Harvest of Empire: Immigrant Workers in the United States
Part 1
by Kim Moody
THE RISE OF mass immigration in much of the developed world began its acceleration with the global economic crisis of the 1970s. A deepening crisis of profitability; the collapse of the Bretton Woods currency system; and the recession of 1974-75 encouraged an acceleration of foreign direct investment, the rise of multinational corporations, and the subsequent increase in trade.
By the 1980s, aggressive lending by major banks led to the Third World debt crisis and International Monetary Fund “structural adjustment programs” that drove millions from the land and other traditional employment. A series of civil wars and U.S. military interventions throughout this era sent millions more displaced farmers and workers from their homes to many of the wealthier countries of the OECD in search of work.(1)
In the United States, where the immigrant population had declined in the 1950s and remained stagnant in the 1960s, the foreign-born population rose from 9.7 million in 1970 to 34.2 million in 2004. By 2004, the employed foreign-born workforce had risen to over 20 million, composing 14.5% of those employed in the U.S.(2) As the immigrant workforce grew and more in its ranks established some measure of security in the United States, in numbers if not always in legal status, they began to organize to address the severe economic, social, and legal problems they faced. In doing so they would turn to traditional trade unions, create some of their own, and build new types of community-based worker organizations.
Go to Against the Current to continue reading this first part of a two-part analysis of immigrant workers in the US.
Harvest of Empire: Part 2
by Kim Moody
ACCORDING TO THE Migration Policy Institute’s estimate, 1.8 million foreign-born workers belonged to unions in 2003, up from 1.4 million in 1996, increasing as a proportion of union membership from 8.9% to 11.5% in that period. The rapid increase in the proportion of foreign-born union members was due in part to the decline in membership among native-born workers.
Continue reading Part 2 here.
