African-Americans, Economic Well-Being, and Immigration

Chaka A. K. Uzondu challenges the idea that immigrants deprive African Americans of jobs.

May Day Finally Comes Back Home

May Day is International Workers Day. It was born from the national backlash against brutal police attacks on striking immigrant workers in Chicago in 1886. Soon after the birth of America's first major labor movement, May Day came to be celebrated globally and has been every since, except, as Geov Parish reminds us, in the U.S.

The immigrants of the first May Day gave U.S. workers the forty hour work week that big corporations have finaly managed to take away, as more and more Americans are forced to stake down multiple part time jobs while good paying jobs head overseas for cheaper labor markets of countries driven into dire poverty and soaring unemployment by trade agreements like NAFTA, GATT and the WTO. Most important to the struggle of workers today, Geov Parish adds:

the larger issue is America's imposition of corporate-friendly trade policies that have decimated economies in Mexico and elsewhere, spurring economic emigration to America, while at the same time exporting millions of better-paying jobs from America itself.

This year, May day has finally come back home and the U.S. may be witnessing its first labor movement in generations. Hopefully, U.S. workers will soon come to welcome solidarity with these immigrants who offer the best hope of taking the reigns of global corporate exploitation and the best chance for getting better compensation for all workers in every country, even the U.S. To oppose the immigrants who have taken to streets of the U.S. is to support a lower standard of living for the average U.S. citizen.

Every worker should demand that international trade agreements and trade organizations include fair democratic representation of workers everywhere. These agreements and organizations must be turned on their head and overhauled to protect workers rights, instead of prohibiting any laws that protect workers rights, which is what they currently do. Unbridled global trade by and for transnational corporate profiteers is what causes migration. The solution resides not in deporting immigrants, but in confronting the cause.

Bolivia Nationalizes Petroleum and Gives Oil Profiteers the Boot