For a Joint Unemployed and Illegal Labour Union
by Kat Klinkenstein Wednesday January 21, 2004 at 11:03 AM

A Draft Manifesto for a Joint Illegal and Unemployed Worker's Union

PAPERS FOR NONE, JOBS FOR ALL

PAPERS FOR NONE, JOBS FOR ALL!

For a Joint Unemployed and Illegal Labour Union

Nothing in the current industrial landscape is as shocking as the alignment of major unions with the nationalist project of strengthened border and immigration controls.  This marks the abdication of solidarity by these organizations, for in persecuting so-called ‘illegal labour’ they pit worker against fellow worker. A worker living in fear of deportation by the police and denunciation by the trade-union is a worker with no bargaining power who must accept whatever conditions are available and who must live with the bosses’ tolerance hovering above like the Sword of Damocles. Such a worker has been forced into the condition of a scab by the prejudice of the unions themselves! As such, her struggle is also the unemployed worker’s struggle. When unions persecute workers because they are unblessed by the state, they have turned their back on the universal right to work, not just of the paperless but of everybody.  They have resorted to scape-goats with which to hide their lack of courage and their own inability to win work for all workers. To the unemployed they smile and point a finger towards the undocumented worker, saying: “there is the reason you haven’t got a job!” To the employed they wink and mutter: “there is your reason why we can’t get you a break!” All the while, they wheel and deal with the bosses and debase themselves before the ALP. In this way, their desire to justify their own powerlessness erodes the power of both sets of workers, and we are left with nothing except a dire media spectacle with which to re-elect the brainless.

Our society should not be a detention camp. We should not live by a system of rewards administered by a state playing us off against each other. Work is not a privilege, and neither is the provision of a tenable life out of work a disposable luxury. If we allow the state to determine who amongst us may be allowed to work and who amongst us will be allowed to live outside work, we surrender to political parties our right to productive life itself. In their hands, this right becomes so many vouchers and nationalist delusions with which to buy workers for the lowest price and ensure their placidity. Once we surrender the demands of universal solidarity, that is to say – once we accept that some of us, by the mere location of their birth cannot be allowed a productive life in or out of work amongst us – we forfeit our own freedom. We can live by the delusion that persecuting the defenceless will bring back jobs lost to profit-seeking bosses, but this decision not only condemns us to chase our own shadows, it also makes sure that we will ourselves be vulnerable. Each deported illegal worker weakens the position of all illegal workers, and thereby weakens the position of all workers. We can chose to dream nationalist fantasies that barricaded inside our island we will be safe from the hordes outside, and we can chose to ignore the fact that the threat to our livelihood comes rather from those who would have us so barricaded. Throwing people out of the country won’t create jobs. You cannot create jobs by firing people, either from a factory or from a country. Neither will deportations make casual work permanent. You cannot improve work conditions by persecuting workers.

We can choose to cast our lot with these harmful delusions, or we can embrace the historic task of labour, of universal fellowship and contempt for national divisions, and forge a true international of workingmen and women, and of workless men and women also. So long as our brothers and sisters overseas live in abject misery, turning them away from our land is a crime of the highest order. How can we kid ourselves that an illegal worker at low pay here is any worse than a teeming population on no pay over there? The same week Mark Latham announced he would persecute illegal labour, that he will wage war on labour’s freedom of movement, he announced that he supported the freedom of movement of capital. This is not half-baked nationalism on his part: this is what nationalism entails.  Our land is not blessed: it is fortified. The effect of this is devastating for those outside, but it is also very harmful for us. Every dweller of castles must worry about what goes on outside the gates and must live stalked by the thought that one day the walls shall crumble under the combined weight of his privilege and the shouts of the outsiders. Dinner parties taken on a distinctive feel when the neighbours are starving. Nobody wants to live like this, and we don’t have to, if we work together for the advancement of all – inside and outside our country, or better yet, with no concern for boundaries.

Nobody will win freedom for us on our behalf. The unemployed must stand up for their right to a livelihood in and out of work, for if the government can avoid giving them their rights, it will.  Casual labour cannot hope to win rights by denying them to other people, for it is worse than pointless to give the bosses another stick with which to beat us. Illegal labour cannot hope to succeed by hiding. Only together can we be strong enough to win. Only by disobedience and furious solidarity can we forge a network that provides security for all. Such is our struggle.

Kat Klinkenstein

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