Guest Workers and Resistance to U.S. Corporate Despotism

4. Temporary Labor Migration and U.S. and Foreign-Born Worker Resistance

4 temporary labor Migration and U.S. and foreign-Born Worker Resistance As the Internet is used more and more as a medium of communication in the United States, we are entering a new era of collective action at “the point of production” that is growing in significance to workers as a form of resistance. The practice of organizing at the “point of production” is what socialist labor unionists consider the “purest form of unionism.” In contrast, traditional unions habitually organize through bargaining with management to achieve a contract stipulating the wages and conditions of employment. This strategy ultimately benefits capital that mostly fears worker direct action at the workplace. To reinforce employer power over workers, the contemporary workplace consolidates management dominance through electronic surveillance that prevents any form of democracy on the job. Since the origin of capitalism, employers have continuously sought to reduce worker power derived through skills or collectivities through restructuring labor markets by means of introducing new technology and lower-wage workers. Since the eighteenth century, workers have engaged in various forms of direct action at the “point of production” as the most effective means of controlling employer abuses in the absence of militant trade unions. In 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World was founded as a means to resist the abuse of the capitalist class through new technology and low-wage labor. The Industrial Union Manifesto is applicable to workers more than a century later: “The great facts of present industry are the displacement of human skill by machines and the increase of capitalist power through concentration in the possession of the tools with which wealth is produced and distributed. . . . New machines, ever replacing less productive ones, wipe out whole trades and plunge new bodies of workers into the ever-growing army of trade-less, hopeless unemployed. As human beings and human skill are displaced by mechanical progress, the capitalists need use the workers only during that brief period when muscles and nerve respond most intensely” (IWW 1905). Just as in the early twentieth century, workers remain under assault through the introduction of new technology and low-wage replacements, which contributes to rising labor competition and working-class conflict—today as a century ago, through the rise of nativism and xenophobia toward migrant laborers. The I.W.W. Manifesto declares that: “These divisions, far from representing differences in skill or interests among the laborers, are imposed by the employer that workers may be pitted against one another and spurred to greater exertion in the shop, and that all resistance to capitalist tyranny may be weakened by artificial distinctions” (IWW 1905). As this chapter will demonstrate, instead of relying on large union bureaucracies , more workers in and out of labor unions are opposing employer domination through electronic communication—a form of electronic direct action—as opposed to relying on traditional grievance systems and other forms of employer and trade union–based dispute resolution, which are less effective than at any time since the 1930s (Lynd 1992). Though success is not certain, it is crucial to develop new forms of democratic unionism grounded in class solidarity to break the absolute power of the capitalist class over workers ever more divided by immigrant status. In this chapter, we will see how this syndicalist form of activism and microorganizing , which is common among anarchist unions, is currently growing among U.S.- and foreign-born workers. As Staughton Lynd claims in Solidarity Unionism, it is not yet apparent whether numerous yet discontinuous forms of worker self-activity will lead to a mass working-class movement— but a labor movement in the United States and beyond will only grow if it is founded by direct action by workers in shops, offices, factories, and beyond. As Andrej Grubacic asserts: “We should rely not on a fantasy that salvation will come from above, but on our own self-activity expressed through organizations at the base that we ourselves create and control” (Grubacic & Lynd 2010). However, in the capitalist-controlled workplace, with or without traditional unions, we must recognize the value of new forms of worker control that occur spontaneously through rank-and-file direct action, often leading to profound transformations in the class-consciousness of workers. temporary labor migration · 87 One cannot just identify forms of democratically controlled work in a prism. This chapter will examine how U.S. and migrant laborers engage in direct action to resist employer domination. These...