What We Can Learn From Organized Labor
We’re at a time in American history where Democrat and Republican, Left and Right, are ideologically fluid. There is no place where this is more apparent than in the treatment of American labor. As late as 2015, Democratic hopeful for President Bernie Sanders famously called mass immigration a “Koch brothers conspiracy” to reduce wages. And when he lost the nomination to Hillary Clinton, many people (yours truly included) abandoned the Democratic party and cast their ballot for Donald Trump.
I was not a normal Democrat either. As a bright-eyed utopian in my early twenties, I was as an active organizer in the Industrial Workers of the World—yes, the revolutionary communist labor union. My husband and I became Secretary and Treasurer of the Seattle branch. While time was scarce as young parents, one lecture at the University of Washington caught my eye as directly relevant to my new life as a mother. The topic was “Wages for Housework by Global Women’s Strike.” The speaker was Selma James, the ex-wife of the late black Trotskyite writer and activist C. L. R. James. James argued that raising children is the most important of all labors and that outsourcing this labor so a mother could work away at something else just to pay for the labor required to raise her children was absurd.
At this point, communists still generally acknowledged the validity of the nuclear family. (This is no longer the case.) In fact, paying one parent to provide childcare for their own children now happens to be a current proposal of the Trump administration. I wonder if Global Women’s Strike has noticed.
At the end of her talk, one of the attendees asked James, “What do you think about intersectionality?” Intersectionality was the fashionable new idea that people are categorized by their persecuted traits and that these categories intersect with class. I.e., if you’re a black trans lesbian in a wheelchair, you are the most oppressed and therefore the most important.
James answered, “It doesn’t make sense to me. We’re supposed to unite the working class. Why would you divide it even further?”
This stuck with me: diversity is a deadly weakness for any kind of organized society whether it be a union, a social club, or a functioning nation.
Introducing diversity as a union-busting tactic is well-recognized by employers. In a 2020 article, Business Insider exposed Whole Foods’ “heat map” which identified stores at risk of unionization. One key metric is lack of diversity. The more ethnically homogeneous a store, the more at risk it is to unionize.
As late as the 2000s, the labor movement in the US recognized this and was outwardly nationalist simply as a matter of fact. It was universally understood that foreign labor brought down wages of the native working class. (This only changed under years of pressure from unions that represented service workers that were largely composed of illegal aliens.)
Samuel Gompers, himself a Jewish immigrant from the United Kingdom, led the American Federation of Labor to support every law that would restrict immigration. This policy shifted only after his death and with the merger of AFL with the communist infiltrated Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1955.
On February 7th, 1979, the New York Times ran a piece reporting that third-generation Mexican-American labor leader Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers set up a “100-mile line of military-style tents to halt the flow of illegal aliens threatening to take the jobs of striking melon farmers.” Despite being mostly Hispanic, the UFW was opposed to immigration. They lobbied fanatically against the Bracero Program (a diplomatic agreement between the US and Mexico during and after WWII, whereby Mexicans were allowed to live and work as farm laborers in America). The program was terminated in 1964 under pressure from the UFW.
More recently, shortly after my time with the IWW, farm workers struck at a Washington State berry farm in 2014. The owners threatened to ship in Mexican workers, using H-2A visas to replace other striking Mexican farmworkers already living in the US. (The berries will rot in the fields!) Using H-2As as strikebreakers is illegal, but the Sakuma family (descended from Japanese immigrants) nearly did so until public scrutiny prevented them.
One notorious example of the destructive effect of immigration on American workers was dramatized 1990 film, American Dream.
Filmmakers documented the famous Hormel Spam Factory strike in Austin, Minnesota, in 1985. These workers raised families and bought homes on an assembly line salary. None had, nor required, college degrees. But the strike ended in disaster for the union—80% of the workforce was replaced, permanently, by Mexicans. (The Spam was going to rot in the fields!)
These replacement workers were easily exploited compared to the native workers they replaced. Language barriers and immigration status made it difficult to organize for basic worker protections. In 2011, Mother Jones published an exposé on this same Spam factory. Now, workers dealt with debilitating neurological disorders caused by the inhalation of vaporized pig brain matter. Most of these workers were illegal aliens, largely from the same village in Mexico, and their names were changed by Mother Jones to protect them from ICE.
This is not an argument for organized labor but a recognition that a disorganized, individualistic workforce, and society more broadly, can’t withstand predation from an outside group.
Whether that outside group is big business that maximizes quarterly profits at the detriment of its employees, China eyeing a destabilized West, or an organized ethnic group pushing for involvement in foreign wars, White Americans who see themselves only as individuals will be exploited. Whites should draw inspiration from the old labor movement and recognize that we too need to see ourselves as a group with valid group interests. We need to organize for these interests, or we, as a shrinking global minority, will disappear. If we do nothing, Western Civilization will disappear with us.
Because we have allowed large numbers of other ethnic groups to immigrate into our country, they generally do not assimilate and unfortunately self-segregate amongst each other instead. For example, Pew Research reveals only 33% of third-generation Hispanics in the US identify as American. These groups naturally have competing interests, and we have begun to lose our national unity, purpose, and identity. If we accept a multicultural race to the bottom, we will forfeit our personhood and become interchangeable economic units fit for exploitation.
Embracing our validity as an interest group and our importance as the founders and perpetuators of Western Civilization is not just necessary to protect the American labor force, it’s necessary for our civilizational survival.
This Labor Day, we choose to remember and honor the Western dignity of the working class. The Western value of a life that values both productivity and family, community, and spirituality. Others before us fought hard for our standard of living. We must do our part in the fight to protect it.
More on labor from White Papers here:
- The Great American Worker, by White Papers
- A Nationalist Agricultural Policy, by White Papers
- Labor Day During Trump’s Second Term—An Administration That Openly Takes The Side of American Workers, by James Fulford
- Remigration and the Economy: Facts vs. Fiction, by Cyan Quinn
- Patel Motel Cartel or American Dream? Trump has Made his Decision, by James Fulford
- The Disaster That is the India-EU Trade Deal, by White Papers
- We Can Do the Job Ourselves: Automation is the Alternative to Low-Skill Immigration, by Cyan Quinn