Traditional agriculture disrupted. Immigrants streaming into the country and driving down wages. Anger among native-born workers being fanned by agents of the powers-that-be in a strategy of divide and conquer. It’s an old, old story in the United States.
Irish escaping the potato famine. Southern and Eastern Europeans migrating when large-scale wheat-growing made small farms uncompetitive.
Black farmers from the U.S. South being pushed off the land by mechanized cotton picking. Midwesterners abandoning family farms when new machinery made agribusiness the order of the day. And always into the cities. Always into the factories, as U.S. industry grew and grew and grew.
So immigrants streaming into the United States is not new. What’s new about the Great Migration is that the industrial jobs are not growing but declining, leaving native-born workers jobless, too. There’s a technological revolution under way that is not only pushing farmers off the land but bit by bit pushing all workers out of the workplace.
Robotic assembly-line workers cost about $3.40 an hour. For workers world wide, that’s now the effective minimum wage. And nobody can live on that, not in the U.S. To survive, big changes are necessary. But there are important lessons still to be learned from the older immigrant experience.
The last time immigrants were called “aliens,” and employers and the government used that to set one section of the workforce against another, was in the early 20th century.
At the time, fully half of the industrial workforce was immigrant. But the whole workforce was being exploited and oppressed by the industrial oligarchy. The workers saw clearly that they had to unite—in unions.
When the native-born workers united without the immigrants, they lost their strikes. When the immigrant workers united without the native-born, they lost their strikes. But when the immigrant and native-born workers united together, they won their strikes and won their struggles. They had to put their status and their nationality in their pocket and wear their class-unity pin.
Los pueblos, unidos…
