David Bacon is a California writer and documentary photographer. A former union organizer, today he documents labor, the global economy, war and migration, and the struggle for human rights. His latest book, The Right to Stay Home (Beacon Press, 2013). discusses alternatives to forced migration and the criminalization of migrants.
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RETHINKING CALIFORNIA LABOR HISTORY
By David Bacon, Truthout | Book Review – 3/6/18 https://davidbaconrealitycheck http://www.truth-out.org/opini
Members of Unite Here 2850, the hotel union for the East and North San Francisco Bay Area, show their opinion of Trump in the march protesting his inauguration. Book Review – «From Mission to Microchip – A History of the California Labor Movement» A recent New York Times article detailed the ways California as a state has become the Trump administration’s bête noire. According to reporter Tim Arango, the morning after Trump was elected, «Kevin de León, the State Senate leader, and his counterpart in the Assembly, Anthony Rendon, said they ‘woke up feeling like strangers in a foreign land.'» In the past year, California has declared itself a sanctuary state. It raised the minimum wage and expanded worker protections. It legalized recreational marijuana. Legislators declared they would not permit offshore oil drilling. They proposed making state taxes charitable contributions to keep them deductible with the IRS. It might seem strange to activists under 40 to think that Los Angeles was the «citadel of the open shop» for almost a century. That the city that elected Rendon and De Leon had as mayor a conservative ally of President Nixon — Sam Yorty — and the country’s most active and violent police «red squad.» That Berkeley sent an extreme right-winger into the legislature who headed up California’s own «Un-American Activities Committee.» That the state was ruled by agribusiness with an iron hand, and farm workers who went on strike were beaten and murdered. Arango credits California’s rebellion to its racial diversity and growing Latino population. There’s no doubt that state Republicans sealed their unpopularity in the days of Gov. Pete Wilson two decades ago. Their campaign for Proposition 187, which would have denied education and hospital care to the undocumented, convinced hundreds of thousands of immigrants to apply for citizenship just to be able to vote against the juggernaut. But there’s another good reason for the state’s current politics: unions. California has 2.55 million union members, more than any other state, more even than all the jobs in Minnesota. Runners-up New York has 1.9 million and Illinois has 812,000. About 15.9 percent of California workers belong to unions — unchanged for the last few years. Because of its large population and workforce, it doesn’t have the highest density — New York (23.6 percent), Hawaii (19.9 percent), Alaska (18.5 percent), Connecticut (17.5 percent) and Washington State (17.4 percent) have a greater percentage of union workers. But the state’s labor movement has been able to translate its membership into a solid voting base, which has made these political changes possible.
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