I think it is important that we understand that there is an intimate connection between race and the crisis that the union movement is currently going through and I would argue there has been an intimate connection between race and labor in the United States. But it’s a connection that is largely ignored in most labor histories. Most labor histories, for example, will begin to talk about workers that organized in the 19th century and formed things that we start to know of as unions and they went on and on and you might hear about the Ludlow Massacre, Haymarket, the Congress of Industrial Organizations. That’s not where I start.

I actually start in the 1500s and I’ll explain that in a second. What brought me down part of this road was in 1985 there was the 50th anniversary of the formation of the Committee on Industrial Organizations, the CIO that was its first name. And knowing a little about labor history, I read this article in the AFL-CIO newspaper centerfold about that and noticed a very interesting thing. People of color were ignored in the article and specifically there was no reference to the role that people of color had played in the formation of the CIO. I tried to figure out well how is this possible. It is a blind spot in most labor histories.

Most labor histories are actually not labor histories. They are the history of white men in unions and what we have to do is actually reconstruct labor history and so that’s why I say we go back to the 1500s and we don’t even start in North America. We start in a little place called Ireland because in order to understand race in the United States, you actually have to go to Ireland, believe it or not. And you have to understand that when the English invaded and took over Ireland and carried out a brutal suppression of the indigenous people who happened to be Catholic. I emphasize “happened to be” because the suppression was not because of their religion. It was that they happened to be on the land and the English wanted it. The brutal suppression of the indigenous people of Ireland brought with it the construction of an entire system of rule. And the system of rule had a couple of different elements.

One was that the notion of anything Irish was inferior to anything English. Anything. There was no legitimacy for the Irish language. There was very little legitimacy for religion or any of the cultural features in Ireland. The other thing that happened was that the English began the active introduction of a new population into the best lands in Ireland. They brought into the northern part of Ireland, English, Scotts, and Welsh. They settled there and in settling those areas, there was a differential in treatment that was created between the settlers and the indigenous population. It is a differential that is often called orange privilege. The differential was constructed around the notion of religion.

In other words, if you were Protestant, you had certain privileges over the Catholics, but it wasn’t fundamentally about religion because it wasn’t like the Irish could say convert to Protestantism. That wasn’t going to change their situation because fundamentally what this was about was social control over Ireland. And how do you do that and what the British invented, and very effectively, was the notion of introducing to a population, a relative differential in treatment such that they put on a uniform everyday when they woke up and served the interest of the colonizer. When North America settled, this basic system of social control is introduced to our shores. But it doesn’t take the form of religion.

The original workforce in North America was not a slave workforce. It was an indentured servant workforce including the Africans that were brought here. This is why I say when we are looking at labor history, we have to look back understanding how this whole system of social control and in fact labor relations begins and it begins with this. It begins with a series of discussions and struggles that take place in the 1600s because you have a situation where African indentured servants, European indentured servants, and Native American indentured servants that they could capture and hold, were working and there was a fairly small ruling elite over the colonies. This fairly small ruling elite was having great difficulty managing the situation and if you look at the record in terms of the 1600s, you see a series of things that are called bondservant revolts. Bondservant was another name for indentured servants.

These indentured servants - African, European, and Indian – were constantly revolting against the colonial ruling group and in that situation, the colonial ruling group had to determine a mechanism for the social control over the workforce in order to ensure stability. Over the period of roughly a hundred years, they institutionalized what we have come to know as white supremacy or racism, but it is very interesting the way that is happened because it wasn’t very simply a matter of ideas. It wasn’t like that every Sunday in the churches, the white people were told “you’re superior”. There were active institutions created to drive wedges between the different populations and supplementing that was an ideological justification. So for example, you had things like the prevention of miscegenation, that is intermixing of the peoples. You had rules or laws that were codified such that if two bondservants ran away and they were both European and they were caught, they would only have to serve out their own time, but if an African and an European bondservant ran away and one of them was caught, they would have to serve out not only their time, but the time of the other so you think about that for a second and think about the implications that that has for people because no one was a fool right? So they are thinking well I have to make a decision. It’s always a risk running away. If I get caught, what are the ramifications?
It is over the period of roughly a hundred or so years that you move from Africans as indentured servants to Africans as slaves to Africans as slaves for life to Africans as slaves for life and the lives of their children so that the notion of chattel slavery took roughly a hundred years to institutionalize. One impact of this entire system was that the bonds that existed within the workforce start to break down and by the end of the 1600s and certainly by the early 1700s, you do not find evidence of so-called interracial bondservant revolts. What you see instead are African slave revolts because by the early 1700s, the European workforce had put on a uniform and that uniform was white.

Now I often like to ask people when I am giving talks, where did white people come from and you may find that to be a very humorous question, but you know, I used to ask myself this all the time because I’d look at the map. I could never find Whiteland. And I looked. And the closest thing to Whiteland I could ever come across was White Russia, Bellerose, right? But that couldn’t be the source, right? Not everybody that’s white in the United States came from Bellerose. So where did all these white people come from? Where is this Whiteland, right? And what we have to understand is that the construction of race is not about origin. It is fundamentally a political question. It’s very interesting when we look at the record in terms of the 17 and 1800s that the people that are now today considered white in the 1700s would not necessarily be considered white.

That there is a constant reconstruction of race in the United States and it is absolutely remarkable and if it weren’t so serious, it would actually be funny. Up until the mid-1800s, Irish really weren’t considered white people. They were really pissed with the British for occupying Ireland and they were in fact stirring up trouble in North America and often providing weapons to the Africans and to the Indians. But in the mid-1800s, something in fact does happen in connection with the massive migration of Irish after the Potato Famine, you start to see a transformation of the Irish to becoming part of this block and I think that understanding white as a block really helps.

It’s not a race, it’s a political block and that what effectively happens in the 1800s, is that this political block remolds itself so that white people who were up until that point French, English, and Germans largely, now there is a certain kind of inclusion. An inclusion that is not immediate. There is great resistance as we all know that Irish immigrants came here and they faced immense hell and resistance. But over time, there were provisions created for their introduction into the white block.

Nothing like that ever happened to the African. The white block evolves over the 1800s and 1900s. Jews, for example, were never accepted as white people until after World War II. I mean we have to be very clear about that. It was only in the aftermath of the Holocaust that there was a grudging acceptance of Jews and saying, we’ll give them a little place. Italians, forget it. Not until very late in the 20th century. And other south Europeans. There was this constant remolding and I would suggest to you that there is an additional remolding that is underway right now.

So race is fundamentally political and if we don’t understand that, then a lot of what’s happening in U.S. labor history doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. We don’t really understand what had been some of the breaks that have stopped grouping sections of the working class from in fact, coming together. There is a second feature when we are looking at the issues of crisis that faces labor in that when we start to see in the mid-1800s, the development of something that’s identifiable as a union movement. That is organizations that call themselves trades unions. That there is a deep division from the very beginning and it’s a division that continues to permeate the movement. And it’s between inclusion versus exclusion.

Capitalism, the system we live under, promotes competition among workers. It exists on that basis. It’s not simply competition among capitalists, but it’s competition among workers. It’s like the game of musical chairs. There’s always one less chair than there are people playing the game. There’s always a limited amount of resources because of the way that the social surplus is distributed so the question is how does this competition get dealt with and unions emerged in order to address this competition. But the question that they had to deal with fundamentally, from the very beginning was whether the notion of unionism was an inclusive one, right? That is, whether it was to organize everybody who potentially could be organized or was the idea to narrow the target group, limit the number of people who can get the goods, and these two things have been in contention from the very beginning.

An example of this is the whole fight around slavery. Within the union movement, prior to the Civil War, there were three views on the question of slavery. One view said it was not an union position. It was not an union issue, we shouldn’t take any position. Another view said we should oppose slavery and a third view said we should support slavery. Now growing up, I could not understand how a trade unionist could support the idea slavery until you remember we live in a capitalist society and then it was like one these “Ah-ha” moments, right? Because the whole notion wasn’t simply what the white laborer in the north thought about black folks. It was more a question of free black labor as a competitor with free white labor. This is one of the things that haunted the movement from its inception and so you had in the movement, these two views. One view saying that in order to gain power for workers, we have to organize everybody. We have to organize any potential worker. Anyone such that we limit the ability of management to play us. Whereas another view, that was particularly associated with craft unionism, articulated the notion that we limit the number of people that have certain skills and the employer will have to deal with us. These views have been in contention and they have just morphed over time, but in their essence, they have remained the same.

A third challenge that has faced the movement has been a question of empire. One of the things that’s interesting when we look at the history of the United States and a lot of us don’t really want to address this because it gets a little dicey is that the United States from the very beginning has conceptualized itself as an empire. From the very beginning, the notion of creating a republic and an empire were seen as something that would go hand in hand. The expansion beyond the Appalachians, going west, Manifest Destiny. All of this was very much wrapped up with the question of building empire and the idea of being often driven by certain religious and quasi-religious views was that this land had been God-given to a certain group of people and that anyone that stood in the way of that was to be annihilated. So the annihilation of course involved moving against the Native Americans, but it also involved seizing the northern half of Mexico.

When the continental United States came into existence, the notion of empire did not stop. But the notion of empire wasn’t simply territorial. There was a territorial aspect. Obviously the seizing of Hawaii, provoking a war with Spain in order to grab Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. I mean these were all; there were certain limited territorial issues, but fundamentally, the issue of empire for the United States has been one of behind the scenes. That is controlling indirectly and this was something that was masterful introduction in the late 19th century and early 20th century contrasted with Europe and Japan, which looked for territories.

The labor movement in the United States, grudgingly in some cases, actively in others, accepted the notion of empire. It accepted the notion that an empire was legitimate. And the acceptance wasn’t necessarily one of flying the banner of empire, it was often one of silence. Silence in the face of atrocities. It was the notion that a union could sit back and only focus on wages, hours, and working conditions, but not think about the implications of larger questions, domestic and international.

In other cases, there was very, very active contribution to empire. And just a few examples: after World War II, before the AFL and the CIO came together, there was very active collaboration by the AFL with the Central Intelligence Agency, which was formed shortly after World War II in suppressing left-wing labor organizations in both Japan and in Europe. When the AFL and the CIO came together, there was a continuation of an active collaboration and it was quite notorious. September 11, 1973, may people don’t remember it was September 11. There was a coup in Chile that overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. The coup had the active collaboration of the AFL-CIO. There were other examples of this where the official union movement believed that part of its role was to advance the foreign policy objectives of the United States and so no contradiction between advancing those and some of the issues that workers were facing here in the United States. Nor saw any contradiction between that and issues of injustice. So that you’d have U.S. trade unionists actively supporting political organizations that were suppressing trade unionists.

This happened in Central America during the 1980s when dictatorial regimes backed by the United States were suppressing legitimate trade unionists and the AFL-CIO was in some cases, supporting that suppression so we have a movement that finds itself in a dilemma here in the beginning of the 21st century. A dilemma that involves issues of race, issues of inclusion that go beyond race – gender, ethnicity, and other areas, and this issue of empire. These come together and have helped to create the crisis that we are looking at with the union movement because the construct, that is the way that the union movement understands its purpose is really being called into question. Fundamentally, one of the things that we have been seeing over the last twenty-five years with the reconstruction of global capitalism is that global capital no longer seeks partnerships with labor. At a certain point, particularly in the period from the Depression up until about 1975, there were searches for partnerships. In the United States, this was absolutely true.

In the 1930s, there was great worry that everything was unraveling and therefore the necessity for a certain wing of capital to align itself with labor or to at least tolerate the existence of unions. This is no longer the case and this is one of the problems that the leadership of organized labor, including both factions in the current split do not get. That there is no peace in our time. There is no acceptance by capital of unions. In fact, what we are in is what’s called a war of annihilation. We are in a situation where capital is ultimately trying to destroy any form of organization that workers have including, but not limited to trade unions. This is really one of these things that we used to call a fight to the knife, yet the leadership of organized labor wants to deceive itself that somehow we can reinvent the New Deal era.

Somehow we can convince, perhaps if we get on our knees long enough, that we can convince capital that they should accept us, that we have a role to play. There are union leaders that are begging literally, I read this stuff all the time. They are begging for acceptance. They talk about something called Team America. Well I mean the only kind of team that the capitalists are interested in is a mule team. They are not interested in a partnership. They are interested in putting something around the workforce and saying this is what you do and if you don’t do this, if you don’t follow what we are saying, then the results - look South. Look at the Gulf Coast. Look at the people that suffered as a result of Katrina. Look at the redundant workforce that is no longer needed. That is your future so we find ourselves in a situation where there really is no peace in our time. There is no accommodation.

This is a fight. It’s a fight not only for the future of the labor movement, it’s really a fight for what kind of country we are going to be living in and in fact, what kind of world we are going to be living in. The black worker in that situation finds himself and herself at the center of this, much as we have many, many other times in history because contrary to those that identify the struggle of the African-American simply as a struggle against racism, our struggle is about democracy and it’s about inclusion. Our struggle when we have faced struggle, whether it is in the union movement, whether it’s the Civil Rights or whatever, our battles for democracy have been the battles against any and all forms of privilege and injustice.

And so the challenge that we have continued to offer to the official labor movement is that there can be no successful labor movement without taking up the banner of inclusion and inclusion is not the same thing as diversity. Diversity is how many assortments of people we have in the room. Inclusion is who makes the decisions. The future of a real union movement is a future that really does speak to inclusion. It speaks to a change in power relations even within the oppressed and our union movement must look at that.

When we are talking about the crisis that is facing the labor movement and black workers, I would identify by way of summary that there is this crisis between capital and labor. It’s not just in the United States. The reconstruction of capitalism, which is what people call globalization, and we have to be very clear about what globalization is. When we are talking about globalization, it really is the reconstruction of global capitalism. It’s not that all of a sudden we have discovered each other around the world. African people know that very well.

We know a little bit about globalization, because one could argue right? And there has always been trade, but there are certain new things, particularly with the introduction of new technology, but also with the interpenetration of capital that has been taking place internationally. The issue of immigration is a critical one for African-Americans and for the union movement. What immigration has resulted in for many people is this fear of continued competition.

You know a couple years ago, there was this horse race. You might have heard about it. It was between African-Americans and Latinos. And it was almost everyday in the USA Today and others. And it really was. I had an uncle that was really into the horses, right? And I’d read and it really felt like horse races. And they are coming around the bend. And here come the Latinos and they are gaining up on the African-Americans. Folks, it’s looking like a photo finish. Here it comes and it is down to the wire. And it is the Latinos! They are the largest minority right? And when you realize what was going on, we were both being played for suckers. The accretive term in that was not largest, but minority, right? And instead of saying to each other, let’s change the power relations in this country, we were fighting it our over who rings the bell. What I mean, who rings the bell, I am talking about that famous scene in the beginning of Gone With the Wind when the slaves are out there in the plantation and one slave goes and rings the bell and another slave says, you are not supposed to ring the bell, I am supposed to ring the bell. And between African-Americans and Latinos, we have been fighting about who rings the bell rather than fighting about power.

In Los Angeles, the Latino population is growing. A segment of the black political elite there, instead of embracing Latinos, instead of saying let us partner, instead is trying to fight it out with them to see who gets some of the crumbs so this issue of immigration is a real challenge. The thing is that it is not new because the workforce in the United States is always rebuilding and reconstructing.

And my final point is this, that the rebuilding of powerful working people in the United States will not happen through simply filling up a tire. In other words, if you think metaphorically of the union movement as a tire that is moving towards being flat, any of you that have a car know that you fill up the tire, but that is only a temporary solution. If there is a hole in the tire, you’ve got to replace the tire. You don’t have a choice. And that is the situation that we’re in. That too many leaders of the movement are essentially trying to refill the tire and they believe that we really don’t have to change the treads or even the material that we created this tire. We just simply have to pump a little bit more air into it, inflate it more, and that it can keep rolling. There is a real danger when you do that. The danger is you drive too fast, you will have a blowout. Thank you very much!