If you’ve spent any time around the labor movement, you’ve probably heard the saying: “an injury to one is an injury to all.” This is a core principle of our movement, not just because we care for our brothers and sisters, but because we know that if we let those in power come for one of us, the rest of us are next.
On March 8, Mahmoud Khalil was forcibly removed from his home — in front of his pregnant wife, a US citizen — by officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A legal resident with a green card, Mr Khalil was targeted by the Trump administration because of his role in the protests against Israel’s war on Gaza that erupted across US universities last year. Mr Khalil has unfortunately joined a long list of labor leaders, civil rights activists, and other organizers who, over the course of US history, have been detained, jailed, or even killed for their speech. The labor movement has an important role to play right now in standing up against this illegal detention and defending the constitutionally protected right to protest.
Labor unions have a long history of brave men and women speaking out against government repression. When my union was barely thirty years old, in 1918, labor leader Eugene Debs famously gave a speech against the Woodrow Wilson administration, World War I, and the military draft, dubbed the Canton, Ohio, Speech. In the speech, Debs said that “if it had not been for the men and women who, in the past, have had the moral courage to go to jail, we would still be in the jungles.” Just like the leaders he spoke of, he too was jailed for a decade as a result of the speech.
Around the same time, workers across West Virginia stood in open combat with our government as they tried to unionize. Federal agents, the US military, and private detectives of the Baldwin-Felts agency battled union coal miners for nearly a decade. Over five hundred miners and labor activists were…
Auteur: Jimmy Williams Jr
