Guest Workers and Resistance to U.S. Corporate Despotism

6. Who Can Organize? Trade Unions, Worker Insurgency, Labor Power

6 Who Can organize? trade Unions, Worker insurgency, labor Power The appearance of the modern guest work program in the United States is in many ways an extension of the long-standing labor migration policies of the early twentieth century. But it is also a crucial aspect of the neoliberal globalization policies that have unfolded since the 1990s. In both senses it is an example of the state bowing to the demands of capital, which regards labor as a tradable human commodity. While government officials and immigrant rights advocates wrestle with framing a new migration policy that would permit many of the undocumented entry into the United States, if a new law effectively ends all immigration, business leaders and their sponsors in both the Republican and Democratic Parties consider the creation of a vast guest worker program essential to expand the pool of low-wage labor in the United States. The principal purpose of guest work is to restructure wages and working conditions in the United States and other labor markets of the advanced capitalist Global North. Even if workers were allowed to organize into labor unions, guest work programs are inherently a form of transitory labor migration that will permanently undermine forms of solidarity that profoundly endure in migrant societies and allow for worker organization. To make the system more palatable, according to Stephen Castles and Raúl Delgado Wise (2008), proponents of greatly expanded guest work programs are now using the euphemism “circular migration” to remove any harmful undertone to such policies that are intrinsically deleterious to workers in sending and receiving countries. However, establishing a new semantic of guest work as a positive type of “circular migration” establishes an affirmative imprint on policies that only intensify the social and economic marginal- ization of workers in both the developed and the developing worlds. Guest worker status translates into subordination of the worker as a human commodity , and irrespective of the etymology of the term—as demonstrated in the case studies of Indian and Jamaican migrants—the system sharply erodes living standards in both the sending and the receiving countries. A more accurate and truthful depiction of the most significant consequence of guest work must encompass neoliberalism’s ineluctable demolition of stable lives and labor markets that subordinate both migrant and native-born workers. Though some labor unions—such as those for teachers and nurses—ensure that all workers (even guest workers) are represented, the overall effect is the relegation of guest workers to a marginal and inferior status. While in rare instances labor union representation is compulsory—especially in the case of skilled workers—most employers will prohibit guest worker union membership and resist their unionization. This book contends that formerly established labor markets that were built upon class struggle, conferring to workers a modicum of power in developed countries, have been targeted by capital for slow destruction through the onslaught of documented and undocumented labor migration. As Karl Marx argued, the advances of the working class produce the conditions for further marginalization through capital’s outlay of surplus value into new forms of less-expensive production. In this case, guest workers are an integral means to reduce the standards in a wide range of skilled and unskilled labor markets just as new machinery replaced workers in the late nineteenth century (Marx 1915).1 Labor market shortages are fashioned both by capital and the state. Withdrawal of the state from financing education and labor training allows global capital to seek out ever lower-cost labor outside regional and national labor markets in the United States and the Global North. A prime example is the steep reduction of state-administered technical training institutes for postsecondary students, which was once viewed as a means of advancing to higher wage working-class positions in construction, nursing, plumbing, electricity, welding, maintenance, and beyond. Dramatic confirmation of the shift from productive manufacturing, health care, and service functions to financial education in high school and postsecondary schools is found in U.S. government statistics from 1982 to 1994, when the number of high school students in curriculums with vocational concentrations declined 25percent. Over the same period, high school graduates specializing in vocational curriculums declined from 13 percent to 7 percent of all students, according to the U.S. Department of Education. As who can organize? · 151 a result, vocational training shifted from concentrations in manufacturing, construction, technology, and communications toward business and...