The Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) is Mexico’s most important independent union on the Left. Ten years ago, it was nearly destroyed. Today, its members are rebuilding through a new labor cooperative.
We should, of course, avoid simplistic nostalgia for industrial work, nor should we forget its dangers and adverse health effects. Yet workers are right to remember and value many aspects of industrial employment.
After taking their union drive public on Thursday, workers from Anchor Brewing Company, a San Francisco institution that was founded in 1896 and stands as one of the country’s oldest craft breweries, rallied in the Mission District.
Today, this strike is largely forgotten, or worse, when remembered, dismissed as a long lost cause, sometimes reduced to a “disaster” – that is, a near fatal setback for Seattle’s working people. It was neither.
The reality of precarious employment in Mexico is illustrated by the level of unemployment, informal work, the loss of purchasing power and the lack of labour justice.
Recent graduates face enough difficulty trying to find employment and pay off their large student debt. Imagine doing it with a criminal record and trying to find the money to pay for legal fees.
UHW was an incubator of talent, organizers who are still bargaining for the common good, utilizing the power of the strike, and promoting a political agenda for labor that’s focused on issues, rather than personalities.
Steuben’s book remains astonishingly relevant today — which speaks both to the enduring facts of employment relations in capitalism, as well as to the efficacy of Steuben’s strategic perspective.
Absent a bold, well-articulated working-class program, labor’s agenda risks being crushed by the Democratic Party’s traditional pro-corporate and discredited neo-liberal ideology.
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