MINNEAPOLIS—Legendary labor leader Delores Huerta, aged 96, pumped up the crowd at the AFL-CIO convention in Minneapolis with a wide-ranging speech urging action on everything from migrants’ rights to the Equal Rights Amendment to the PRO Act to health insurance for the nation’s farmworkers.
Huerta, the co-founder of the United Farm Workers, and author of the now widely used motto “Si se puede!” addressed the crowd for more than half an hour and repeatedly urged them to take to the streets. She added that the labor movement is a credible source not just of information, but of inspiration for progressive causes.
Huerta spoke near the end of the discussion of a federation resolution demanding comprehensive immigration reform, including legalization of all 10 million-11 million undocumented people in the U.S. She strongly endorsed it, but it wasn’t her sole cause. She also shot barbs at the white racist regime of GOP President Donald Trump and his MAGA followers. Among her points:
- “We still have the battle ahead of us” on the rights of undocumented people and against their deportation. “Many are being put in detention centers, and people are dying in detention centers.” There have been at least three confirmed deaths of migrants whom Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have flown to detention.
- “We still have to make sure no union money can be invested in detention centers.” Several unions have already raised questions with their pension fund managers about investments in private prison firms that run those centers.
- Huerta reminded people to remember Minneapolis residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti, murdered by ICE as they witnessed protests against its Operation Metro Surge and its sweeps in the Twin Cities. “They must never be forgotten,” said Huerta of the two, whom she declared “martyrs.” She asked the crowd to chant ‘Presente!” when she said their names.
The murders also show “the fascist regime we are facing right now.”
“Who’s going to stop them from taking over the country?” Huerta asked. “We are!” the crowd roared. But the takeover halt must be accomplished through organizing and non-violence, she warned. “We have to get rid of the racism in this country,” as well as “the ropes of slavery.
“Let’s say to all the neo-Nazis and white supremacists, ‘Get over it.’”
- “We have to be all on the same page on women’s rights. We all have to be on the same page on who you love. To marry whom you want? That’s your business.”
That was yet another shot at the white misogynist right, which is extremely anti-LGBTQ.
- Huerta urged teachers to get into the fray for human rights by trying to influence the choice of school books and the creation of curricula. That may be easier said than done. The right has conducted a wide-ranging censorship campaign to strip books from library shelves, especially books with favorable views of racial and gender minorities.
That includes books at military installations, removed from those facilities’ libraries by orders of Trump’s War Department. The book-removal plague is strong. The American Association of University Professors, now a Teachers/AFT sector, is fighting back. So are the Chicago Public Schools, with their union, AFT Local 1, fighting alongside.
And the right-wing government in Texas controls school book selection for the nation’s second most populous state. The Texas market is so large that it can virtually dictate school book buys elsewhere.
- By contrast, Huerta said, school systems should not only teach ethnic studies, but labor studies.
- Political candidates must commit in advance, in writing, to supporting labor’s causes before union campaign finance committees give them any money. Those dollars are voluntarily donated, not from union dues, as the right constantly and falsely lies.
“You want our support, you want our dollars, but we will not give it to you unless you give it”—the pledge to back pro-labor legislation—“in advance,” said Huerta.
- A Congress filled with labor-backed lawmakers should enact not just the PRO Act, which would make it easier to organize and bargain for first contracts, but also “universal health care, universal day care, and a free college education.”
- “Coming out of the Depression, we got the right to organize” in the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, Huerta said. “Coming out of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, we got the peace movement and the women’s movement.” For further progress, labor “will be at the front of the parade,” she proclaimed.
- “Only in California, Hawaii, and New York do farmworkers have health insurance,” Huerta said. If necessary to achieve it elsewhere, boycotts should begin, she urged. That’s reminiscent of the United Farm Workers’ nationwide consumer-driven boycott decades ago, which pushed grape growers into bargaining with the union and signing contracts.
- “The boycott of Target” for reversing its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion principles “worked,” she said, as the Minneapolis-based low-price retailer’s revenues declined. “The CEO said he was afraid of Trump, but we aren’t afraid of Trump.”
Huerta concluded by leading the crowd in another chant. “Who’s got the power?” she asked. “Union power!” the convention replied. “Shout it so loud the fascists can hear us,” she urged. They did. Then she concluded with “Si se puede!” before receiving a special first-ever award from the AFL-CIO, named for her.
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