Worker Solidarity Is the Best Strategy to Defeat Rising Fascism

Donald Trump and his accomplices want working people to look at each other with distrust and divide ourselves over banal differences. The prejudices they foment against Latino immigrants, Black people, and LGBTQ people mask their real agenda: stomping on the rights and power that organized workers have won.

But for progressives who want to engage with our co-workers on these issues, we have to watch out for the mirror image of these prejudices in our own attitudes. It’s important to listen to your co-workers’ concerns before drawing conclusions about their true attitudes and world outlook. Just because someone likes Trump, that does not automatically make them a fascist.

In my experience talking with my fellow construction workers, you have to start by building a relationship grounded in mutual respect and recognition of each other’s contributions to the workplace.

WHO’S ON YOUR SIDE?

At one job, I used to engage in arguments over immigration policy or government spending with a union brother who was a Trump supporter. But at the end of the day we both had to work outside under inclement weather, removing asbestos-covered pipes, and deal with the many risks associated with the job.

This union brother backed me up when another worker wanted to confront me for saying my priority as a shop steward was the well-being of the workers, not production. Despite being a Trump supporter, he understood the role of a steward.

I began a conversation with this brother before one of the rallies during the #CountMeIn campaign in Hudson Yards—a major struggle in New York City from 2017 to 2019 over whether the largest real estate construction project in U.S. history would be built entirely with union labor.

The conversation touched on how the non-union companies had brought immigrant workers to work on the project. Some union workers thought we should call immigration on them.

I told him I didn’t think that was the solution—the correct approach was to organize them. We should think of immigrant workers not as a threat to our jobs, but as future members of our union. It’s in the union’s interest that all workers doing the same kind of work be organized and united. It’s in the bosses’ interest to throw up obstacles, make solidarity look impossible, and keep us disorganized and divided.

The worker replied that before helping immigrant workers, we should attend to the interests of Americans first. I pointed out an obvious contradiction: I, an undocumented immigrant union laborer, was standing with him against a big developer who was taking away our work—and who was an American citizen like him. This was a class struggle, and solidarity among workers mattered more than his shared nationality with the developer.

HARDER TO ANSWER

I don’t have the answers for everything, however. The recent wave of immigrant asylum-seekers has proven very difficult for many workers to accept.

Older day laborers like my father have been able to integrate into the informal economy, slowly establishing particular rates for the work they do. Newer immigrant asylum-seekers are selling their labor power at a lower rate, outcompeting this older generation.

Union labor, too, now has to compete with a larger pool of immigrants, who—ignorant of their rights as workers, or afraid to enforce them because of vulnerable immigration status, or just desperate for work—fall victim to the overexploitation at construction body shops and other unscrupulous employers.

I hear workers taking issue with the services provided to asylum-seekers, including shelter, contrasting it with New York City budget cuts at schools and public agencies. They say, “The roads are not paved, the streets are not clean, but the city has money to give these migrants food and let them stay at five-star hotels.”

Immigrant workers contrast the services the city gives to these asylum-seekers with their own experience of arriving in this country. In their view, no one helped them get where they are; they did it through their own hard work.

MIXED EMOTIONS

It would be easy to assume that these workers hate immigrants, but I find that this is not the case. In fact, many are immigrants themselves.

They will often sympathize with the plight of the asylum-seekers. Their issue is with the resources the city is providing, which from their perspective is straining the budget and taking away from other areas, like homeless shelters.

They’re also afraid that bringing all these immigrants into the city will increase crime rates—a fear that’s often fanned by lurid news stories, though the actual statistics show that immigrants are far less likely to commit crimes than people born in the U.S.

One way I’ve tried to counter these arguments is by reminding other immigrant workers that the same was said about them when they arrived in this country—but this isn’t very effective, since it doesn’t really address the issues they are raising.

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We can’t simply brush off concerns by blaming them all on Trump’s scaremongering. We have to acknowledge that people have legitimate worries about their family’s safety, their city’s meager public services, and their own bargaining power for better wages.

But we must also express that there’s more than one way to solve these problems. The MAGA approach of criminalizing immigrants and supporting massive raids on jobsites will not only terrorize our communities, but also break apart any chance of working-class solidarity.

DON’T DEPORT—ORGANIZE

When over-exploited immigrants are outcompeting other workers, the union approach should be to support these immigrants in organizing on the job.

A Biden administration policy called Deferred Action for Labor Enforcement offers a work permit and protection from deportation to workers willing to testify against a company that has committed labor or safety violations.

DALE is the cornerstone of the organizing approach my union is pursuing in its campaign at body shops. It’s a worker-centered approach that protects workers while going after bad employers.

Organizing can not only protect immigrants and integrate them better into working-class communities, but also make the union movement the backbone of the immigrant movement.

My union, LiUNA Local 78, a union of asbestos removal workers, was founded in 1996 by immigrants. When our first contract was signed, the news was read in English, to little fanfare; then in Spanish, to which half the room exploded in cheers; and then in Polish, to which the other half of the room exploded in cheers.

Our local is infused with the culture and attitudes of immigrant communities. This is a consequence of the right organizing approach: seeking to bring all the workers doing this particular work into the same union.

FEELINGS, NOT FACTS

Many of the concerns I hear about immigrants and asylum-seekers are based on misinformation—and I could spend a lot of time countering these assertions with facts.

I could point out that undocumented immigrants contribute $1 billion in tax revenue in six states alone. I could say that much of the $1.6 billion that New York City spent on services for asylum-seekers last year went to non-profit emergency shelter agencies, many of which lack appropriate sanitary facilities like showers or toilets—hardly five-star hotels. I could argue that politicians are scapegoating immigrants for their own bad policies.

I could also spend a good part of my 30-minute lunch break breaking down how wars, climate disasters, sanctions, and social instability have caused the recent wave of immigration we are seeing.

But I think such efforts would be futile. The social discontent that fuels MAGA is not based on specific disagreements over policy.

The problem is not that people are uninformed. The problem is that people feel alienated from their work and powerless to change things in their community. That’s why they’re angry at the thought of someone getting some help.

MAGA is built on sentiments meant to divide us. It offers a very narrow definition of what is normal or acceptable, and blames every problem on outsiders or people who are different. But solidarity and diversity have always made the union movement strong.

Combating Trump can’t only be done by arguing facts with people. You have to practice solidarity at the worksite, and be the example of how a good unionist thinks and acts.

In the workplace, rather than combat it by moralizing—which is what MAGA itself does—we should combat it by reminding our co-workers of the mutual toil, respect, and struggle that unites us as working people. We do this by being good co-workers, respectful debaters, and overall, committed unionists.

And if the threat of fascism does materialize, the groundwork laid in our jobsites may be crucial to inspiring and mobilizing workers to come out and confront it. While the class struggle is fought on the shop floor, fascism has to be fought in the street.

Percy Lujan is a shop steward in LiUNA Local 78.