Labor's Trojan Horse

In a massive organizing drive conducted by the Service Employees International Union, about 5,000 janitors in Houston have signed cards requesting union membership (here). A big issue, not surprisingly, is money. Janitors get paid $20 an hour in New York City and about $13.30 an hour in Chicago and Philadelphia. In Houston, though, they make a mere $5.25 an hour, only 10 cents more than the federal minimum wage. Tammy Bettancourt, corporate flunkey and executive VP of the Houston Building Owners and Managers Association, sees no problem with this, commenting that the janitors’ wages “are very much in line with every other part-time job and with the city’s retailers. That’s what the market dictates.”

What the market dictates, my ass. Here’s why this union drive will succeed. Most of these janitors are immigrants. That means they don’t give a shit about the “dictates of the market”. And unlike those of us who were born here, they haven’t been educated into thinking that the so-called free market is something magical and holy. In short, they haven’t been taught to be stupid.

And let’s face it, some of us are truly hopeless. Utter “That’s what the market dictates” to the average white male (my demographic niche) and watch his IQ drop by at least 40 points. (Luckily, my IQ is so phenomenally, even astronomically, high that the effect is negligible.) Under the guise of “the free market” these dumb-ass white boys have been robbed of everything – pensions, jobs, health care. Their gullibility is bottomless.

This is not true, though, of immigrants. They know that they’re living like crap and that having a union will get them a better life. And no amount of management propaganda will shake them out of that knowledge. They're willing to sign the card and fight. In that respect, they may prove as pivotal to building organized labor as earlier waves of immigrants were. After all, it was the European immigrants who came over between 1880-1924 who built the militant unions of the 1930s and 40s. (That their grandchildren turned out to be credulous chumps is another matter.) So, too, the current wave of latino immigration may very well provide the basis for a revival of labor unions in the 21st century.

And, of course, the irony here is that George W. Bush’s plan to grant several million illegal aliens the status of immigrant guest workers (which as we all know is just a prelude to a general amnesty) may turn out to be exactly what organized labor needs. True, Latino immigrants are willing to work for low wages but they're also willing to form a union and raise those wages. The same cannot be said of their Anglo counterparts - they'll take the low wages, to be sure, but they'll never put up a fight.

I Thought He Looked Familiar....