it must do this, because workers worldwide, including in the U.S., Mexico, and the rest of Latin America, are now competing, not with each other, but with computerized, robotic production.
