News: “As long as Mexican workers don’t have rights, workers in America are under threat.” That’s what Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, president of the Mexican mine and metalworkers’ union Los Mineros, told the AFL-CIO Executive Council recently. Gómez argued that low wages and repression of workers in Mexico hurts U.S. workers by reducing exports to Mexico and creating unfair incentives to relocate plants from the United States. “Workers in the U.S. and Mexico have to fight together, even harder, for justice and against inequality,” Gomez said. While the Los Mineros union has doubled the real wages of its members in the past decade, most Mexican workers face repression when they try to join democratic unions. “That’s why we must work together to stop the Trans-Pacific Partnership and demand real labor reforms in both of our countries” Gómez said.
Here's today's labor history: On this date in 1811, Luddites smashed 63 textile machines near Nottingham, England. The Luddites were 19th-century English textile artisans who protested against new machinery which threatened to replace the artisans with less-skilled, low-wage laborers. In 1950, Transport Workers Union members at American Airlines won an 11-day national strike, gaining what the union said was the first severance pay clause in the industry. Today's labor quote is by Albert Einstein, who said: “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”
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