David Bacon

Time To Say No To Unjust Immigration Bills

David Bacon — 2005-12-10T03:31:00Z

Editor's Note: The slew of immigration reform bills now before the Republican-dominated Congress will worsen, not improve, the country's broken and unjust immigration system, the writer says.

BERKELEY, Calif.—It's time to say no to repressive immigration bills.

Every new Republican proposal for immigration reform in Congress makes the prospect for winning legal status for the nation's 12 million undocumented residents more remote. At the same time, Congress appears ready to pass measures that will increase border deaths, lead to wholesale violations of workers' rights and give the largest corporations a huge new bracero program.

Supporters of immigrant and workers' rights face a moment of truth. Can they defeat the right-wing "reform" offensive? Even more important, can they build a movement for a real alternative? (...)

- / Pacific News Service

Communities Without Borders

David Bacon — 2005-10-07T03:50:00Z

In 1982 Guatemalan army troops filled the roads through the highlands above Huehuetenango. As part of the country's civil war, soldiers, carrying Armalite rifles supplied by US President Ronald Reagan, swept into the small indigenous villages of Santa Eulalia and San Miguel Acatán. Accusing the towns of using church youth groups to recruit guerrillas, they began killing political activists. Finally, after the army shot down San Miguel teenagers in front of the church, many families fled. Helicopters chased and bombed them through the mountains, all the way to the Mexican border. For those who stayed behind, there was no work—just devastation.

That same year indigenous farm workers from Oaxaca, living in Sinaloa's migrant labor camps in northern Mexico, began to rise up against filthy living conditions and backbreaking labor. Radical young Mixtec organizers launched strikes and, together with left-wing students from the local university in Culiacán, faced down growers, police, armed guards and, ultimately, Mexican troops. (...)

[October 24, 2005 issue]

- / Nation

Between Soldiers and Bombs

David Bacon — 2005-08-04T00:55:00Z

BASRA, IRAQ-The cracking towers and gas flares of the al-Daura oil refinery rise above the neighborhood on Baghdad's outskirts that bear its name. On February 18, Ali Hassan Abd (Abu Fahad), a leader of the refinery's union, was walking home from the Al Daura Refinery with his young children, when gunmen ran up and shot him.

Abu Fahad had been one of 400 union activists who emerged from the underground or returned from exile in May 2003, and at a Baghdad conference formed the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU). Afterwards, he went back to the refinery and urged his fellow workers to elect department and plant-wide committees. That, in turn, became a nucleus of the Oil and Gas Workers Union, one of the twelve industry unions that make up the IFTU.

Less than a week after Fahad was killed, on February 24, armed men gunned down Ahmed Adris Abbas in Baghdad's Martyrs' Square. Adris Abbas was an activist in the Transport and Communications Union, another IFTU affiliate. The murder of the two followed the torture and assassination of Hadi Saleh, the IFTU's international secretary, in Baghdad on January 4. Moaid Hamed, general secretary of the IFTU's Mosul branch, was kidnapped in mid-February, as was Talib Khadim Al Tayee, president of the metal and print workers union. Both were later released. (...)

[August 02, 2005]

- / Foreign Policy In Focus

Labor Needs a Hard Left Turn

David Bacon, Bill Fletcher — 2005-07-22T00:20:00Z

Bill Fletcher is president of TransAfrica, a national policy organization in Washington dealing with issues surrounding Africa. After the reform administration of John Sweeney was elected in 1995, Fletcher became the labor federation's director of education, and later an assistant to AFL-CIO President John Sweeney. Forced out over his radical politics, Fletcher has since proposed a wide-ranging set of ideas for a truly new direction for US unions. They clearly need it. As the AFL-CIO prepares to meet in Chicago on Monday, the percentage of organized workers in the US (overall 10%) is lower than it's been since the 1920s. While unions are debating structural changes, and some threaten to leave the AFL-CIO entirely, Fletcher says labor's problems arise because unions have stopped being the radical organizations they once were. The current debate is too limited, he says. Instead, the labor movement needs a profound change in political direction. He was interviewed this week by labor journalist David Bacon.

Q: I'd like to ask you about the criticism you've been leveling at the debate itself, more than either of the two parties in it. You say the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the AFL-CIO itself are not really fighting about the right issues. Quoting from your most recent piece, you say, "these contentious debates make a dangerous assumption: that the decline of unions is largely the fault of the structure of the AFL-CIO and/or how the AFL-CIO has operated." What do you mean by that?

A: First, the bulk of the resources in the union movement don't exist at the level of the AFL-CIO, while individual unions themselves are responsible for organizing. This is a prerogative they have cherished very deeply. In this debate about the AFL-CIO and its structures, there's very little discussion about the actual practice of the various affiliate unions.

What I feel is missing from this debate is a thoughtful, rigorous analysis of the economic and political conditions we're facing and the implications they have for the kinds of organizing unions should be doing, and the structures they need to accomplish that. In the absence of that analysis you can make all kinds of structural suggestions but they may not necessarily get to the problem.

Our problems include what's happening externally - the economic and political situation - and the lethargy that exists within the labor movement. Our unions suffer from a profound conservatism, a failure to recognize the kinds of changes that are going on, and therefore our need for a very visionary movement. (...)

- / t r u t h o u t

Iraqi Oil Workers Fight Privatization and Occupation

Hassan Juma'a Awad al-Asade, David Bacon — 2005-06-13T23:00:00Z

Public sector unions in Iraq were outlawed by Saddam Hussein in 1987. Now, the Iraqi labor movement is protesting plans by U.S. occupation authorities to privatize state owned industries. We speak with the president of the General Union of Oil Workers. - / Democracy Now!

Murdered Iraqi Trade Unionist Trapped Between U.S. and Insurgents

David Bacon — 2005-01-27T04:43:00Z

Editor's Note: Union organizers and other progressive Iraqis are caught between deadly Baathist insurgents, who likely killed trade unionist Hadi Saleh, and U.S. occupiers intent on privatizing Iraq's state-owned factories.

When they came for Hadi Saleh, they found him at home in Baghdad with his family. First, they bound his hands and feet with wire. Then they tortured him, cutting him with a knife. He died of strangulation, and before fleeing, his assailants pumped bullets into his dead body.

No group claimed credit for the Jan. 4 assassination. But for many Iraqis, the manner of his death was a signature. (...)

- / Pacific News Service

Service Employees Leader Says The War Is An Issue To Workers

David Bacon — 2004-08-10T02:54:00Z

LOS ANGELES, CA (7/30/04) - On June 22 the national convention of the Service Employees International Union, with 1.7 million members the US' largest, voted unanimously to oppose the occupation of Iraq. This was followed a few days later by a similar resolution, passed by another of the AFL- CIO's largest unions, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, and then by a resolution passed by the California Labor Federation, representing one- sixth of all US union members. (...) -

Iraq's Labor Upsurge Wins Support from U.S. Unions

David Bacon — 2004-07-30T03:29:54Z

Ewa Jasciewicz, in Basra for Occupation Watch earlier this year, contributed to this report.

Once the U.S. occupation of Iraq began over a year ago, Iraqi workers lost no time in reorganizing their country's labor movement. Labor activity spread from Baghdad to the Kurdish north, with the center of the storm in the south, in the oil and electrical installations around Basra, and the port of Um Qasr.

Workers quickly discovered that the occupation authorities had little respect for labor rights, however. Once the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) took power in Baghdad in March of 2003, it began enforcing a 1987 law banning unions in public enterprises, where most Iraqis are employed. On top of this, CPA head Paul Bremer added Public Order #1, banning pronouncements that "incite civil disorder, rioting, or damage to property." The phrase civil disorder can easily apply to organizing strikes, and leaders of both the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) and Iraq's Union of the Unemployed have been detained a number of times. (...)