A few public buses drive through empty streets near the Retiro train station during a general strike against the reforms of President Javier Milei in Buenos Aires, Argentina, May 9, 2024. | AP
Argentina’s biggest trade unions mounted one of their fiercest challenges to the free-market fundamentalist government of President Javier Milei today with a mass general strike.
The walkouts led to the cancellation of hundreds of flights and halted key bus, rail and subway lines. Main avenues and streets, as well as major transportation terminals, were left eerily empty.
The 24-hour strike against Milei’s contentious austerity and deregulation agenda threatened to bring the nation of 46 million to a standstill as banks, businesses and state agencies closed in protest.
Most teachers couldn’t make it to school and parents kept their kids at home. Rubbish collectors walked off the job, as did health workers, other than in A&Es.
The government said transport service disruptions would prevent 6.6 million people from making it to work. That was apparent during morning rush-hour today as few cars could be seen on streets typically snarled with traffic. Rubbish was already piling up on deserted pavements.
CGT, the country’s largest union federation, said it was staging the strike alongside other labour syndicates “in defence of democracy, labour rights and a living wage.”
Argentina’s powerful unions — backed by left-leaning Peronist parties that have dominated national politics for decades — have led the pushback Milei’s policies on the streets and in courts over recent months.
“We are facing a government that promotes the elimination of labor and social rights,” the unions said.
The government downplayed the disruption as a cynical ploy by its left-wing political opponents.
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MLK regarded progressive unions as bulwarks of the civil rights movement. In this rousing 1962 speech to the National Maritime Union, he linked the democratic struggles of workers and black people and ended by quoting the “beautiful words” of Eugene Debs.
Industry knows only two types of workers who, in years past, were brought frequently to their job in chains — Negroes and shanghaied seamen. In those days only these workers were physically bound to their place of employment — the Negro to his plantation by guards, and the seaman by the watery isolation of his ship. Yours was never as humiliating a condition as chattel slavery, but the abuse of your freedom, and dignity of personality, were corrosive and destructive.
The sailors wrote a luminous page of history when they used their mighty strength and unity to civilize their work conditions. Everyone benefitted — other labor groups as well as employers because the violence and instability of the sea life of old could not be a basis for a great commerce. Nor could maltreated, brutalized men be entrusted with the multimillion-dollar ships of the modern era; nor with the safety of millions of passengers who now make the seas a highway.
And so you and your industry have come a long way from great depths to great heights in your journey, achieving democratic practices which put you above many other segments of American life.
What do I mean by this? I believe there is more simple nobility in your work than in almost any other. First, in the progress toward integration you are matchless because an integrated ship is a flower of democracy. On the sea, workers not only toil side by side, but they eat, sleep, and relax on an integrated basis. You are not divided by color, religion, or other distinctions. The men of a department work and sleep and eat without artificially imposed barriers between them. Mastering nature’s giant seas requires unity, brotherhood, and in moments of peril, the color of a man’s skin is of no importance, but the quality of his courage and resourcefulness is all important.
Sailors are unique workers possessing noble qualities because in time of war they assume risks many soldiers never experience, even though they remain civilians.
Lastly, every sailor is expected in the tradition of the sea to be willing to risk his life in order to save the life of another.
Some years ago I read a newspaper story of an American liner which altered its course and stood by in a storm because a single man had been sighted floating on a raft. Thousands of passengers, many of them leaders of industry and eminent statesmen, were compelled to wait — perhaps altering a thousand appointments and conferences. The delivery of cargo and mail were delayed until one man was rescued from death. For me this incident had overwhelming spiritual and moral meaning because the multitude of distinguished people, who were inconvenienced, and the fortune in wealth which waited upon one man, dramatized the importance of a single human being in an age when we too easily forget people. But this incident was multiplied in meaning because that one man, whose life hung in the balance, was discovered to be a Negro when the lifeboat brought him to safety.
It is not often that everything stops and holds its breath for an ordinary Negro. I am happy to say that a similar situation finally did occur on land only recently when the governor of Mississippi tried to reverse history and victimize one Negro, only to find hundreds of millions lining up with James Meredith and an army mobilized at his side, for the sole purpose of ensuring his rights as an American citizen.
Reaching far back into the past, it is interesting that the brutal practice of flogging on ships was fought and abolished by a member of another minority group in the eighteenth century when Commodore Uriah Levy, a Jew, ended this barbaric practice in the US Navy.
All of your progress in humanism spread to other sectors of American life, making you pioneers of the human spirit.
Martin Luther King Jr was arrested in 1963 for protesting the treatment of blacks in Birmingham, Alabama. (Wikimedia Commons)
So it is a natural extension of your tradition, it is consistent with your sense of brotherhood, that in celebrating your twenty-fifth anniversary, that with your deserved enjoyment and delight in the event, you also use it to make financial aid available to a people still fighting to realize their elementary rights and still seeking the long-promised pursuit of happiness. [The National Maritime Union, like other progressive unions, was a strong financial supporter of the civil rights movement.] Your twenty-fifth anniversary arranged in this constructive fashion honors you even beyond the achievement of twenty-five years of organized life. You sum up thousands of years of man’s struggle to be human, decent, and honorable.
Our nation is facing severe trials in these turbulent days because one region of our country still holds itself above law, as if it were cut adrift from constitutional obligations, and insurrection and mutiny against the government is still possible. They not only abuse persons, but they debase the democratic traditions of the nation in their defiant resort to anarchy and storm troop rule.
Against this force, which has the power of states at its command, Negroes have searched for effective weapons. We believe we have found them. Emulating the labor movement, we in the South have embraced mass actions — boycotts, sit-ins and, more recently, a widespread utilization of the ballot.
Emulating Biblical teachers and Mahatma Gandhi, we have seized the unique weapon of nonviolent resistance. It is a pleasure to tell you that our weapons work. They do not draw the blood of our adversary, but they do defeat the unjust system.
A remarkably effective method has evolved and become a source of splendid strength in recent months. The secret ballot is our secret weapon.
In the state of Georgia a quiet revolution is taking place. My organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, has been persistently carrying on a voting and registration drive in concert with other groups. First in Atlanta, the Negro vote joined with white allies casting our ballots in secret, and together we crushed a rabid segregationist and put into the mayoralty seat a white moderate, who has already with us broken more walls of segregation in a year than were destroyed in decades. . . . [King went on to cite political victories in his home state of Georgia based on registering black voters, leading to the election of more moderate candidates for governor and Congress.]
Student sit-in at Woolworth in Durham, North Carolina, on February 10, 1960. (Wikimedia Commons)
It is heartwarming to share your successes, and gratifying to tell you of ours. We still have a long way to go and if we forget how great the sacrifices will be, there are always arsonists, lunatics, and rampaging bigots to remind us that death lurks nearby. But if physical death is the price that we must pay to free our children and our white children from a permanent death of the spirit, we’ll accept it with quiet courage . . .
Our lives are an endless concert of tensions, struggle, and pain. Many who would speak are silent. I have often looked at the imposing, segregated churches, which the religious South has in profusion, and asked the troubling question, “What kind of people worship there? Who is their God?”
I don’t know what kind of church you worship in. Perhaps many of you worship in none. Yet I know what kind of people you are and I know what God you worship.
In your long struggle for humanity and justice, you are religious in the deepest sense, whether you have realized it or not.
With all our problems we are optimistic. We are presiding over a dying order, one which has long deserved to die. We operate in stormy seas, but I often remember some beautiful words of Eugene Debs to the court which imprisoned him for his pacifism:
I can see the dawn of a better humanity. The people are awakening. In due course of time they will come to their own.
When the mariner, sailing over tropic seas, looks for relief from his weary watch, he turns his eye toward the Southern Cross, burning luridly above the tempest-vexed ocean. As the midnight approaches, the southern cross begins to bend, and the whirling-worlds change their places, and with starry finger-points the Almighty marks the passage of time upon the dial of the universe, and though no bell may bear the glad tidings, the lookout knows that the midnight is passing — that relief and rest are close at hand.
Let the people take heart and hope everywhere, for the cross is bending, the midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning.
Excerpted from All Labor Has Dignity by Martin Luther King Jr. Edited and introduced by Michael K. Honey. Copyright 2012. Excerpted with permission by Beacon Press.
The measures are part of a “decree” announced by the far-right president in December.
The Argentine judiciary has granted a request from the National Confederation of Labor (CGT), the country’s main trade union center, and suspended the effects of the labor reform provided for in the “decree” launched by the government of ultra-right Javier Milei last December. The court decision published on January 3 is a precautionary one, i.e. it suspends the measure.
The decision was taken by the National Chamber of Labor Appeals, the first instance in the Argentine judiciary for appeals on labor issues. The court argued that there was no proven need or urgency to make the decision without consulting the Argentine Congress, which is responsible for legislation.
The “decretazo” is formally called the Decree of Necessity and Urgency (DNU), and is provided for in the Argentine Constitution. However, the executive branch can only issue this type of decree when there are exceptional circumstances and it is not possible to wait for Congress to meet.
Among other measures, the Milei government’s labor reform extends the probationary period for new employees from three to eight months (thus increasing the period in which employers can fire new workers without paying severance pay).
It also authorized the dismissal of workers who take part in picket lines or occupy workplaces during stoppages or strikes, as well as changes to overtime compensation systems.
According to Argentine newspaper La Nación, Wednesday’s court decision came as a surprise to the government. Clarín, another daily in the country, said that the government will appeal to higher courts to overturn the injunction issued by the Labor Appeals Chamber.
This article was translated from an article originally published in Portuguese onBrasil De Fato.
The World Federation of Trade Unions strongly opposes and condemns the neo-fascist policies of the Milei government in Argentina. The government’s antipopular measures, including currency devaluation, unconstitutional protocols, and a massive decree, threaten the working class and social justice.
The WFTU stands with the Argentine workers and the class-oriented trade union movement of the country, denouncing the privatization of state entities, erosion of labor rights, and the overall neoliberal agenda.
Representing more than 105 million workers in 133 countries, we join our voices with the workers of Argentina, who declare a state of permanent alert against these regressive actions and express solidarity with workers in their fight for justice.
In Defense of Communismblog, edited in crisis-ridden Greece, aims in supporting and promoting the continuous advancement of the class struggle against the rotten capitalist system. We aim to defend the ideological and practical legacy of 20th century’s historical socialism from various falsifications, but also to serve as a useful informative platform for the contemporary struggle of the working class in Greece, Europe and the World.
MLK regarded progressive unions as bulwarks of the civil rights movement. In this rousing 1962 speech to the National Maritime Union, he linked the democratic struggles of workers and black people and ended by quoting the “beautiful words” of Eugene Debs.
Industry knows only two types of workers who, in years past, were brought frequently to their job in chains — Negroes and shanghaied seamen. In those days only these workers were physically bound to their place of employment — the Negro to his plantation by guards, and the seaman by the watery isolation of his ship. Yours was never as humiliating a condition as chattel slavery, but the abuse of your freedom, and dignity of personality, were corrosive and destructive.
The sailors wrote a luminous page of history when they used their mighty strength and unity to civilize their work conditions. Everyone benefitted — other labor groups as well as employers because the violence and instability of the sea life of old could not be a basis for a great commerce. Nor could maltreated, brutalized men be entrusted with the multimillion-dollar ships of the modern era; nor with the safety of millions of passengers who now make the seas a highway.
And so you and your industry have come a long way from great depths to great heights in your journey, achieving democratic practices which put you above many other segments of American life.
What do I mean by this? I believe there is more simple nobility in your work than in almost any other. First, in the progress toward integration you are matchless because an integrated ship is a flower of democracy. On the sea, workers not only toil side by side, but they eat, sleep, and relax on an integrated basis. You are not divided by color, religion, or other distinctions. The men of a department work and sleep and eat without artificially imposed barriers between them. Mastering nature’s giant seas requires unity, brotherhood, and in moments of peril, the color of a man’s skin is of no importance, but the quality of his courage and resourcefulness is all important.
Sailors are unique workers possessing noble qualities because in time of war they assume risks many soldiers never experience, even though they remain civilians.
Lastly, every sailor is expected in the tradition of the sea to be willing to risk his life in order to save the life of another.
Some years ago I read a newspaper story of an American liner which altered its course and stood by in a storm because a single man had been sighted floating on a raft. Thousands of passengers, many of them leaders of industry and eminent statesmen, were compelled to wait — perhaps altering a thousand appointments and conferences. The delivery of cargo and mail were delayed until one man was rescued from death. For me this incident had overwhelming spiritual and moral meaning because the multitude of distinguished people, who were inconvenienced, and the fortune in wealth which waited upon one man, dramatized the importance of a single human being in an age when we too easily forget people. But this incident was multiplied in meaning because that one man, whose life hung in the balance, was discovered to be a Negro when the lifeboat brought him to safety.
It is not often that everything stops and holds its breath for an ordinary Negro. I am happy to say that a similar situation finally did occur on land only recently when the governor of Mississippi tried to reverse history and victimize one Negro, only to find hundreds of millions lining up with James Meredith and an army mobilized at his side, for the sole purpose of ensuring his rights as an American citizen.
Reaching far back into the past, it is interesting that the brutal practice of flogging on ships was fought and abolished by a member of another minority group in the eighteenth century when Commodore Uriah Levy, a Jew, ended this barbaric practice in the US Navy.
All of your progress in humanism spread to other sectors of American life, making you pioneers of the human spirit.
Martin Luther King Jr was arrested in 1963 for protesting the treatment of blacks in Birmingham, Alabama. (Wikimedia Commons)
So it is a natural extension of your tradition, it is consistent with your sense of brotherhood, that in celebrating your twenty-fifth anniversary, that with your deserved enjoyment and delight in the event, you also use it to make financial aid available to a people still fighting to realize their elementary rights and still seeking the long-promised pursuit of happiness. [The National Maritime Union, like other progressive unions, was a strong financial supporter of the civil rights movement.] Your twenty-fifth anniversary arranged in this constructive fashion honors you even beyond the achievement of twenty-five years of organized life. You sum up thousands of years of man’s struggle to be human, decent, and honorable.
Our nation is facing severe trials in these turbulent days because one region of our country still holds itself above law, as if it were cut adrift from constitutional obligations, and insurrection and mutiny against the government is still possible. They not only abuse persons, but they debase the democratic traditions of the nation in their defiant resort to anarchy and storm troop rule.
Against this force, which has the power of states at its command, Negroes have searched for effective weapons. We believe we have found them. Emulating the labor movement, we in the South have embraced mass actions — boycotts, sit-ins and, more recently, a widespread utilization of the ballot.
Emulating Biblical teachers and Mahatma Gandhi, we have seized the unique weapon of nonviolent resistance. It is a pleasure to tell you that our weapons work. They do not draw the blood of our adversary, but they do defeat the unjust system.
A remarkably effective method has evolved and become a source of splendid strength in recent months. The secret ballot is our secret weapon.
In the state of Georgia a quiet revolution is taking place. My organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, has been persistently carrying on a voting and registration drive in concert with other groups. First in Atlanta, the Negro vote joined with white allies casting our ballots in secret, and together we crushed a rabid segregationist and put into the mayoralty seat a white moderate, who has already with us broken more walls of segregation in a year than were destroyed in decades. . . . [King went on to cite political victories in his home state of Georgia based on registering black voters, leading to the election of more moderate candidates for governor and Congress.]
Student sit-in at Woolworth in Durham, North Carolina, on February 10, 1960. (Wikimedia Commons)
It is heartwarming to share your successes, and gratifying to tell you of ours. We still have a long way to go and if we forget how great the sacrifices will be, there are always arsonists, lunatics, and rampaging bigots to remind us that death lurks nearby. But if physical death is the price that we must pay to free our children and our white children from a permanent death of the spirit, we’ll accept it with quiet courage . . .
Our lives are an endless concert of tensions, struggle, and pain. Many who would speak are silent. I have often looked at the imposing, segregated churches, which the religious South has in profusion, and asked the troubling question, “What kind of people worship there? Who is their God?”
I don’t know what kind of church you worship in. Perhaps many of you worship in none. Yet I know what kind of people you are and I know what God you worship.
In your long struggle for humanity and justice, you are religious in the deepest sense, whether you have realized it or not.
With all our problems we are optimistic. We are presiding over a dying order, one which has long deserved to die. We operate in stormy seas, but I often remember some beautiful words of Eugene Debs to the court which imprisoned him for his pacifism:
I can see the dawn of a better humanity. The people are awakening. In due course of time they will come to their own.
When the mariner, sailing over tropic seas, looks for relief from his weary watch, he turns his eye toward the Southern Cross, burning luridly above the tempest-vexed ocean. As the midnight approaches, the southern cross begins to bend, and the whirling-worlds change their places, and with starry finger-points the Almighty marks the passage of time upon the dial of the universe, and though no bell may bear the glad tidings, the lookout knows that the midnight is passing — that relief and rest are close at hand.
Let the people take heart and hope everywhere, for the cross is bending, the midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning.
Excerpted from All Labor Has Dignity by Martin Luther King Jr. Edited and introduced by Michael K. Honey. Copyright 2012. Excerpted with permission by Beacon Press.
The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union on strike for higher wages. (Getty Images)
Originally published in Jacobin on January 21, 2023
According to the latest data, the ranks of unionized workers grew by 200,000 between 2021 and 2022. If the United States’ unionization rules in place weren’t so biased toward bosses, tens of millions more workers indicate they would have joined a union, too.
According to data newly published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Labor Relations Board, the number of American workers belonging to unions rose over the past year. Amid the general trajectory of decline that has defined the last several decades of American labor organizing, the total number of unionized workers across the country rose by roughly 200,000 — with especially large increases visible in Alabama (40,000), Maryland (40,000), Ohio (52,000), Texas (72,000), and California (99,000). Between October 2021 and September 2022, the number of petitions to the National Labor Relations Board for union elections jumped by an astonishing 53 percent.
Driving the increase was a wave of unionization among workers of color, 231,000 more of whom now belong to unions (the number of white workers belonging to unions actually decreasing by 31,000). While 88,000 of new union jobs were added in the public sector, successful organizing in industries like entertainment, transport, and warehousing added 112,000 new union jobs in the private sector.
But in their analysis of the data, researchers at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) explain why the new data, taken as a whole, are less than encouraging. For one thing, the economy added nonunion jobs at a greater rate than unionized ones, so the overall share of workers with union membership actually declined very slightly from 11.6 percent to 11.3 percent. Also, the raw numbers, though not insubstantial, were driven in part by unusually strong job growth that won’t necessarily persist into the coming years. Still, seen in relation to other developments such as the fifty-year high in public support for unions registered by Gallup in 2021, the data offers some evidence that a nascent fightback against the long-term decline of unionized work has begun.
But perhaps the most remarkable statistic highlighted in the EPI’s analysis concerns the number of workers who wanted to join a union in 2022 but couldn’t: some 60 million, or 48 percent of the entire nonunion workforce. It’s ironic, given the political right’s frequent justification of anti-union laws under the auspices of choice and voluntarism (evident in Orwellian phrases like “right to work”) that the appetite for union membership is so much higher than current union density would suggest. As the EPI’s researchers also pointedly note, “the large increase in the share of workers expressing a desire for unionization over the last four decades has occurred at the same time the share of workers represented by a union has declined.”
This divergence is owed, in significant part, to employer-friendly laws and regulations that make it incredibly difficult to organize a workplace even when a majority of workers might be in favor. A recent study by University of Oregon labor scholar Gordon Lafer, for example, finds that the climate facing workers at many companies effectively resembles that faced by democratic opposition movements during sham elections in one-party dictatorships. For one, existing laws governing unionization are almost comically slanted toward employers. Furthermore, when management does break the rules — employers are charged with violating federal law in more than 40 percent of union elections — penalties are often so lax that they can be treated as little more than the cost of doing business: a state of affairs that allows for rampant intimidation and election-rigging. As Lafer illustrates, using several examples from the auto industry:
[At Tesla] the Labor Board recently concluded that the company committed a series of violations, including illegally firing one union supporter and disciplining another because of their union activity; threatening employees with a loss of stock options if they joined a union; restricting employees from speaking with the media; coercively interrogating union supporters; and barring employees from distributing union information to their co-workers. So too, the CEO at Fuyao Glass — the country’s largest producer of automobile glass — was filmed openly reporting to the firm’s chairman that he had fired employees who tried to organize a union.
The decades-long decline of unionized labor, as the EPI’s analysis concludes, has thus not occurred because workers don’t want to join unions, but rather because the design of current labor law is prohibitive to forming them even when the appetite for doing so is strong. Through determination, grit, and courage, and with the winds of unusually strong job growth at their backs, hundreds of thousands of workers across America successfully joined unions last year. With more democratic labor laws in place, tens of millions more would eagerly have done the same.
COMMUNIST PARTY OF MAINE 