In response to a recent LA Times opinion.
Opinion by Profe. Gonzalo Santos | SEP. 29, 2022
A magnificent, well-thought, well-timed, and well-executed campaign to improve the labor rights to organize and vote for farmworker unions in California. First, the hard legislative work to pass AB2183, THREE times (the last two vetoed by Newsom). Then the 24-day march from Delano to Sacramento to pressure the governor to sign the bill. Then the dual tactics of getting Biden & Harris to endorse the bill and mount daily vigils to keep the pressure on the governor all the way to yesterday - two days before the deadline to sign the bill - when Newsom relented and agreed to sign it with a side letter of understanding with the UFW and the CLF on text to be added next legislative period.
And it worked! This hard-fought, finally victorious campaign for workers’ union voting rights, becomes the gold standard for labor organizing - ¡sí se pudo!
Three other observations that folks need to keep in mind: (1) The powerful, highly organized and influential California growers really lost this time. Their well-known intimidating, union-busting tactics become much harder for them to deploy to keep the workers from forming unions in their fields, as they will now be able to do so like all other workers in the public sector - by mail and petitions OUTSIDE their workplaces.
(2) The business/donor/mega-rich classes who regularly buy off politicians in both parties of the corrupt American duopoly have relied for a long time on just enough so-called Blue Dogs Democrats to sometimes quietly, sometimes brazenly DERAIL urgently-needed and popular legislation that in any way affect their capacity to continue to enrich themselves at the expense of working-class and middle-class Americans (and protect the environment, ensure social justice, and promote egalitarian social relations). This is what has been happening during the entire term of office of the Biden administration on the strategic deal that the Biden team made with Bernie Sanders team on all sorts of issues.
A favorite tool to achieve this sabotage has been the outdated and much abused filibuster. In California, we have the governor's veto power as the last-ditch resort in case all else fails. It's no surprise that even such a progressive governor as Newsom came under immense pressure by the growers' lobby to veto again the AB2183 bill. But it did not work, mainly due to the fact the organized California labor movement knew how to deal with this challenge very effectively: put massive, visible, persistent *moral* pressure on Newsom and *never* attack him or threaten him politically.
They didn't have to: they knew that Newsom knew they saved him from the cynical and phony 2021 recall election the Republicans mounted at great public expense. They knew that for him to position himself for a future in national politics he needed them much more than they need him. And finally, they knew that if he vetoed the bill, he could kiss good-by flipping the competitive races up and down the Central Valley to the blue side of the ledger.
In fact, you can surmise that Newsom may have very well told them what FDR told the African American labor leaders led by A. Philip Randolph who asked him in 1941, as the US was about to enter WW II, to integrate the defense industries - he's reported to have said "make me do it." Randolph promptly called for a March on Washington to be held with up to 100,000 highly organized Black workers. FDR then promptly signed Executive Order 8802 and the rest, as they say, is history.
Something like this just happened, pushed to the very brink for drama, and so much the better that it happened this way for the two sides - for Newsom and for the UFW/CLF labor movement in the fields. And just like the white supremacists in both industrial corporations and unions seethed over FDR's order, today's agribusiness and white nationalist reactionaries in California can seethe all they want, but won't alter or stop this great victory of farm workers and immigrant rural communities.
(3) Nine years ago, precisely, I, along other pilgrims organized by PICO-California, walked in reverse - from Sacramento to Bakersfield - to bring attention to the national campaign for creating a pathway to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants - mostly working class and most unprotected in their labor and social rights. Everything I said in my first paragraph applied to this campaign, including the seamless integration for a national and state push to get the 2013 comprehensive immigration bill that had already passed the U.S. Senate (controlled by the Democrats) to pass in the U.S. House (controlled by the Republicans).
The main idea, of course, was to apply maximum *moral* and *political* pressure on a number of Central Valley Republican congressional representatives - David Valadao, Devin Nunes, and Kevin McCarthy. Many massive marches and rallies were held in Bakersfield, including hunger strikes, letter-writing campaigns - even an all-women peaceful but noisy occupation of McCarthy's office in November '13 (which forced an embarrassed McCarthy to show up at late night hours and "promise" the militant ladies, mostly from CHIRLA and the DHF, that he would stop stonewalling the bill and support a vote on the House floor "by early 2014" - something which he and the rest of the Republicans reneged on, of course).
Here's the point of my retelling this mirror campaign (this one for immigrant rights, which included, of course, rights for farmworkers): *none* of our pressure tactics worked to sway these Republican politicians from our Central Valley to budge an inch. They remained steadfast in blocking a vote on the CIR bill all through 2014, in effect killing it. And they, the intransigent Republicans, were *rewarded* by their reactionary mostly-white voting base by retaining control of the House and taking control of the Senate after the Nov. '14 elections - forming a formidable, consolidated congressional blocking wall to everything president Obama and the Dems tried to do, until they ran out the clock.
Utterly hamstrung as he became, Obama the timid, deluded gentleman-president, always naively seeking nonexistent bipartisanship while deporting millions of immigrants to ingratiate himself with the GOP, presided in the 2016 presidential elections over the spectacle of seeing Hillary Clinton lose to the extremist white nationalist Donald Trump; and the rest, as they say, is history.
The abject lesson of both the enormous and admirable 2013/14 campaigns for immigration reform, and the appeasement strategy adopted by Obama and the Democrats on that and many other issues, is that not only did they just failed to move the Republicans, but paved the way for a triumphant Trumpism to consolidate in the Republican Party. The strategy and tactics of the immigrant movement, framed and led as they were by the White House team and the Democratic Party's coterie of national NGOs and allied foundations completely missed what they were up against - some still do.
A picture perfect campaign - another potential gold standard of organizing a social movement with the capacity to move the national needle towards progressive social change - floundered in the shoals of the American duopoly, just as one-half of it - the Trumpist GOP - bailed out of its bipartisan rules and sensibilities, and took power with an agenda to substitute it with autocracy - the naked rule of the plutocracy that now saw no need to fund both parties, and much to gain from whipping up white nationalism, homophobia, racism, and ruthless patriarchy among the divided populace.
To make this lesson as clear as possible: this great victory for farmworkers in California would today be inconceivable, *impossible*, in a state like Texas, under the most extremist white nationalist gov. Greg Abbott or Florida under the other extreme nationalist gov. Ron DeSantis, busy as both are in out-Trumping Trump by whipping anti-Latino and anti-immigrant hysteria in every way they can - the latest, sending busloads and planeloads of actually *legal* asylum-seekers - conflated as criminal illegals - to Washington, New York, and Massachusetts.
Not that there are no Latino farmworkers in these two states, or plenty of organizers willing to mount campaigns like the one the UFW/CLF mounted in California. It's that the *target* of such campaigns are not just immune to any pressure from mobilized (non-Cuban) Latinos and immigrants, but that they would *use* such Latino mobilizations as *opportunities* to go even more extreme in their policies and actions - just as the GOP did on a national level ever since the massive, peaceful, historic immigrant marches of 2006, 2010, 2013/14.
To *force* the GOP to change course all appeasements and delusions about "working across the aisle" in the name of seeking a bipartisan compromise must be jettisoned from both the progressive social movements and the Dem Party. Instead, the Trumpist GOP, which is now busy trying to sabotage American democracy itself, must be directly confronted and defeated at every turn and opportunity, lest they continue their scorched-earth rampage on our democracy to the end. Only the persistent defeat of the protofascist Republican Party will push them to change or to the margins of American politics.
