The Crisis of Mexican Labor

The Crisis of Mexican Labor
Author: Dan LaBotz
Publisher: Praeger
Total Pages: 240
Release: 1988-06-22
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

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In this definitive volume on the Mexican labor movement, journalist Dan La Botz concentrates on labor politics, the relationship of the unions to the state, and their relevance to other struggles for union independence. Prefaced by Mexican Congressman Ricardo Pascoe, The Crisis of Mexican Labor outlines the country's economic and political crises. The book also gives a complete overview of the labor movement from 1920 to 1987. La Botz chronicles workers' strikes and their results. He also demonstrates how Mexican union confederations, and their ruling bureaucracies, have clearly depended upon the material, the political, and even the military support of the state. This, the author contends, is the central problem of Mexican workers. They must develop an internationalist, socialist ideology and reorganize independently of the state. To do so will entail restructuring the entire system.

Mexican Labor & World War II

Mexican Labor & World War II
Author: Erasmo Gamboa
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2000
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780295978499

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A study of the bracero program during World War II. It describes the labor history of Mexican and Chicano workers in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. It analyses the ways in which Braceros were active agents of their own lives. It also describes the living and working conditions in migrant farm camps.

Consuming Mexican Labor

Consuming Mexican Labor
Author: Ronald Mize
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2010-10-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1442604093

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Mexican migration to the United States and Canada is a highly contentious issue in the eyes of many North Americans, and every generation seems to construct the northward flow of labor as a brand new social problem. The history of Mexican labor migration to the United States, from the Bracero Program (1942-1964) to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), suggests that Mexicans have been actively encouraged to migrate northward when labor markets are in short supply, only to be turned back during economic downturns. In this timely book, Mize and Swords dissect the social relations that define how corporations, consumers, and states involve Mexican immigrant laborers in the politics of production and consumption. The result is a comprehensive and contemporary look at the increasingly important role that Mexican immigrants play in the North American economy.

Mexican Labor and World War II

Mexican Labor and World War II
Author: Erasmo Gamboa
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2015-09-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0295998393

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“Although Mexican migrant workers have toiled in the fields of the Pacific Northwest since the turn of the century, and although they comprise the largest work force in the region’s agriculture today, they have been virtually invisible in the region’s written labor history. Erasmo Gamboa’s study of the bracero program during World War II is an important beginning, describing and documenting the labor history of Mexican and Chicano workers in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho and contributing to our knowledge of farm labor.”—Oregon Historical Quarterly

Labor Rights Are Civil Rights

Labor Rights Are Civil Rights
Author: Zaragosa Vargas
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2013-10-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 1400849284

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In 1937, Mexican workers were among the strikers and supporters beaten, arrested, and murdered by Chicago policemen in the now infamous Republic Steel Mill Strike. Using this event as a springboard, Zaragosa Vargas embarks on the first full-scale history of the Mexican-American labor movement in twentieth-century America. Absorbing and meticulously researched, Labor Rights Are Civil Rightspaints a multifaceted portrait of the complexities and contours of the Mexican American struggle for equality from the 1930s to the postwar era. Drawing on extensive archival research, Vargas focuses on the large Mexican American communities in Texas, Colorado, and California. As he explains, the Great Depression heightened the struggles of Spanish speaking blue-collar workers, and employers began to define citizenship to exclude Mexicans from political rights and erect barriers to resistance. Mexican Americans faced hostility and repatriation. The mounting strife resulted in strikes by Mexican fruit and vegetable farmers. This collective action, combined with involvement in the Communist party, led Mexican workers to unionize. Vargas carefully illustrates how union mobilization in agriculture, tobacco, garment, and other industries became an important vehicle for achieving Mexican American labor and civil rights. He details how interracial unionism proved successful in cross-border alliances, in fighting discriminatory hiring practices, in building local unions, in mobilizing against fascism and in fighting brutal racism. No longer willing to accept their inferior status, a rising Mexican American grassroots movement would utilize direct action to achieve equality.

From South Texas to the Nation

From South Texas to the Nation
Author: John Weber
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2015-08-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469625245

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In the early years of the twentieth century, newcomer farmers and migrant Mexicans forged a new world in South Texas. In just a decade, this vast region, previously considered too isolated and desolate for large-scale agriculture, became one of the United States' most lucrative farming regions and one of its worst places to work. By encouraging mass migration from Mexico, paying low wages, selectively enforcing immigration restrictions, toppling older political arrangements, and periodically immobilizing the workforce, growers created a system of labor controls unique in its levels of exploitation. Ethnic Mexican residents of South Texas fought back by organizing and by leaving, migrating to destinations around the United States where employers eagerly hired them--and continued to exploit them. In From South Texas to the Nation, John Weber reinterprets the United States' record on human and labor rights. This important book illuminates the way in which South Texas pioneered the low-wage, insecure, migration-dependent labor system on which so many industries continue to depend.

Guest Workers or Colonized Labor?

Guest Workers or Colonized Labor?
Author: Gilbert G. Gonzalez
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2015-11-17
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1317264819

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A decade of political infighting over comprehensive immigration reform appears at an end, after the 2012 election motivated the Republican Party to work with the Democratic Party's immigration reform agendas. However, a guest worker program within current reform proposals is generally overlooked by the public and by activist organizations. Also overlooked is significant corporate lobbying that affects legislation. This updated edition critically examines the new guest worker program included in the White House and Congressional bipartisan committee s immigration reform blueprints and puts the debate into historical and contemporary contexts. It describes how the influential U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO agreed on guidelines for a new guest worker program to be included in the plan. Gonzalez shows how guest worker programs stand within a history of utilizing controlled, cheap, disposable labor with lofty projections rarely upheld. For courses in a wide variety of disciplines, this timely text taps into trends toward teaching immigration politics and policy.Features of the New Edition"

Redeeming the Revolution

Redeeming the Revolution
Author: Joseph U. Lenti
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2017-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1496201353

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A tale of sin and redemption, Joseph U. Lenti’s Redeeming the Revolution demonstrates how the killing of hundreds of student protestors in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco district on October 2–3, 1968, sparked a crisis of legitimacy that moved Mexican political leaders to reestablish their revolutionary credentials with the working class, a sector only tangentially connected to the bloodbath. State-allied labor groups hence became darlings of public policy in the post-Tlatelolco period, and with the implementation of the New Federal Labor Law of 1970, the historical symbiotic relationship of the government and organized labor was restored. Renewing old bonds with trusted allies such as the Confederation of Mexican Workers bore fruit for the regime, yet the road to redemption was fraught with peril during this era of Cold War and class contestation. While Luis Echeverría, Fidel Velázquez, and other officials appeased union brass with discourses of revolutionary populism and policies that challenged business leaders, conflicts emerged, and repression ensued when rank-and-file workers criticized the chasm between rhetoric and reality and tested their leaders’ limits of toleration.

Allies Across the Border

Allies Across the Border
Author: Dale A. Hathaway
Publisher: South End Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2000
Genre: International labor activities
ISBN: 9780896086326

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North American workers find their jobs more pressured and precarious but turn on the television and find pundits praising the glories of the global economy. Their counterparts south of the Rio Grande find themselves forced into the arms of global corporations that barely pay them their daily bread for work in dangerous plants that refuse to observe minimal safety or environmental standards. No wonder inequality is increasing in both countries. Although North Americans are told that Mexicans are stealing their jobs, workers can find "allies across the border." Like the U.S. labor organizers in the early part of the 20th century who created the C.I.O. in response to A.F.L. corruption, Mexico's F.A.T. (Frente Autentico del Trabajo or Authentic Workers' Front) is building a historic movement to create an alternative to Mexico's notoriously co-opted labor unions and collusion with government international capital. Allies Across the Border, the first book on F.A.T., analyzes this important group in the context of the globalization of capital and the necessary globalization of labor struggle. Dale Hathaway shows how F.A.T.'s dedication to worker education and self-management, union independence, and community development are key, not only in Mexico, but worldwide. Allies Across the Border includes detailed descriptions of F.A.T.'s growth from its liberation theology origins, through the Worker's Uprising and student movements of the late 60s, Mexico's debt crisis of the 70s and 80s, and F.A.T.'s work with women's groups, peasants, and consumer co-ops in the 90s. Hathaway's Allies Across the Border shows how F.A.T.'s dedication to worker's dignity offers lessons for North American workers who are fighting to keep corporations from pushing for greater exploitation of workers and environment in their home countries and worldwide. Dale Hathaway is Associate Professor of Political Science at Butler University in Indianapolis.