Cesar Chavez Day

by Jason O'Neal

I wanted to provide a first-hand report from a community event that I attended last weekend in Southern Arizona. On Saturday, March 22nd, I participated in the Cesar Chavez/Dolores Huerta March and Rally. I first heard about this event during a general membership meeting of my local union and eventually I received an invite text message that was sent out to members about two weeks before. Since this was the 25th Annual March I thought it might have a decent turnout.

Before I begin, I want to make a few points perfectly clear to readers of this article. First, I am pro worker and support any attempts to develop militant fighting labor unions that are democratically run by members from within. Second, I do not support the “team concept” that has allowed the labor union leadership of the past several decades to abandon its responsibility to represent and protect the interests of dues paying members over their financial interests with the bosses and the alliances with one (sometimes both) of the two major political parties of capital and big business. Lastly, this is not a hit piece designed to shut down activism. However, I think it is important to identify where workers might be able to seek common interests and have a collective opportunity to fight back against the current and future mobilization of government resources against the working class and poor in our society. 

I am a public sector employee in an at-will state where multiple state and regional governments have divided their workforce of full-time positions. Some workers have union protections, others are at-will employees, and another group are contractors from one of the many staffing agencies and nonprofits in the area. My particular job is with an organization that has more than 4,000 non-management positions, although 700 of them are at-will employees who can be fired at any time. Of this group only a little more than 100 employees are dues paying members of our division of the local union. I don’t have the exact figures of active members for all divisions in the local, but judging by the turnout at this event, it can’t be too many. 

On the morning of the event I drove to the southside of town to a community park which was to be the rally point at the end of the march. We were told that shuttles would be available to transport marchers to the starting point, a local high school some 2.2 miles away, and upon my arrival I was able to locate our tent and the few members setting up. I had a handful of co-workers tell me they couldn’t make it, but I was hopeful that a few others would come through and take part in this activity. Unfortunately, I was holding out in vain because I was the only person from my division who showed up. Again, our local has multiple divisions, but two had nobody show up to represent them, two others had only one person each (myself included), and another had about half a dozen members present. If you include the four full-time staffers we would be lucky if a dozen folks were there from our union.

To complicate matters further, the shuttle vans weren’t running as efficiently as promised and people had to carpool to drop off marchers at the starting point. As members piled out of trucks and SUVs, right away we could see tables with tee shirts and the local media was present. With small drones buzzing overhead, a few police officers and vehicles were there mainly to provide traffic blocks.

The event was kicked off by members of the local Native American tribe performing an indigenous ritual. We heard from the event organizers, a county supervisor and her family who were there as well as the mayor. A U.S. Congressional Representative had recently passed away, so this event was also billed as a memorial for his family and supporters. Less than a half dozen unions were present, but participants from various movements brought their signs and banners. Groups representing Veterans for Peace and Free Palestine had a cadre of activists and the usual suspects of self-described socialist revolutionaries were out with about ten members. An estimation of the total marchers for this portion of the event was about 150 people.

The crowd exited the high school parking lot and made its way through a small neighborhood that had the occasional resident coming outside and waving. Once on the main road, the route turned south and went past the Veterans Administration Health Center. Aside from the extended wait times at traffic lights, and the sporadic horn honks and waves, it was a typical Saturday morning for a community that had folks eating at local restaurants, shopping at discount stores, and working in the countless vehicle repair shops and garages.

For most of the march people were repeating the cliched chants in unison with shouts of “this is what democracy looks like”, “Trump must go”, and “Si se puede.” But about a mile short of the finish line, the chants were less enthusiastic and the honorary group that was leading the march peeled off with a few hugs and kisses before jumping into vehicles waiting along the route. I found out almost immediately that they would be speaking at a “fighting oligarchy” Bernie Sanders/AOC event at a local high school and they would not be addressing the crowd gathered at the park.

The final mile eventually had the crowd enter into the park where more tents had been set up and a car club had filled one side of the parking lot with low-riders. There were speeches by representatives from community groups and more dances and music by performers. The only other event of notice was when I met an organizer from the Starbucks union and had a brief conversation about his activities. I quickly realized that this event was a dud and I decided to go home.

I had noticed an increase in traffic around the military base on my way to the park that morning and as I was driving away I could see jets flying overhead. Later that afternoon I saw news flashes from the Bernie-AOC rally. The radio stated 30,000 and other outlets reported only 20,000. Let’s just say they had 10,000 and that was exponentially greater than our tiny march on the southside. Both events paled in comparison to the total number of attendees at the air show. It’s been going on for more than 30 years and has been reported to routinely draw more than 100,000 spectators in previous events. We love our spectacle!

Back to Sanders and the progressives inside the Democratic Party. From what I gathered, Bernie wasn’t offering anything new from the position he has held since he ran for president in 2016. When he had a chance to contest the primary election with a floor vote, his first act was to tell his supporters to vote for Hillary Clinton. He wasn’t alone. Dolores Huerta was also telling voters to do the same. In spite of a push by countless voters to form an alternative, all of the Democratic Party front groups, donors, and political action committees shepherded voters to the polls in the name of a “brand new congress” that would be “indivisible.” Alexandria Ocasio Cortez was elected in those midterms and she quickly became a media darling as one of a small group of progressive women of color referred to as “the Squad.” Not much happened, however, when the squad was in position to leverage their votes for Speaker of the House into supporting Medicare for All. Pelosi was able to hold them in check and she was quick to remind everyone that the Democrats were capitalists.

Biden and Harris came to office in 2020 and workers seem to have completely forgotten that “worker Joe” from blue-collar Scranton came out against the railway strikes during his presidency. What was the call to voters in 2024? Huerta, Sanders, and AOC told everyone to vote for Harris. That was a catastrophe that resulted in Trump regaining the White House.

In the first two months of the second Trump presidency, the ruling class is making drastic changes to the federal government, foreign policy, and U.S. labor law. His blatant disregard for the accepted norms of Washington are in full-effect. He half-ass followed these protocols during his first time in office partly because he was surrounded by insiders during the beginning of his term. He is now surrounded by sycophants and ineptitude en masse, but he has pulled the mask off of the charade in American politics. 

His closing of many institutions and downsizing the regulatory agencies of the government has called the bluff of the Democratic Party and their allies in the media and what is left of the labor union leadership. When the Senate could have voted down a continuing resolution to keep the government funded and forced a slowdown to the madness, Trump knew that too many Democrats like Schumer and Co. wouldn’t risk biting the corporate hand that feeds them and keeps their campaign funds rolling in. So, what options do working class families and the poor actually have when it comes to voting for change?

My excitement about building a labor union to fight back has been diminished when even organized labor isn’t offering a way out. Voting blue no matter who didn’t work in 2018 and it will not work now. It appears labor leadership is going to crank up the same old song and dance about voting for a Democrat to fight Trump’s “fascism.”

This is an approach that many “woking class” voters are rushing into. I met with a coworker and fellow union member a few days before this march. He told me that he was too busy helping out a state assembly person, a Democrat from a real estate family in the area. He was recently elected in 2024 and, like AOC, he was a Democratic Party insider interning for congresspersons and working in all of the campaigns. One of his first moves in office was to propose a bill to adopt the term “howdy” as the official state greeting. Is this the resistance? I didn’t have neither the energy, nor the time to argue with my coworker. He will find out eventually.

What I have realized over the course of the events of the past week, including the funeral of the U.S. House Rep, is that there is no real response to Trump from those who claim to be leading the resistance. He has a party that is almost in lockstep behind him, a significant portion of American business owners, tech billionaires including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerburg, and the Alphabet bunch are all behind him. The question remains where will many of his working class supporters go? Especially, when they begin to lose the benefits and programs they are relying on to survive because Musk and Trump’s other corporate handlers are slashing and burning the regulatory structure of the federal government.

Perhaps the consistency of Bernie Sanders' message will finally resonate with working class voters, but the solution has to be something other than voting for the other team. With active union membership at historic lows and labor unions under new attacks at the federal level (not discounting decades of anti-worker laws and court decisions) could the new worker movement against capital come from outside of the traditional means seen in the past? Will it look like the #RedforEd movements in 2018?

When sixty percent of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck and the wealthiest people getting even more tax breaks, it is clear that the system has been tilted in favor of the ruling class. I am of the opinion that this is just the latest in a long line of attacks that goes back to right after World War II when a bi-partisan Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act to limit labor power in the U.S. Follow that up with the Red Scare, a resurgence of conservative values, the end of the Cold War, and a downward economic slide for most workers and we have our current predicament.

When this new movement takes hold and begins to push back against the austerity measures of the capitalists who control the levers of government, it will more than likely be composed of workers from all backgrounds and voting blocs. Let’s not forget that Trump and Harris both received more than 75 million votes in the 2024 election. However, 90 million eligible voters didn’t even cast a ballot. Who might they be waiting on? Will they become part of this new worker’s movement and become politically active in the future?

If Bernie and Co. really want to challenge Trump and the oligarchy in the U.S. they should be running campaigns centered on the day-to-day issues confronting most Americans. Instead, they are promising more of the same tired rhetoric to re-elect their team who, after getting into office, then does nothing to deliver on those promises. The truth of the matter is that the two parties of capital will not solve the problems created by our current political economy. At the end of the day, a progressive democrat is still a democrat… even if they claim to be a democratic socialist.

This realization also holds true to our history and the history of Chavez and Huerta. They accomplished much for farm workers during the 1960s, only to become staunch supporters of the Democratic Party. They were reformers at best, and political party machine operators in the end. True revolutionaries like Epifanio Camacho were erased from working class struggles because he knew that you had to confront the power of the wealthy with the power of the masses. Camacho was also a militant socialist. 

I am hopeful new leaders will rise up from within the working class and take the lead on demanding more. The current system is rigged and broken and workers should not vote for either party until candidates come forward from a bottom-up labor movement. They should challenge the ineffective union leadership which has been collaborating with the ruling classes for nearly a century.

 

Until you see someone fighting for Medicare-for-All, raising the minimum wage, more affordable housing, quality education for everyone, and healthy nutritious food as a right, keep your enthusiasm tampered and do your best to help your friends and neighbors. I am reminded of a movie from many years ago titled, “All the King’s Men.” The main character is a politician running for governor in Louisiana and he makes campaign stops at county fairs and rural community events. Anyway, he often ends his speeches with the following:

“You’re a hick, and nobody ever helped a hick but a hick himself.” 

Workers in the U.S. are going to have to stop waiting for a savior to lead them to the promised land because they will never show up. Workers are going to have to take the reins of society themselves if we are going to see any positive changes aimed to help them in the near future.