TODAY'S LABOR MOVEMENT NEEDS A RADICAL VISION

TODAY'S LABOR MOVEMENT NEEDS A RADICAL VISION
By David Bacon
Labornotes - December 02, 2025 
https://labornotes.org/2025/12/todays-labor-movement-needs-bigger-vision

 
SAN FRANCISCO, CA - Lillian Galedo among the marchers  protesting plans to stage mass immigration raids in San Francisco and Oakland. Photo: David Bacon

It is time for the labor movement to use its organization and resources to fight to stop this wave of repression. As part of that effort, labor needs to propose a freedom agenda for immigrants that will really give people rights and an equal status with other workers on the job, and their neighbors in their own communities. 

[This article is part of a Labor Notes roundtable series: How Can Unions Defend Worker Power Against Trump 2.0? We will be publishing more contributions here and in our magazine in the months ahead. Click here to read the rest of the series.-Editors]


During the Cold War, many of the people with a radical vision of the world were driven out of our labor movement. Today, as unions search for answers about how to begin growing again, and regain the power workers need to defend themselves, the question of social vision has become very important. What is our vision in labor? What are the issues that we confront today that form a more radical vision for our era?

The labor movement needs a freedom agenda. When Zohran Mamdani spoke after his primary election victory in New York City, he declared, "We can be free and we can be fed." Mamdani is telling our unions and workers that we can reject the old politics of agreeing to war abroad and repression at home, in the hopes that at least some workers will gain.

PEACE ECONOMY

We don't have to go back to the CIO and the radicalism of the 1930s to find voices in labor calling for a radical break from the past. 

In the 1980s, while Reagan was President, William Winpisinger, president of the Machinists, told his members, thousands of whom worked in arms plants, that they would gain more from peace than from war. Under union pressure in 1992, Congress even passed a bill calling for redirecting a small part of military spending into conversion for a peacetime economy.

One big part of that program is peace. Another is reordering our economic priorities. 

Right now working class people have to fight just to stay in the cities. They're being driven out, and this has a disproportionate impact on workers of color. Unions and central labor councils need to look at economic development, and issues of housing and job creation. That would start to give us something we lack, a compelling vision. 

IMMIGRANT RIGHTS

Since 2006 millions of people have gone into the streets on May Day. The marches in 2006 were the largest outpourings since the 1930s, when our modern labor movement was born. In one of the best things our labor movement has done, we began raising the expectations of immigrants when we passed the resolution in Los Angeles in 1999 changing labor's position on immigration. 

We put forward a radical new program: amnesty, ending employer sanctions, reunification of families, protecting the rights of all people, especially the right to organize. That came as a result of an upsurge of organizing among immigrant workers themselves, and support from unions ranging from the United Electrical Workers to the Carpenters. 

Congress, however, has since moved to criminalize work and migration, and proposed huge guest worker programs. States have passed bills that are even worse. 

Mississippi, for instance, made it a state felony for an undocumented worker to hold a job, with prison terms of up to ten years. Florida has made it a crime to give an undocumented person a ride to a hospital. And administrations from Bush to Trump have implemented by executive order the enforcement and guest worker measures they couldn't get through Congress.

LABOR'S SILENCE

When Democrats campaigned against Trump by accusing him of sabotaging an immigration bill that would have put billions of dollars into immigration enforcement, they prepared the way for Trump's onslaught once he was elected. Labor, which should have prepared our own members for the fight to come, stayed silent. 

In the wave of raids that have followed, hundreds of our own members have been taken, not just for deportation, but on bogus criminal charges or simply swept off the streets by masked agents. Unorganized workers have been terrorized by the raids-a gift to employers as workers are pressured to give up any hope of a union or a higher wage.

Some unions today are part of the network fighting to protect workers and communities from immigration raids. SEIU California leader David Huerta faces misdemeanor federal charges after opposing ICE during a raid in Los Angeles' garment district. 

It is time for the labor movement to use its organization and resources to fight to stop this wave of repression. As part of that effort, labor needs to propose a freedom agenda for immigrants that will really give people rights and an equal status with other workers on the job, and their neighbors in their own communities. 

DEFEND CIVIL RIGHTS

In the past, the possibility of fighting for our ideals-what we really want-has been undermined by beltway deal making. We have to be consistent in our politics. 

Labor needs an outspoken policy that defends the civil rights of all sections of U.S. society, and is willing to take on an open fight to protect them. If Trump's raids and terror campaigns scare unions into silence, few workers will feel confident in risking their jobs (and freedom) to join them. 

Yet people far beyond unions will defend labor rights if they are part of a broader civil rights agenda, and if the labor movement is willing to go to bat with community organizations for it. 

JOBS FOR ALL

A new direction on civil rights requires linking immigrant rights to a real jobs program and full employment economy. It demands affirmative action that can come to grips with the devastation in communities of color, especially African-American communities. 

And none of that can be done without challenging Trump's war policies, but equally the war policies that have come from Democratic administrations. 

CLIMATE JUSTICE

Today part of a freedom agenda is not only conversion from military production, but conversion from fossil fuel dependence. 

Jeff Johnson, past president of the Washington State Labor Council, drew the connection between labor support for climate conversion legislation and social justice. "I knew we had to educate my members, so that they would understand that we can't support more fossil fuel exploration," he told me. "We have an existential crisis that is social, political and racial, in addition to climate. And we know that the impact of climate change will hit those communities who had the least to do with causing it."

INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY

At the heart of any radical vision for our era is globalization-the way unions approach the operation of capitalism on an international scale. 

When the old Cold War leadership of the AFL-CIO was defeated in 1996, I heard incoming AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer (later President) Richard Trumka say unions should find partners in other countries in order to face common employers. At the time it represented a big change-that unions would cooperate with anyone willing to fight against our common employers. It rejected by implication the anti-communist ideology that put us on the side of employers and U.S. foreign policy, and that shamed us before the world. 

Three decades later, however, this idea is no longer radical enough. It's an example of pragmatic solidarity, although it was, at the time, a good first step out of that Cold
War past. 

What's missing is a response from the labor movement to U.S. foreign policy. International solidarity involves more than multinational corporations. There is no doubt that military corporations benefit from selling the bombs that Israel uses in its Gaza genocide, but political support from Trump, and Biden before him, for Israel is more than just an effort to defend their profits. 

Corporate globalization and military intervention are intertwined, and in the labor movement there's not enough discussion about their relationship. That's why we got manipulated in the response to 9/11, and by justifications for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. 

WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?

Unions in the rest of the world are not simply asking us whether we will stand with them against General Electric, General Motors, or Mitsubishi. They want to know: Will you take action to oppose the Gaza genocide and arms shipments? What is your stand about aggressive wars or coups? 

U.S. corporations operating in a country like Mexico or El Salvador are, in some ways, opportunistic. They're taking advantage of an existing economic system, and trying to make it function to produce profits. They exploit the difference in wages from country to country for instance, and require concessions from governments for setting up factories in their countries. 

But what causes poverty in a country like El Salvador? What drives a worker into a factory that, in the United States, we call a sweatshop? What role does U.S. policy play in creating that system of poverty?

In our union movement, we need that kind of discussion. We turn education into simply a technical matter about techniques for grievance-handling and collective bargaining. We don't really work with our members to develop a framework to answer these questions. So our movement becomes ineffective in fighting about the issues of war and peace, globalization, and their consequences, like immigration. 

EDUCATE THE MEMBERS

When the AFL-CIO campaigned in Washington against the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), for instance, labor lobbyists went up to Capitol Hill and tried to mobilize pressure on Congress to defeat it. But what was missing was education at the base of the labor movement. 

Had we educated and mobilized our members against the Contra war and the counterinsurgency wars in El Salvador and Guatemala (and certainly many of us tried to do that), U.S. workers would have understood CAFTA more clearly a decade later. 

The root of this problem is a kind of American pragmatism that disparages education. We need to demand more from those who make the decisions and control the purse strings in our unions. 

Since grinding poverty in much of the world is an incentive for moving production, defending the standard of living of workers around the world is as necessary as defending our own. The logic of inclusion in a global labor movement must apply as much to a worker in Mexico as it does to the nonunion worker down the street.

That's why the debate over the Iraq War at the AFL-CIO convention was so important. From the point when it became clear that the Bush administration intended to invade Iraq, union activists began organizing a national network to oppose it through U.S. Labor Against the War. What started as a collection of small groups, in a handful of unions, became a coalition of unions representing over a million members, the product of grassroots action at the bottom of the U.S. labor movement, not a directive from the top. 

That experience was put to work when the genocide began in Gaza, as national and local unions and activists organized the National Labor Network for a Ceasefire. When the United Auto Workers endorsed its call, the union also set up a divestment and just transition working group, "to study the history of Israel and Palestine, the union's economic ties to the conflict, and to explore how to achieve a just transition for U.S. workers from war to peace." 

Opposing intervention and war means fighting for the self-interest of our members. It means being able to identify that self-interest with the interest of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. The same money that pays for bombs for the Israeli government is money that doesn't get spent on schools here at home. We can't have a full-employment economy in the U.S. without peace. 

The arguments by political centrists in the Democratic Party that we must choose to fight only about workers' immediate economic interests, and stay silent about Gaza or racism, hides the connections workers have to make to challenge the sources of their own poverty and the attacks against them. As veteran organizer Stewart Acuff says, "While economic justice must run through everything our movement does, we cannot deemphasize any strand of injustice." 

Union members are not ignorant of this basic fact. In fact, they are becoming more sophisticated, and better at understanding the way global issues, from war to trade, affect the lives of people in the streets of U.S. cities. But the percentage of union members is declining, and the organization they need to put that understanding into practice is getting smaller. Deeper political awareness alone will not create a larger labor movement.

NEED A SOCIAL MOVEMENT

Just after World War II , unions represented 35 percent of U.S. workers. It's no coincidence that the McCarthy years when the Cold War came to dominate the politics of unions was the moment when that strength began to decline. 

By 1975, after the Vietnam War, union membership had dropped to 26 percent. Today only 9.9 percent of all workers, and 5.9 percent in the private sector, are union members. 

Declining numbers translate into a decline in political power and economic leverage. California (with one-sixth of all union members) and New York (with one-eighth) have higher union density than any others. But even there, labor is facing an all-out war for political survival.

While the percentage of organized workers has declined, unions have made important progress in finding alternative strategic ideas to the old business unionism. If these ideas are developed and extended, they provide an important base for making unions stronger and embedding them more deeply in working-class communities. But it's a huge job. Raising the percentage of organized workers in the United States from just 10 to 11 percent would mean organizing over a million people. Only a social movement can organize people on this scale. 

In addition to examining structural reforms that can make unions more effective and concentrate their power, the labor movement needs a program that will inspire people to organize on their own, one which is unafraid to put forward radical demands, and rejects the constant argument that any proposal that can't get through Congress is not worth fighting for. 

A BROADER VISION

The labor movement has to become a movement that inspires people with a broader vision of social justice. Our standard of living is declining. Workers often have to choose between paying their rent or their mortgage or having health care. There's something fundamentally wrong with the priorities of this society, and unions have to be courageous enough to say it.

Working families need a decent wage, but they also need the promise of a better world. For as long as we've had unions, workers have shown they'll struggle for the future of their children and their communities, even when their own future seems in doubt. But it takes a radical social vision to inspire the wave of commitment, idealism, and activity.

The 1920s were filled with company unions, the violence of strikebreakers, and a lack of legal rights for workers. A decade later, those obstacles were swept away. 

An upsurge of millions in the 1930s, radicalized by the Depression and left-wing activism, forced (relative) corporate acceptance of the labor movement for the first time in the country's history. 

There are changes taking place in our unions and communities that can be the beginning of something as large and profound. If they are, then the obstacles unions face today can become historical relics as quickly as did those of an earlier era.


David Bacon is a labor journalist and photographer, former factory worker and union organizer, and author of Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants, More Than a Wall/Mas que un muro, and other books.

POVERTY AND DEPORTEES ON THE STREETS IN TIJUANA

POVERTY AND DEPORTEES ON THE STREETS IN TIJUANA
By David Bacon
With photos and an interview with Laura Velasco
Dollars and Sense, November/December
https://www.dollarsandsense.org/poverty-and-deportees-on-the-streets-in-tijuana/

 

A deportee among the homeless people living on the street, lined up for food at a distribution center in downtown Tijuana, Baja California Norte, Mexico.

In the U.S. media, even in progressive media, we pay very little attention to what happens to most people when they're deported, or when they choose self-deportation as a result of fear. Most people who are deported or who self-deport go home to communities far south of the border. But the people who are just dumped through the border gate and have no home to go to find themselves in cities like Tijuana, Mexico. For many years deportees from the United States have lived on the street or in the concrete Tijuana River channel. 

A year ago, the city's refuges were packed with families from places as far away as Venezuela and Haiti. These days, that wave of people from countries besides Mexico has dissipated. People know that Trump has closed the border. These photographs show the cavernous halls in shelters where migrants set up their tents. Today shelter residents are often families from southern Mexico, fleeing the violence. Others are still here because they cannot go home. These photographs also show deportees mixed with other street dwellers, eating at a sidewalk meal distribution site. This is a terrible reality for many people.

These photographs try to document the lives of people on the ground in Tijuana. To give them a deeper context I interviewed Laura Velasco, an investigator and professor at Tijuana's Colegio de la Frontera Norte. Velasco has researched the situation of deportees and migrants in the city for many years, and has written several books about them. Thanks also to Michelle Lerach and Yolanda Walther-Meade for their help.

Since U.S. policy is in great part responsible for the fact that migrants are here at all, it is our responsibility to look at what's happening to them and take Mexican reality into account. Mexico, with far fewer resources than the united States, has made much greater efforts to treat migrants as human beings. As the photographs and Velasco's analysis show, the situation for deportees and self-deportees in Tijuana is mixed-people ripped from their lives at home, trying to survive as best they can. -David Bacon

 

Refugees at a casa de refugio, or sanctuary home, administered by the Templo Embajadores de Jesus in Tijuana. The casas are for refugees from other countries or parts of Mexico where people have fled violence or poverty. Some are deportees from the United States. 

David Bacon: Has the Trump administration's wave of immigration enforcement-the deportations and self-deportations-had an impact in Tijuana and in the border cities?

Laura Velasco: The number of people coming into Tijuana since January has dropped significantly. People are being deported directly to their places of origin, or are being sent to Mexico City. They are not leaving them at the border, to prevent them from re-entering the United States. The Mexican government has arranged with the United States to receive Mexican deportees far from the border, particularly at airports in and around Mexico City, and the government talks about the large numbers of deportees they're receiving at the airports, but not at the border.
 
Foreigners are sometimes also received there, before they return to their countries of origin. In addition, since [the administration of former President Manuel] López Obrador, the Mexican government has also had a policy of preventing foreigners from arriving at the border. 

I have many doubts about his figures, but [President Donald] Trump says that since he became president, they have deported a million people, or forced people to self-deport. Of course they are from all countries, but many are Mexican. Nevertheless, there is only a small flow of deportees through the border gates. In January we were preparing for deportations we expected would be massive, but they weren't. Instead, only 20 or 50 people have been arriving every day. They set up a shelter run by the army, which was very well organized, but there were few deportees.

 

A young woman rests in her bunk at the casa uses American flags for privacy. 


DB: When I was in Tijuana recently, I saw that the number of people in the shelters has gone down.

LV: There are far fewer people in shelters in Tijuana now. Before the beginning of January, there were far more. Today in the shelters, most of the people are internally displaced Mexicans. They're not foreigners. Most came from Michoacan and Guerrero, but Michoacan is the source for most here in Tijuana. 

They leave home because of all the criminal violence, the forced recruitment of young people, and the disappearance of family members. Some have told us that organized criminals charged them for the privilege of working. For every hour worked in the lemon harvest, for instance, they had to make a payment. These are very poor people who had nothing, and the gangs just took it from them.

Displaced people basically depend on shelters. Families need food and the time to make decisions about what they're going to do, whether they return to their place of origin or stay. Their family networks also help, especially money from relatives in the United States, who send them money for their tickets, for food, to pay for a hotel for a few days or the first few days of rent.

Nevertheless, fewer internally displaced people are arriving in Tijuana because the possibility of entering the United States has been shut off. People who have been displaced and would come to the border and think about crossing now have to face not only the threat of deportation but also imprisonment. That has discouraged many people.

People who have returned from the United States speak about terrible prison conditions, and their stories have spread widely. There's much less incentive to cross the border and enter as an undocumented immigrant, since you can not only be deported but might also be thrown in jail. In that sense, we can say that the U.S. policy of intimidation has worked.

At the same time, the number of Mexican workers brought to the United States on H-2A and H-2B visas has increased enormously. Last year the State Department issued over 300,000 visas for agricultural workers alone. So on the one hand, Mexican workers who have a life and home in United States are deported, while on the other, hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers are imported under this exploitative labor program. 

 

 

 

Children at the casa de refugio administered by the Templo Embajadores de Jesus in Tijuana. 


DB: In one of the shelters for unaccompanied youth, I talked with two brothers from Haiti who'd been there for two years, and a young woman from Guatemala who'd been there for months. What happened to the people who were living in the shelters before?

LV: Some people we talked with recently have been in shelters for three or four years. Young people especially can't leave the shelter, and their emotional situation and quality of life is not good. For the people who have been waiting to cross, the situation is very difficult now. The program that allowed people to apply for asylum, especially young people, and then leave detention on parole, has been closed. Even those who were on the path to asylum are more or less trapped in Tijuana because Trump's policy will not allow anyone to enter now, even the young people who before perhaps had a hope of finding their family in the United States. Waiting without hope, really. 

That has stranded many people who were on the path to regularization through asylum, and some have sought to settle and live in Tijuana. Perhaps some still think that at some point things will change, that the border will reopen and they will be able to cross. But others have found a job, and a place to live. You can see women on the streets selling merchandise, fresh fruit or weavings and clothing. They are families who have settled in Tijuana and are staying. 

Many have left the shelters because there they often have no autonomy, no privacy, and no ability to organize their time. They can't make noise, they can't listen to music, they can't cook their food. If they have children, the children have to stop being free. It is a very hard life of discipline.

So even though they can barely manage, leaving the shelters allows them to have freedom, to be able to sleep whenever they want, to get up whenever they want, to listen to music, to have their children make noise. The transition from the shelters to becoming independent, staying in the city-it's a change in quality of life. Even though they're living in very poor housing and have very precarious jobs, they see it as a step forward.

Some shelters are less restrictive. The Embajadores shelter in Scorpion Canyon, in the photographs, has very comprehensive services, including a school. It's a much more community-based model than many others that just provide food and shelter. There's more community integration, and a different way of relating to the migrants. It's a model that emerged from local civil society.

 

 

Mexicans deported into Tijuana often have no home in Mexico and nowhere to go. Without money many live on the streets and stave off hunger through a food distribution center downtown organized by Tijuana Sin Hambre.  Ricardo Ponce pours food into a container (upper photo) and Araceli Claro prepares food (lower photo) at the distribution center. 


DB: For many years I've taken photographs and talked with deportees living on the streets and in the river channel. But recently it seems the number of people sleeping outside has grown. 

LV: There have always been people living on the sidewalks in Tijuana, and we don't have measurements or numbers that tell us exactly whether that number is increasing. But the mayor suddenly came to our research center a few months ago, asking us for help, because the number of people sleeping on the street in the downtown area had increased dramatically, and many were using drugs. 

Some deported people use the programs that provide food to people on the street. A lot are homeless people, and families who live in Tijuana. On the border there is supposedly less extreme poverty, at least in the media coverage, but we meet families who get meals at the food distribution sites because they don't have enough money to eat. 

Rents here have increased a lot. Many of our students come from the south of the country and try to find housing here on the border in Tijuana with a modest scholarship. In the past they could live well with that scholarship. Now they can't. They tell us the rents are very high, about $200 for a room and $500 for a two-bedroom apartment. Rent that high didn't exist before.

Our rents are rising because of the real estate crisis in California, where the rents right across the border are much higher. Because of that, the number of people who cross to work in the United States has increased a lot. And because they can pay more, the rents here go up, and more people wind up on the street.

But there are also homeless people who choose to come to live in Tijuana. For a long time, we've seen a kind of reverse migration, crossing the border from north to south. Many homeless people in California come here to Mexico because here they can live with less. Many people who are threatened with deportation come to Tijuana because they can no longer pay the rents in California. 

Upper photo: Clyson Jeanlaurent and his brother Manielsonluc Juanlaurent at the YMCA shelter in Tijuana, which houses unaccompanied young people from other countries or parts of Mexico where people have fled violence or poverty. They came from Haiti two years ago and hope to join their family in Texas. 
Lower photo: Margelis Rodriguez and her niece Sofia Orellana who came here from Venezuela are staying at a casa de refugio in Tijuana administered by Movimiento Juventud 2000. 


DB: What support are migrants in Tijuana receiving from the government now?

LV: Claudia Sheinbaum, our president, talks about her vision of supporting migrants through the consulates, with shelters, and reintegrating them by finding them employment. These are good goals, but they're often not coordinated with the state and local governments. There's a lot of disorganization, even though there are good intentions.

Sometimes, as we saw in one recent case, local governments can be a big obstacle. The director of the Migrant Institute here, José Luis Pérez Canchola, worked for the municipal and state administrations. Canchola has been a left political activist for many years and was a founder of MORENA [Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional, Mexico's dominant political party]. He was fired, despite Sheinbaum's vision. When Trump first came into office he went to the border crossing, where many foreign migrants had assembled, waiting for the border to open. They'd heard the United States was going to let them in, and of course instead it closed the border. There were many children and families in the street with nowhere to go, and Canchola tried to convince them to leave. The city government accused him of trying to pressure it and fired him. 

Sometimes the consulates in the United States give people threatened with deportation help and legal advice, but once they're here in Mexico they get much less attention. There is a program to give returnees a little money, a phone card, and a kind of ID. The ID is important for those who are deported, since without one there's often a problem with the police. The government created one shelter here, but it wasn't really necessary. There are a lot of shelters in Tijuana, so it was practically empty.


Note: Thanks to Laura Velasco and also Michelle Lerach and Yolanda Walther-Meade for their help. 

Daniel Ortega and Irma Cortez fled the violence of the cartels in their home state of Michoacan.



Cesar Walsh Delgado grew up in Buffalo, New York, but never became a U.S. citizen.

photos from the edge 23 - WHAT RESISTANCE LOOKS LIKE

photos from the edge 23 
WHAT RESISTANCE LOOKS LIKE

OAKLAND, CA - 23OCTOBER25
Photos by David Bacon
to see a full selection, click here.

Hundreds of people came out in the early morning darkness to block the causeway leading to Coast Guard Island, where 100 ICE agents were believed to have arrived yesterday. Cars of workers could not pass the picket line that moved slowly from corner to corner, through the whole intersection. Border Patrol agents came out to break the line and bring their vehicles onto the island, using anti-personnel weapons against people with no weapons. But except for their half-dozen SUVs and king cab pickups, no other cars got through. It all reminded me of 1984, when a similar moving line blocked Pier 80 in San Francisco, and longshore workers refused to cross it and unload South African cargo from the Nedlloyd Kimberley. The Bay Area has this rich history of people putting themselves on the line for justice. 

 

 

 

photos from the edge 22 - OAKLAND AND SAN FRANCISCO SAY, NO TROOPS!, NO KINGS!

photos from the edge 22
OAKLAND AND SAN FRANCISCO SAY, NO TROOPS!, NO KINGS!
Photoessay by David Bacon

OAKLAND, CA - 18OCTOBER25 - Thousands of people rally in Wilma Chan Park, and march to Lake Merritt, to protest the illegal actions and immigration raids of President Trump, and his threat to bring the National Guard to Oakland. 

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - 18OCTOBER25 - Thousands of people rally at the Embarcadero, and march to Civic Center, to protest the illegal actions and immigration raids of President Trump, and his threat to bring the National Guard to San Francisco. 

A REVOLUTIONARY IN POLITICS AND PHOTOGRAPHY

A REVOLUTIONARY IN POLITICS AND PHOTOGRAPHY
By David Bacon
Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 10/1/25
https://rosalux.nyc/a-revolutionary-in-politics-and-photography/

Tina Modotti [publicity still as "Rosa Carilla" in "Riding with Death", 1921, photographer unknown]

Jeannette Ferrary, a fine photographer whose work has a rare and brilliant sense of humor, drew my attention to the obituary for Tina Modotti in the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/obituaries/tina-modotti-overlooked.html).  I'm glad that the NYT series of obits on women who were ignored when they died chose to do one for Modotti.  The author, Grace Linden, deserves credit for getting acknowledgement in the Times for this radical hero, 83 years after her death.  Linden gives a good account of the work she did as a photographer in Mexico in the 1920s, where she is regarded as a founder of Mexican socially radical photojournalism and documentary work.

Modotti was brought by her working-class parents to San Francisco's North Beach around the turn of the century, from Udine, in northern Italy.  Growing up, she began acting in local theater, and moved to Hollywood, where she met Edward Weston. Linden pays a lot of attention to her relationship with Weston, a founder of modernism in photography.  As Modotti, at 27, was searching for her way as a photographer and woman, the two went to Mexico together.  

Weston had begun to discard the soft-focused pictorialism favored by established photographers of the day. His images of the Armco steel mill, taken in 1922, were historic in the development of modernism in their simplicity and sharp focus.  His decision to use a steel mill as the place for this experimentation was partly due to the era's progressive ideas about the importance of industry, and by implication, industrial workers. But he was not alone.  Paul Strand made the same turn in that period.  Later, in the 1930s many photographers used factories for this purpose, but Weston and Strand were ahead of his time.  We don't see heavy industry in the same way today, but in those years it seemed like the future.

Weston, together with Modotti, developed this vision further in Mexico.  John Mraz, a respected photo historian, believes the Mexican contribution to the development of photography is generally unacknowledged in the U.S.  He makes an argument that Mexico, where Weston created some of his iconic images, deeply affected him.  Jason Weston, the photographer's great grandson, says "his ideas about photography were very far along by the time he went to Mexico. His vision developed more there, but he had already made the jump from pictorialism to straight photography. This takes nothing away from the importance of Tina, politically or photographically. Edward taught her photography, but she took it in her own direction."

In Mexico Modotti and Weston became more collaborators than student and teacher.  Modotti joined the Mexican Communist Party in 1926, and combined her politics with the new modernist ideas of directness, sharp focus and simplicity.  That gave her work tremendous impact, including in the U.S.  Her famous image of a hammer and sickle was a cover for The Masses at the height of the magazine's popularity.  It was one of a series, in which she began with a straight depiction of the Communist symbol, and then gradually transposed the elements.  First she added a sombrero, and eventually took out the symbols from the Russian revolution and substituted a bandolier, guitar and ear of corn.  She is clearly trying to "Mexicanize" communism, that is, provide symbols that make sense in Mexico's own revolutionary history, that can provide the same political inspiration.  The last photograph in the series is the one reproduced in the NYT obit, so the revolutionary intent is kept unclear.  Perhaps the Communist symbols in the previous ones were too much for the NYT editors.

Linden's account makes her a little too subservient to Weston.  Modotti did ask him to teach her photography in Los Angeles, before they even left.  And she did recognize that her technical skill came from his.  But Modotti also used the modernist aesthetic to give politics new impact.  The obit discusses her famous image of the workers march, where their massed sombreros, absent their faces, convey they political power and militance.  Linden includes another worker photograph, showing worn hands resting on the handle of a shovel.  



Campesinos Reading El Machete, Tina Modotti, 1929

But Modotti didn't stop there.  She shot luminous portraits of women from indigenous communities, including another well-known image of a woman holding a baby, in which the light gives their skin and muscles almost three dimensions.  She created other overtly political images.  One shows a group of workers reading a copy of El Machete, the Communist Party newspaper.  The message of the photograph is that the paper and its Party are speaking to the working class, and ordinary people are becoming literate as they participate in politics.

Modotti has been an important figure in feminist and women's studies because of her genius as an artist, her independent life and her unwillingness to subordinate herself to men (including Weston).  The obit describes their lives in the bohemian atmosphere among artists and muralists in Mexico City in the late 1920s, just after the revolution.  

Linden mentions that Modotti posed nude in several Weston photographs (among the most famous nude images in photography) and the online version of the obit reproduces one of them.  These photographs are charged with the photographer's sexual desire, but looking at them from Modotti's perspective, as the person in the image, they seem very matter-of-fact.  She doesn't face the camera.  There's no come-on.  Her attitude seems more, "this is my body, part of who I am."  Photography historian Sally Stein cautions, however, that "After those rooftop pics, she soon stopped, and we're left to wonder whether she had growing reservations about photography's potential, with regard to women."

There's no question that this is a colorful and fascinating part of Modotti's life, and she plays such an important role in the history of photography that it deserves all the attention that Linden and other writers give to it.  There are several books about Modotti, mostly focusing on her years in Mexico and her photography.  One of the best is Tinissima, by the great Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska.  But their authors generally have a much harder time with her life after she left Mexico.  Linden's obit shares that limitation, briefly presenting her travels after she left Mexico as spontaneous.  

Because of her politics, Modotti was deported in 1930 by Mexico's incoming rightwing government, with Vittorio Vidali, the representative in Mexico for the Comintern.  The two eventually became partners, comrades and lovers, a relationship that lasted to the end of her life.  She stayed for six months in Berlin, where she began working for the Anti-Imperialist League, whose Mexican chapter she had helped organize.  In Berlin she tried to adapt to the new genre of street photography.  Her deliberate process and old camera were too slow, however, and her poverty kept the new 35mm Leica out of her reach.  With Vidali she traveled on to Moscow, where she became an organizer for the Comintern.  For several years she worked for International Red Aid (the MOPR), smuggling money and support to imprisoned revolutionaries and banned political parties.  In 1934, after Hitler took power, she and Vidali went back to Berlin to organize support for Georgi Dimitrov, on trial for the Reichstag fire, which Hitler used to suspend all civil liberties in Germany.  

Her photographs from Mexico were widely published by Willi Munzenberg's AIZ, the Workers Pictorial Newspaper.  She gradually stopped taking pictures herself, however, but continued to contribute to the ideas of socially-committed photography.  In 1932 she wrote "Photos as a Weapon for Red Aid Agitation."  According to Brigette Studer's Travelers of the World Revolution, Modotti argued that photography makes possible the "objective" reproduction of the hard reality of capitalism, but that images should not just illustrate text but should speak for themselves.  



Mother and Child, Tehuantepec, Oaxaca, Tina Modotti, 1929

Modotti first went to Spain in 1933, and was deported.  In 1934 she tried to return to bring support to the miner's uprising in Asturias, and was stopped at the border.  Then, in 1936, with the election victory of the Popular Front, she went back and stayed until the final retreat in 1939.  During the Civil War she was the head of Socorro Rojo, organizing all the support, first for the soldiers and civilian population, and then for the refugees as they fled from Franco.  Vidali, as Carlos Contreras, was one of the organizers, and then political commissar, of the Fifth Regiment.  

During the war Red Aid's membership in France grew to 150,000, and in Spain to 500,000.  Modotti moved from city to city, even by boat from Barcelona to Valencia, under the guns of the fascist-occupied coast.  She was close to poet Antonio Machado, who called her "the angel of my house."  

As Franco's armies advanced, and the International Brigades left, "I felt anguish in my heart, and I thought about how this was the end," she recalled.  Vidali said he thought the war still might be won, but "You were always an optimist," she responded.  In the weeks that followed she helped half a million people make their escape from Barcelona to the French frontier, under bombs and strafing planes.  Antonio Machado died of pneumonia after crossing the Pyrenees.  Her comrade at Red Aid, Mathilde Landa, stayed on but was captured, and committed suicide after being tortured by the fascists.  

Modotti left Spain with no possessions on February 9, 1939, and Vidali shortly afterwards.  In France, the Mexican ambassador Narciso Bassols, a Communist, got Mexican residence visas for Modotti and Vidali and hundreds of other political refugees, including transit visas for the U.S.  When the Queen Mary docked in New York, however, immigration authorities wouldn't let Modotti off the boat.  Her sister, Yolanda Magrini, a Communist artist, tried in vain to see her and could not get on board.  Modotti, who'd last seen the U.S. in 1923, was never able to return.

Linden describes the efforts of her friends to find her refuge in Mexico, but Modotti's political history is basically missing from the NYT obit.  The Mexican government, still under the influence of Lazaro Cardenas, gave asylum to thousands fleeing Spain.  That decision had a great influence on Mexican photography.  Among the refugees were the Mayo brothers, Communists who founded a radical photo agency that created a new, radical direction for photojournalism.  The Mayos mentored a whole generation of red photographers that followed, from Rodrigo Moya to Marco Antonio Cruz.  

That tradition had its influence north of the border as well.  Mariana Yampolsky was born, raised and educated in Chicago (a niece of Franz Boas), and emigrated to Mexico.  Already a socialist, she went to work in the Taller de Grafica Popular, bringing her into the Mexican left and close to the Mexican Communist Party.  During the McCarthyite hysteria, like Modotti, she was denied the right to return to the U.S.  Yampolsky was a brilliant photographer, very much in the Mexican tradition, and spent many years producing photographs for books for the Secretaria de Educacion, when socialism was still taught in schools as a goal for Mexico.  She was influenced by Modotti's work, and was a student of Lola and Manuel Alvarez Bravo.



Mexican Revolution Sombrero with Hammer and Sickle, Tina Modotti, 1927

Modotti herself, however, didn't return to photography.  She described her motivation for giving up photography and working full time for revolution as hatred for "the intolerable exploitation of the workers of the countries of South American and the Caribbean" and the "bloody revenge on peasants who fight for their land, the torture of imprisoned revolutionaries, [and] armed attacks on street rallies and unemployed marches."  She died in 1942, in the middle of the war against Nazism, without seeing the final anti-fascist victory.  The cause was most likely exhaustion and heart failure.  Vidali returned to Italy afterwards, and was a Communist leader in the Senate from Trieste for many years.

Modotti was a dedicated Communist Party member, and spent the second part of her working life fighting for revolution.  Blanking out this part of her life does no justice to the political sophistication of her ideas, or to her commitment to photography.  Her decision, and the way she tried to balance those commitments, contradicts the bourgeois idea that artists must sacrifice everything for their art.  She believed that communism and fighting fascism was more important than her photography, a revolutionary position.  

All of that, I think, makes it unlikely that she will be as idolized (at least in mainstream media) as Frida Kahlo (another Communist).  Regardless, she deserves all the attention given her, and hopefully people reading the NYT obit will ask deeper questions about why Modotti chose to live her life as she did.  This tension between politics and art was true of red women photographers in the U.S. as well, from Consuelo Kanaga to Marion Post Wolcott.  Their history and contributions are still less well known today because of the Cold War. 

Living here in the Bay Area, I've always thought that we don't give Modotti enough recognition.  San Francisco's Italian community was deeply split by Mussolini and the rise of fascism, but leftwing Italians should claim her as their own, as should leftwing artists and photographers here in general.  We really need a Tina Modotti center, as they have in Udine, to popularize her ideas about photography and politics.  They are as relevant today as they were when she was alive.  

TRUMP DROPS THE HAMMER ON FARMWORKERS

TRUMP DROPS THE HAMMER ON FARMWORKERS
By David Bacon
The Nation, 10/10/25

https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/trum-rural-voters-workers-bailout/ 

ROYAL CITY, WA- Jaime Solorio is an immigrant H-2A worker recruited in Mexico.  He is digging post holes for wire supports for planting apple trees, in an field owned by Stemilt Growers.

On October 2 Trump finally dropped the hammer on farmworkers.  At the end of the season, when most workers who might protest are no longer in the fields, he cut the wages of 400,000 people by as much as a third.  

Trump's order, a Federal regulation published in Thursday's Federal Register and implemented immediately, alters the way wages are set for farmworkers brought to the U.S. by growers on H-2A visas. These workers are recruited mostly in Mexico, and sign contracts to work for a maximum of 10 months per year.  After that, they have to return home. 

H-2A workers are very vulnerable to pressure from their employers.  They can only work for the growers who recruit them, who can legally impose production quotas and fire workers for not meeting them.  Recruiters are legally allowed to refuse to hire women, and almost all H-2A workers are young men.  They can be fired for protesting, organizing, or simply working too slowly.  They then lose their visas and usually find themselves on a blacklist, unable to return to work in subsequent seasons. 

Existing Federal regulations require growers to provide housing, and transportation from the border and to work every day.  Every year the Department of Labor sets a minimum wage for each state, called the Adverse Effect Wage Rate.  It is usually a little higher than the state minimum wage in those states that have them.  The reg's original intent was to keep H-2A wages high enough that growers wouldn't use H-2A recruits to displace local farmworkers.  The new regulation changes both the wage system, and the housing requirement.

The new rule, called the "Adverse Effect Wage Rate Methodology for the Temporary Employment of H-2A Nonimmigrants in Non-Range Occupations in the United States," says the wage in California for Skill Level One farmworkers will be $16.45 per hour.  That's a nickel below the state's minimum wage this year.  There is a higher, Skill Level Two wage, of $18.71, but Daniel Acosta, immigration director for the Economic Policy Institute, believes that "more than 90% of H-2A workers will get the lower wage."  

Today the existing AEWR wage, received by the 37,511 H-2A workers who labored this year in California fields, was $19.94.  The wage those workers will be paid when they return next year, if growers pay the state minimum wage, will be $16.90 per hour, or three dollars less than they were paid this year.  In addition, the new regulation allows growers to charge H-2A workers for housing, which they previously had to provide for free.  In California, the allowed charge will be $3.00 per hour.  The total cut will therefore be from $19.94 to $13.90 - over six dollars.

The day after the regulation was issued I stopped to talk with two H-2A workers at an old motel in California's wine country.  A half-dozen farm labor busses, all with Mc4F Solutions, LLC, painted on the side, were parked in front.  The company is listed is an H-2A labor contractor, according to the Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, an advocacy organization for H-2A workers.  The two said they'd been coming to work in the same vineyards for several years, and joked that by now they knew each vine personally.  Both depend on the work to support families back home.  Being away for most of the year, for them, was the biggest downside.  

When they return next year, however, the company will have to tell them about the new, lower wage.  In addition, they'll be paying about $500 a month to sleep three to a room at the motel.  The company may even save enough to buy the place.  All over California H-2A labor contractors have taken over old motels, a process this regulation will accelerate.  Other growers are building labor camps, now using this involuntary gift from their workers to pay off construction costs.  

PORTERVILLE, CA - H-2A workers, working for Porterville Citrus, were housed by the labor contractor Fresh Harvest at the Palm Tree Inn in Porterville.  During the pandemic some rooms had notices on the windows saying they'd been decontaminated and/or disinfected.  Workers organized a protest when they weren't paid their full wages at the end of their work contract.

Savings by Napa's gentlemen farmers and wineries listed on the stock exchange is unlikely to produce good accommodations, however.  Bad housing is one of the most common complaints among farmworkers.  Nevertheless, regardless of its condition, workers will pay $3.00 an hour for it.  The California Department of Housing and Community Development responsible for all employer-provided housing in the state, won't be much help.  It only has three inspectors, and in 2022 it failed to issue a single citation for illegal conditions, while issuing permits without making inspections.  

The text of the regulation acknowledges "negative impacts" in government-speak. "Certain current H-2A workers may experience reductions in wages as a result of lower prevailing wage rates," it warns.  According to Marcos Lopez, a researcher for the University of California Davis Labor and Community Center, the total number of H-2A workers who worked in the U.S. this past year is close to 400,000.  In simple language, they will get a wage cut.  "This effect will be mitigated by an increase in the number of certified H-2A job opportunities, which will create additional employment for new H-2A workers."  In other words, new workers will be recruited if the old ones don't like it.

Wage cuts for H-2A workers will affect all workers - bitter news for the people who were called essential during the pandemic.  But the wages of farmworkers have never corresponded to the difficulty of the job, the skill needed to perform it, or the cost to workers' families or their own bodies.  Last year Juana, a strawberry picker in Santa Maria, told me, "Not many people can do this job," she said.  She'd been working in the berry fields for 15 years.  "I have permanent pain in my lower back, and when it rains it gets very intense.  Still, I get up every morning at 4, make lunch for my family, and go to work.  It's a sacrifice, but it's the only job I can get."  

Juana was making $16, then the state minimum wage.  The work season lasts for eight months, and produces an income of $21,760.  But she and her husband pay $2000 a month rent, or $24,000 a year - more than her entire earnings.  "We have to save to pay the rent during the winter when there's no work," she added.  "If we don't, we don't have a place to live.  And during those months there are always bills we can't pay, so by March there's no money at all, and we have to get loans to survive.  Plus, I have to send money to my mama and papa in Mexico.  There are many people depending on me."

This year another worker, Emma, described to me the toll farm work takes on her. "In the oranges I have to climb ladders with a 40 or 50 pound bag on my shoulders," she explained. "When I'm bunching carrots, I'm on my knees all day. Every season my body has to learn to adjust to the way my hands and back hurt. It can take an hour and a half to get to the field, and for all that the most I make is $700 a week. And last year 70 percent of the time I only got four hours of work a day because the company hired so many other people."

Emma's description of the cut in her hours is increasingly common.  "A lot of workers come to us, saying they've been replaced in middle of season, or that they don't get the hours they did before," Sarait Martinez, director of the Binational Center for Oaxacan Community Development, told me.  Martinez organizes Indigenous Mexican farm workers in California - people from towns in southern Mexico, speaking languages centuries old when Spanish colonizers arrived.

She explained that recruiters in Mexico target those communities.  As a result, Indigenous farmworkers in California, both local and H-2A workers, sometimes find themselves at odds over displacement.  "We do a lot of education," she says, "where we emphasize to workers that the system exploits both.  It wants us to fight each other over who has the right to work in the fields."

To Martinez and other farmworker advocates, the new regulation was not a surprise.  "Trump 1.0 used the exact same playbook in 2020," Daniel Costa recalls.  "First he got rid of the Farm Worker Survey used to set the Average Effect Wage Rate, just as he just did again.  Then he said he'd just freeze H-2A wages for two years."  The United Farm Workers filed suit and blocked the move. 

Discarding the Farm Worker Survey again this past August came after other moves to please growers.  At the end of June Trump scrapped the Farmworker Protection Rule, regulations put in place by Julie Su, Biden's Secretary of Labor, that provided minimal protections for H-2A workers.  By getting rid of it, growers can now bar outsiders (community groups or unions) from H-2A housing, give workers contracts in languages they can't read, retaliate against those who complain of bad conditions, and even stop using seat belts in the vehicles transporting them to the fields.  

Trump's new Agriculture Secretary, Brooke Rollins, promised changes like these in her Congressional nomination hearing.  She told Congress she'd modernize the H-2A program "to do everything we can to make sure that none of these farms or dairy producers are put out of business [by immigration enforcement]."

Last year the Department of Labor gave growers 384,000 certifications for H-2A visas, for workers who now make up about a fifth of the U.S. agricultural workforce.  That's up from 98,813 in 2012, and from 48,000 twenty years ago.  "Already H-2A workers make up a quarter of the crop workforce," Costa charges.  "Now growers will have a massive incentive to replace more people.  We could see 500,000 H-2A workers."

The new regulation, however, claims the wage cut is needed because of an emergency caused by the administration's own actions. "With the historic near total cessation of illegal border crossings-the Department must take immediate action to provide agricultural employers with a viable workforce alternative while concurrently averting imminent economic harm."  It parrots grower claims that they face a severe labor shortage because "domestic applicants are not applying for agricultural positions in sufficient numbers."

Edgar Franks, political director of Familias Unidas por la Justicia, a farmworker union in Washington State, recalls that during Trump's first administration, Washington State's Employment Security Department and the US Department of Labor agreed to completely remove the guaranteed piece-rate wage for H-2A workers picking apples, the state's largest harvest. That effectively lowered their wages by a third, and undermined local workers too.  "If wages drop even more, it won't be worth it to pick apples," he warned.  "They manufacture a labor shortage to deincentivize the work for local workers.  If they want to attract workers, they should pay higher wages.  But the real intent is to lower wages."

In addition, Martinez says, "the deportations and kidnapping of immigrants are now an excuse for growers to bring more H-2A workers and cut our wages." The regulation acknowledges "that illegal aliens currently employed in agriculture may be adversely affected as growers shift toward reliance on the lawful H-2A program rather than illegal aliens."  Martinez counters that "the lack of immigration status disproportionally affects Indigenous workers.  But while we're forced to leave jobs and homes by raids and deportations, growers are still guaranteed workers."

The new regulation, and the politics behind it, make winning and enforcing workplace rights and decent wages for farmworkers more difficult.  Enforcement of even the regulation's weak worker protections is already in trouble.  In 2019, under Trump, only 26 of the 11,472 employers using the H-2A program were punished for labor violations.  With Biden the DoL staff fell to only 810 investigators for the nation's 164.3 million workers, or one inspector per 202,824 workers.  Then over 2,700 DoL employees, or 20 percent of its workforce, left the department in the wake of Trump executive orders and job cutting by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency.

For organizers like Franks, organizing farmworkers is still the answer, especially with a Federal government undermining wages and terrorizing workers with immigration raids.  "Organizing farmworkers is always difficult, but not impossible," he says.  "At Sakuma Farms we won our contract in 2017, and wages there are good and workers are protected.  There's never been a shortage of workers there."

H-2A workers in Washington have protested in the past, including a strike after one worker died of heat and air contamination in 2018.  "I think there will be anger over this new reg, especially by workers who are experienced, produce more, and expect to be rewarded for their work" Franks predicts.  "And we've supported H-2A workers when they have protested.  So as organizers we have to do a better job of supporting workers whenever they try to change things."