MB Civic

By James Green | Monday, September 4, 2006 | The Boston Globe

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/09/04/the_rise_of_the_immigrant/

James Green teaches history at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. He is the author of “Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America.”

Here he warns that the current trend toward record breaking profit taking by management at the expense of wages is not sustainable – and he reminds the reader that America has been in this kind of trouble before. A century ago, Eastern Europen Jewish Immigrants founded voluntary worker associations to represent them and present their demands to management. Such voluntary worker associations were, in fact, the forerunners of the first unions that formed a century ago, long before employees won the right to organize, strike, and bargain collectively. In New York’s Garment District, The Workmen’s Circle, for example, once provided a wide range of services to immigrant Jewish laborers who then created legendary garment workers unions, like the ILGWU, organizations that lifted two generations of Jews and other immigrants out of ghetto poverty. In our time, immigrant worker centers have become a foundation for an emerging immigrant workers’ rights movement, and they could be a building block for a new, multifaceted American labor movement. Could that happen? Emphatically, yes.

The piece is not only elegantly brief but more than that – it is enlightening and unique in its perspective. Highly recommended…BS