By Fighting Words Staff
It is not a coincidence that anti-union billionaire Elon Musk ended his feud with Donald Trump when David Huerta, president of the California Service Employees Union (SEIU) and SEIU – was thrown to the ground, pepper sprayed and arrested by federal agents.
Huerta injuries were so severe that he was hospitalized overnight. He was jailed for three days and faces six years in federal prison for “impeding a federal officer”. That “crime” was his witnessing and documenting the outrageous ICE kidnapping of Hispanic workers at their workplace at a clothing warehouse.
The open racism of Trump’s campaign was made even more clear when Hispanic California Senator Alex Padilla was attacked, thrown to the ground and handcuffed by federal agents at a Department of Homeland Security head Kristi Noem press conference, simply for trying to ask a question.
At SEIU California, Huerta leads a union with nearly 750,000 members. It represents a wide range of workers, from nurses and university researchers to janitors and public sector employees. Nationally, the SEIU has 2 million members. This union fights every day for these low-paid workers, particularly migrants, and by doing so, raises the living standard for all of us.
The SEIU succeeded in pressuring California to raise the minimum wage for health care workers in the state to $25 an hour.
This attack on Hispanic and other oppressed workers, whether undocumented or not, is a direct attack on all the unions and the working class as a whole. That is why Elon Musk quickly made up with Trump after seeing this campaign of terror. By lowering our wages, salaries and benefits, replacing us with Musk’s AI robots, and destroying our unions, billionaire parasites like him, Jeff Bezos. Mark Zuckerberg and the rest hope to smash our working-class movement to improve our and our families’ lives.
All the hard-won social programs from the New Deal on, including worker safety, Medicaid and Medicare, food and drug safety, cancer research, social security, airline safety, water and air quality, and so much more are now under the gun. And all of the federal workers who operate those programs, nearly all union members, are being terminated to fatten the coffers of the bigwigs.
Millions of people are pouring into the streets every day to protest these outrages. But that may not be enough.
We call on all the unions across the country to stand up in solidarity with the SEIU and all undocumented and documented workers now under racist attack by Steve Miller and Donald Trump. We urge them to publicly prepare and organize a national general strike.
Workers unite!
Solidarity forever!
Shut it down!
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