Conservatives and anti-union forces are hammering labor unions for our role in the demonstrations against Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and Saturday’s “No Kings” rallies. But unions, including controversial Service Employees International Union California president David Huerta, are doing what we should be doing — standing up for our members and for workers as a whole against the enemies of labor. 

Labor’s biggest mistake of the modern era was to allow the destruction of millions of industrial jobs without effective resistance. President Trump spoke the truth about deindustrialization in his 2017 Presidential Inaugural Address when he said, “Rusted out factories [are] scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation … One by one, the factories shuttered and left our shores, with not even a thought about the millions and millions of American workers that were left behind.” 

It was Big Labor’s disgraceful acquiescence to this catastrophic assault on American workers’ livelihoods that has allowed Trump to pose as the friend of the American worker. He has successfully channeled workers’ legitimate anger and resentment in the direction of immigrants instead of against the big businesses who destroyed America’s industrial working class. 

While the labor movement in Los Angeles and in California is being criticized for our sympathies for so-called “illegal aliens,” immigrants (legal or not) make up one-third of California’s labor force. Most of California’s “illegals” arrived in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, many fleeing horrific U.S.-backed Central America dictatorships and the civil wars those regimes created. Most came too late to take advantage of President Ronald Reagan’s 1986 immigration amnesty but are law-abiding and pay taxes in numerous ways and forms. Why would we turn our backs on them?

As a trade unionist, the immigration status of my union brothers and sisters is of no import. The Trump Administration and the big business interests it serves seek to divide working people, but workers as a whole will either move forward together or fall back together. Attacks on one part of the working class cannot, over time, benefit the other parts.

A major line of attack against labor argued by Aaron Withe, CEO of the anti-union Freedom Foundation, conservative investigative reporter Robert Schmid and others is that the average American is being forced to help finance the anti-ICE movement because the SEIU other unions resisting ICE “rely on taxpayer-funded dues.” But this is not taxpayer money. It is workers’ wages, and we have the right to do whatever they want with it, just as if we worked in the private sector.

Moreover, union dues is money well spent. For example, in March, 2023 the SEIU and United Teachers Los Angeles jointly struck the Los Angeles Unified School District. Our picket lines held, SEIU won large pay increases and an extensive expansion of healthcare benefits for part-time employees, and UTLA won a good contract as well.

Conservatives are almost unanimous in their condemnation of Huerta, who spent three nights in detention and is charged with conspiracy to impede an officer — a felony carrying a sentence of up to six years in prison. But Huerta was doing exactly what a good labor leader should be doing — putting himself out front and, if necessary, in harm’s way for the benefit of his members and of workers. The fact that people on both the left and the right were so surprised by Huerta’s incarceration is reflective of modern America’s ignorance about labor history–effective labor leaders have usually had to risk incarceration. 

During the massive strikes that built organized labor in the 1930s, there were many workers and union leaders attacked, jailed, and even killed by police and National Guard. In 1948, John L. Lewis, combative leader of the United Mine Workers, was found guilty of criminal and civil contempt of court for failing to end a coal strike.

In 1964, under then-Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa, truckers won the first National Master Freight Agreement, a national over-the-road contract said to have brought more workers into the middle class than any other single event in the history of labor organizing. In a long-running, politically-motivated prosecution by Robert F. Kennedy, who called the Teamsters the “enemy within,” and others, Hoffa was convicted of jury tampering, attempted bribery, and fraud and incarcerated from 1967 until 1971. However, in the eyes of authorities, Hoffa’s real crime had been his effectiveness as a labor leader. 

During the 1966 New York City Transit Workers Union strike, union leader Mike Quill led his 36,000 workers in shutting down the world’s largest subway and bus system. Just as Huerta and unions are vilified today, Mayor John Lindsay called the strike “defiance against eight million people” and, as British labor writer Ronan Burtenshaw explains, “the New York Times called for the police and army to run the buses; William F. Buckley Jr wanted the National Guard.” 

A judge issued an injunction to stop the strike, but Quill tore it up in front of the media, saying, “The judge can drop dead in his black robes. We will not call off the strike!” Quill and other leaders were arrested and jailed, but the TWU lines held, and they won the strike.

The Trump Administration’s assault on immigrant workers might be the catalyst for a revitalized labor movement with the kind of power unions like the TWU and the Teamsters once wielded. If so, all workers — immigrant or native born, male or female, white, Black, Latino, or other — will be the winners.

Glenn Sacks teaches Social Studies and represents United Teachers Los Angeles at James Monroe High School in the Los Angeles Unified School District. 

Team Trump may be on the verge of understanding that the U.S., NATO and their Pacific allies are being engulfed in a growing global war being waged against them by Russia and China.

Initially, Ukraine was the most logical country in this multiregional war for the West to put its first win on the board against the Axis of Evil.

But now it has become Iran.

For 46 years, Tehran has been waging its own war against the U.S. and its allies, directly and indirectly.

President Trump’s call on Tuesday for Iran’s unconditional surrender was welcome. So too was his brushing off Russian President Vladimir Putin in a brief conversation they held Tuesday. Putin had made an unserious offer to mediate between the U.S., Israel and Iran over Tehran’s nuclear weapons program. 

Trump’s response? “I said, ‘Do me a favor, mediate your own’” conflict.

Team Moscow clearly was not pleased. Twenty-four hours later, Russia’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement “call[ing] on Israel to stop targeting Tehran’s nuclear sites, arguing the ongoing bombardment could lead to global “nuclear catastrophe.”

Once again, when the Kremlin gets faced with a geo-strategic setback, it resorts to nuclear bluster and fearmongering. The Biden administration — and namely former national security advisor Jake Sullivan — fell for it again and again. Team Trump must not.

Trump’s stern pushback on Putin was well-timed and much-needed. For although Israel’s war plan against Iran is succeeding spectacularly and running ahead of schedule, Israeli civilians are still being intentionally targeted by Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Urgency is needed at the White House. Waves of Iranian ballistic barrages are rapidly depleting Israel’s supply of Arrow interceptor missiles. The Arrows play a key role in Israel’s multitiered air-defense.

To date, Iran has launched more than 400 ballistic missiles and more than 1,000 drones at Israel. Civilian casualties are mounting, with 24 killed in Israel and more than 500 wounded.

Likewise, U.S. allies in the Gulf region, including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are exposed and vulnerable — especially their port facilities and oil export infrastructure. 

Approximately 20 percent of global petroleum liquids consumption — roughly 20 million barrels per day — transits the strategic Straits of Hormuz. On Wednesday, Iran threatened the U.S. that any involvement in its conflict with Israel would trigger an “all-out war.” 

U.S. military facilities, remote bases and interests are also exposed in Jordan, Iraq, and throughout the region. As a result, the Pentagon is being forced to move naval assets out of Bahrain. According to a report in Newsweek, “all forward-deployed U.S. Navy vessels” have departed the “key port” in the Gulf.

The repositioning of military assets is likely an indicator that the President has come to a decision concerning military support for Israel.

That the U.S. is being forced to scramble military assets is, at least temporarily, a win for Moscow at Beijing. Yet, Trump is increasingly likely to change that question by ordering offensive operations against Iran.

If Team Trump is to ensure that the West begins winning World War III, it is not an option to let Fordo — Iran’s key underground nuclear facility, buried deep inside a mountain southwest of Tehran — remain operational.

And it appears that Trump will not. The Pentagon has been assembling a vast array of offensive weapons and capabilities in the region. Fighters and air-tankers have been repositioned to Europe and the Middle East over the last several days. Fordo, clearly, is on the White House’s radar screen. 

Likewise, USS Gerald Ford and the USS Nimitz are steaming toward the Mideast to join the USS Carl Vinson already on station. When they arrive, the U.S. will have three powerful carrier groups to take the fight to Iran and defend against any possible retaliation — and, by extension to demonstrate to Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping that red lines will be enforced.

Iran likely knows what is coming. Team Trump has largely gone silent. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth pointedly refused to divulge to the Senate the exact nature of the options he has presented to the White House. Trump himself has remained coy, warning on Wednesday that , “I may do it. I may not do it. I mean nobody knows what I’m going to do.”

Radio silence is never a good thing, and Khamenei appears to know it. His official government X account repeatedly posted warnings on Wednesday aimed at Trump, “Zionists” and Israel. In one of his early posts, Khamenei defiantly exclaimed, “It isn’t wise to tell the Iranian nation to surrender.”

Beijing finally weighed in, too. On Wednesday, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi “warned that escalating hostilities between Israel and Iran could spiral out of control, urging all sides to prioritize a ceasefire to prevent the region from sliding into an “abyss.”

But it’s a bit late for that — regime change and loss of China’s investment in Iran may now be on the horizon.

Yang hypocritically condemned “Israel’s acts of disregarding international law and international rules.” Of course, he ignored — as Beijing has done since February 2022 — Russia’s actual violations of international law in Ukraine, including intentional war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

Chances are that Trump understands Iran must be defeated, its nuclear program destroyed. Team Trump likely also understands that it cannot stop there in countering Russia’s and China’s global war against the collective West and its allies in the Pacific.

What remains to be seen after Iran’s nuclear threat is eliminated is where Team Trump pivots to next. If it leaves Russia to Europe and focuses exclusively on China — as Undersecretary of Defense Elbridge Colby prefers — that would be a colossal strategic error.

As it is, the commander of U.S. Central Command Gen. Michael Kurilla has reportedly been fending off Colby in order to position U.S. assets in the Middle East, to defend Israel and eliminate the Iranian nuclear threat if so ordered. Colby has already repeatedly lobbied to end military aid to Ukraine and focus on the Indo-Pacific — the new “priority theater.”

What Colby fails to understand is the connective tissue of it all. The fights in Ukraine, Iran and potentially Taiwan, and other U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific, are all strategically connected.

Defeating Khamenei in Iran and ensuring Putin’s defeat in Ukraine are the best way two things Trump can do now to confront a rapidly expanding Chinese threat.

This is World War III — not Hollywood’s dramatic version of it, but rather war by a thousand cuts. Winning it starts in Iran and ends by winning in Ukraine.

Mark Toth writes on national security and foreign policy. Col. (Ret.) Jonathan Sweet served 30 years as an Army intelligence officer.