Re: Xenophobia and the American labor movement

[Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dana Frank also covers this territory in her fine history of economic
nationalism, Buy American. This sort of thing is exactly what makes
me so nervous about the anti-China stance of the AFL-CIO and the
Naderites.

Friday night, 6:30-8:30, at the Judson Church, Wash Sq S, NYC, I'm
the token male on a panel on labor & "globalization," along with
Naomi Klein, Thea Lee of the AFL-CIO (who's very good at making the
anti-China case), and Anurhada Mittal of Food First (who's very
critical of the anti-China case). Could be lively.

Doug

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At 6:22 PM -0400 4/4/00, Louis Proyect wrote:

> (From the newly published "Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters
> Foreign Peoples At Home and Abroad 1876-1917" by Matthew Frye Jacobson,
> Hill & Wang, 2000)
>
> In the 1890s and after, an occasional "white" union did attempt to
> embrace?even if reluctantly?the newcomers from Asia. In response to a
> strike of Mexican and Japanese sugar-beet workers in Oxnard, California, in
> 1903, the Los Angeles County Council of Labor resolved:
>
> "We declare our belief that the most effective method of protecting the
> American workingman and his standard of living is by the universal
> organization of the wage-workers regardless of race or national distinction.
>
> "Resolved; That while we are utterly opposed to the unrestricted
> immigration of the various Oriental races, we heartily favor the thorough
> organization of those now here, and believe that the fact that men are able
> to do our work when we strike is sufficient reason why they should be
> organized, regardless of race or color."
>
> But Samuel Gompers voiced the prevailing opinion of American labor[...]