https://themilitant.com/2018/10/13/amnesty-for-immigrants-unite-organize-all-workers/
SWP STATEMENT
Amnesty for immigrants! Unite, organize all workers!
Vol. 82/No. 39
October 22, 2018
The following statement was released Oct. 10 by Dennis Richter,
Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. Senate in California.
“I’m not the immigration police,” the head of the Carpenters union
recently told the press. The union doesn’t ask painters where they were
born or what papers they have, he said, we just sign them up.
Drivers and warehouse workers fighting for Teamsters union recognition
at the Port of Los Angeles combined their three-day strike this week
with a protest against the threatened deportation of immigrants — some
of them truckers and union supporters — whose Temporary Protected Status
is under attack by the White House. I joined them in Wilmington, along
with other Socialist Workers Party supporters.
In the United States today, where there are more than 11 million
immigrant workers without “proper” documents. My party, the SWP,
campaigns for the unions to fight for amnesty for all of them. That way
they can join the battle to build the unions without fear of raids,
arrest and deportation. This is a life and death question to unite the
labor movement.
The fate of U.S.- and foreign-born workers is intertwined. We work
together. Our children go to school together. We need to stand up to the
bosses together.
“We don’t care where you were born, what language you speak, the color
of your skin or your sex. Let’s join together in the union to fight for
the interests of all working people.” That’s the stance every union and
every worker should take.
Just 6.5 percent of workers for private companies have a union today.
That makes it easier for the bosses to impose speedup, cut corners on
safety, push wages down, implement inhumane work schedules and take out
their profit drive on our backs.
How is the capitalist class, a tiny minority, able to impose its will on
the vast majority, the tens of millions of working people who produce
all the wealth?
They work continually to divide us, pitting unemployed against employed,
Black against Latino against Caucasian, native-born against
foreign-born, men against women. Their goal is to convince us to see
each other as the problem, not the exploitation, oppression and wars
inherent in capitalism. The only way to counteract this is to unite in
struggle to fight for workers’ rights.
More than 150 years ago, Karl Marx, the founder of the modern workers
movement, wrote that the unions “must now learn to act deliberately as
organizing centers of the working class in the broad interest of its
complete emancipation.” They must act as the “champions and
representatives of the whole working class.”
This is the road forward to organizing and building a fighting union
movement. It is the road to building our own working-class party
independent from the capitalist rulers’ state and their political
parties, a labor party based on the unions that can challenge the
bosses, fighting every day in the interests of the working class, and
map out a course to take political power.
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In This Issue
Front Page Articles •LA port workers fight for union, immigrant rights
•Amnesty for immigrants! Unite, organize all workers!
•Chicago cop found guilty in killing Laquan McDonald
•‘Workers need their own political party, a labor party’
•Join ‘Militant’ in fight against prison censorship in Florida!
•Forum: Working class is at the center of politics in the United States
today
•Syria truce holds in Idlib, threatened by capitalist rulers’ competing
interests
Feature Articles •Japanese rulers fight exposure of slavery of ‘comfort
women’
Also In This Issue •As bosses face labor shortage, Amazon raises pay to $15
•Chinese gov’t arrests Marxist Society for union organizing
On the Picket Line •‘One job should be enough,’ say striking Marriott
hotel workers
•Chicago hotel strikers win year-round health coverage
•Calif. raisin workers end strike, beat back attack on health care
•Teachers at Miami college rally for higher pay, full-time work
Books of the Month •‘Our revolution is a break with all previous regimes’
25, 50 and 75 years ago
Letters
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