One question for the union movement is bread and butter unionism versus social movement unionism.
That is, is the goal of the union to represent strictly the interests of workers
in a particular... already-employed workers in a particular workplace to have more power inside
their workplace, or does the union have a larger vision of social transformation in the interests
of the working class? And then there's also another part of that question which is fraught
in a country like the united States is, "So, how do we define the working class?
Who's included and who isn't? Like immigrant workers, gig workers. And the U.S. union movement
has frequently had a fraught relationship with the issue of immigration. What about non-white
workers? The union movement, although there are claims towards internationalism,
is based in the United States, and in many cases has kind of accepted the idea of a world order,
in which workers in the United States benefit from U.S. foreign policies that exploit workers, and
working class people ,and poor people elsewhere in the world. So, these are all struggles within the
union movement. In a globally integrated economy and in a hegemonic power like the United States,
the idea that something is going to be good for the U.S. economy or for U.S. workers
doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be good for poor people in other countries.
It often means it's going to be bad for poor people in other countries. One really
unifying trend among the left and in the union movement in Latin America is anti-imperialism.
That is one of the things that that has created a more coherent
left in Latin America. There's a great diversity in the union movement in Latin America as well,
and the unions are frequently affiliated with political parties. And those political parties are
also... They cover a kind of a spectrum. So, it's not that there are no unions that are
more closer to the right or the center than they are to the left, but I think anti-imperialism has
been a topic that's been really difficult for the left in the United States to comprehend and to
rally around. And this comes back to what I was saying before about the orientation of unions
toward bread and butter issues. We want things to be better for the workers that we represent,
but in a finite planet... And better has often been described in terms of increasing consumption,
increasing access to goods and services. And in a finite planet, increasing consumption in
the country that is already the largest consumer in the world means that we are
not only destroying the planet for all of us, but also taking resources and destroying resources in
in the third world. And industrialization in the United States and in Europe and the industrialized
countries has always been part of a global system in which workers in the industrializing countries,
no matter how exploited they have been, have been part of a global system that is exploiting
enslaved people, people of color [and] people in the third world even more in complementary ways
and without thinking about those struggles as part of a larger struggle that has to
include anti-imperialism at its center. I think that's something that's much more visible to
Latin American workers in unions than it is to U.S. workers in unions.