Author page: David Bacon

Increasing anti-union practices on both sides of the U.S./Mexico border have spurred a revival of solidarity work over the last several decades. In this third article of David Bacon’s series ‘Building a Culture of Cross-Border Solidarity’, the author looks at the causes of this trend, the obstacles to it, and the power and potential of organizing across borders. All articles in this series were originally published in the Institute for Transnational Social Change report ‘Building a Culture of Cross-Border Solidarity’.

The Party of Institutional Revolution’s (PRI) recent effort to reform Mexican labor law took aim at workers and independent unionism in Mexico. In this second installment of David Bacon’s series on cross-border solidarity, the author looks at this legislative assault on workers’ rights and other recent neoliberal reforms of Mexico’s economy. All articles in this series were originally published in the Institute for Transnational Social Change report ‘Building a Culture of Cross-Border Solidarity’.

In this first installment of David Bacon’s series on cross-border solidarity, the author lays out the questions that informed the series and takes a look at some of the notable campaigns and figures of the often overlooked history of US-Mexican labor solidarity. This installment, and all subsequent installments, first appeared in the report ‘Building a Culture of Cross-Border Solidarity’ put out by UCLA’s Institute for Transnational Social Change.

In the drive for higher profits, corporations are aided by U.S. immigration legislation. While immigration laws are always presented in the media as a means of controlling borders, and keeping people from crossing them, they have always had a much more important function. For the last hundred years, they’ve been the means of regulating the supply, and consequently the price, of immigrant labor.

Organizing immigrant workers is not a matter of taking pity on the downtrodden. It requires us to understand what is necessary for the survival of our communities, of our labor movement. If we want to build political power, we must incorporate migrant workers, fight for their rights and jobs, and create a movement for social justice that belongs to all of us, documented and undocumented alike.

In the big immigrant marches that swept the country on May Day in 2006 and 2007, one sign said it all: "We are Workers, not Criminals!" Often it was held in the calloused hands of…

In the 2006 elections, aspiring Democrats attacked the Bush administration’s free trade policies, and more than 20 new members of Congress were elected, giving the Democratic Party its new majority in the House of Representatives.…

Editor’s note: At the last U.S.-Mexico Binational Meeting on November 9, Secretary of State Colin Powell dashed hopes for an integral immigration reform in the near future. Delivering the line of the Bush administration, he…

In early September 2002, the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras (CJM) put out a call to border activists, urging them to act quickly to salvage one of the few remaining complaints filed under the…

[ printer-friendly PDF version ] Citizen Action in the Americas Binational Oaxacan Indigenous Migrant Organizers Face New Century by David Bacon | August 21, 2002   Indigenous people from the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca…