European labor unions absorbed immigrant workers despite general racism

Evidence

Racism was part of the relations of production, even if it is difficult to apply to the European origin immigrant workers the rudimentary Marxist analysis of Oliver Cromwell Cox for whom racism - he was writing about the United States - was the outcome of capitalism, and more specifically, the outcome of the exploitation of the black working class by whites. As we have seen, while racism does target immigrants and is part of their exploitation, there is also, in all the European countries in question, primarily in France, in Great Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, and also in Germany, support for these same immigrants from the working-class movements and their trade union and political organizations. Overall, the working-class organizations in Europe have been a sphere of integration for those workers who were nevertheless victims of racism in other areas. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3150

Categorization

• XREF: Reverses the common assumption that class solidarity always excludes racial others; parallels the counterintuitive union-immigrant alliance dynamics discussed in scholarship on twentieth-century US labor history. — connects to: Three hundred seventy-six thousand immigrant steelworkers struck despite employers’ divide-and-rule tactics — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1347