Questioning Union Raids

by Yvonne Martinez, 2008-04-22

“Is raiding that bad?” California Nurses Association (CNA), Executive Director, Rose Ann DeMoro wants to know. The McCarthy-Era Taft-Hartley Act loyalty oaths were the pretext for wholesale raids against unions in the 1950’s. At the same time that the film industry drove out writers and actors, HUAC was also being used to investigate unions and union leaders who did not fall into line with the AFL-CIO’s cold war collaboration. Steelworkers with ties to the Klan raided Alabama locals of the Mine and Milne workers who had succeeded in integrating its ranks. AFL craft unions have historically seen fit to exclude “rabble” from its ranks. Since its cigar roller craft oriented inception, the AFL limited organizing to the crafts. Craft unions were organized to protect the work for and of “its own.”

As illustrated by a particularly poignant episode in early US labor history and indicative of the continuing “us but not you” legacy, Mexican and Japanese beet hoers organized a successful strike in Ventura, California in 1903. They petitioned the AFL for a charter.

Influenced by its “Exclusion Act” era sympathies, Samuel Gompers wrote the Mexican beet hoers to tell them that the Charter would be extended to the Mexicans, but not to the Japanese. In a response that made this granddaughter of Utah Mexican beet hoer proud, J.M. Lararras, Secretary-Treasurer of the local wrote back and told Gompers that the Japanese beet-hoers had stood by the Mexicans in the strike and now Mexicans would stand by the Japanese. The Mexican beet-hoers told the AFL to keep its charter.

The AFL’s message to the Japanese beet-hoers was clear; the union is for “Us but not You.” We protect our own. You are not one of us.

Red Scare Purges in the 1950’s resulted in violent raids against left led unions. In the wake of Jim Crow, left led unions were in the forefront of organizing workers of color, immigrant workers, and women. They succeeded in organizing when union halls were segregated; where dual seniority lists existed and full union membership was limited by race. They also worked to expand leadership ranks to reflect its minority membership.

To illustrate this aspect of its racist and “union for us but not for you” history, the AFL-CIO accepted the venerable A. Phillip Randolph and the Sleeping Car Porter Union into its membership, but did not count them as full members.

The Red Scare Purges and attendant raids were devastating on two fronts to the labor movement. Most immediately, the most creative and dedicated activists were violently removed from the movement setting a course of decline for the Labor Movement that resulted in a change of labor density from nearly 45% at its height in the 1940’s to about 12% now. The impact was suffered by working people as a whole and disproportionately by the most vulnerable workers, immigrants, women, and workers of color. Secondly, leadership by and of people of color in the trade union movement was all but wiped out.

Maybe when you look at the checkered history of raiding in the US Labor Movement you can find that the answer to Rose Ann DeMoro’s question. It falls not far from its current structural affiliations. In Ohio, CNA, a craft union affiliated with the AFL-CIO, raids SEIU, a union that is part of a breakaway coalition of Unions that includes HERE, the Teamsters and UNITE. A coalition of unions composed mostly of low paid immigrant workers and workers of color. Unions that broke away from the AFL-CIO for same historic reasons that the CIO broke away from the Craft dominated AFL, to organize the unorganized, irrespective of craft or profession.

As true then as now, breakaway former AFL-CIO affiliates as part of the Change To Win Coalition are responsible for the first real growth in union membership in over a decade.

In a repeat of its history, current AFL-CIO Craft union affiliates are again raiding unions who have demonstrated success in organizing. Not since the 1950’s Red Scare when unions affiliated with the right wing AFL-CIO saw fit to raid workers, have there been such wide scale raids.

This year in Ohio, 8,000 workers were told by the CNA to vote “No Union.”

With all this talk about union democracy, it is completely disingenuous to tell workers that a strategy employed by them to carry out a community campaign to organically organize their own workforce has to be interfered with efforts tantamount to the raids carried out against other unions all over the country and to do so by using a “Vote No Union” campaign.

So to answer Rose Ann’s question, I guess it’s okay to interfere and raid and tell workers vote no union because they are better off without a union as long as it’s not your union.

I guess it’s okay when after years of work, struggle and internal change, we now for the first time in years have been able to turn the corner in US Labor Union density by organizing the thousands of new workers who so desperately need a union – women, immigrants, people of color. I guess it’s okay, especially now, when – with everything against us – that we are finally winning.

Yvonne Martinez is a writer and SEIU labor representative. The views expressed here are her own. She has written, researched and published work about women, immigrant workers and workers of color in the labor movement.