Charleston Five longshoremen arrested for defending picket lines against cop attack (January 2000).
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South Carolina clay miners appeal for solidarity in fight for their union (October 2001). 
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February 2007    

Members of IWW Industrial Union 460 in January 15 protest against union-busting in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
(Photo: Thomas Good/Next Left Notes)

FEBRUARY 18 – Over the past year, immigrant workers in the United States have begun to organize big-time to fight for their rights. Last spring there were mushrooming protests by millions of immigrants: first to defeat the draconian HR 4437 bill, which would make criminals of all undocumented immigrants and those who help them, and then to demand “immigration reform” and a “path to citizenship.” On May 1, hundreds of thousands of foreign-born workers took the day off to demonstrate for immigrants’ rights. Packinghouses, restaurants and many other workplaces simply shut down. But the protests fizzled out when the immigrant-bashers in Congress made it clear that there would be no pro-immigrant reforms in 2006. Instead, Republicans and Democrats voted for a 700-mile fence along the increasingly militarized Mexican border.

The immigrants’ rights movement of 2006 was organized a variety of bourgeois forces – notably the Catholic church, Hispanic chambers of commerce, and the Democratic Party – who then called it off in the run-up to the November mid-term elections. Now that the Democrats control both houses of Congress, they are planning a repeat. But the fundamental force to achieve full rights for immigrants lies not in the capitalist politicians but in the class power of this overwhelmingly proletarian population. And across the country, immigrant workers are organizing. Here in New York City, workers at a number of food distribution warehouses in the Bushwick area of Brooklyn and nearby Ridgewood, Queens have undertaken a struggle to unionize their plants. The struggle is being led by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a labor union which seeks to revive the traditions of the anarcho-syndicalist “Wobblies.”

The Internationalist Group calls on all of NYC labor to take up the fight of the embattled immigrant workers. As the old “Wobbly” slogan put it, an injury to one is an injury to all. On February 19, supporters of immigrant and labor rights will demonstrate in their defense. The demonstration will begin at Sunrise Plus (formerly EZ-Supply), then proceed to Handyfat Trading and end up at an Associated Supermarket in Bushwick. Other workplaces that have been organizing include Amersino Marketing, Giant Big Apple Beer and Top City Produce. In the space of two months, more than 20 immigrant workers have been fired by these companies. On December 28, thirteen union members were fired at Sunrise Plus. On January 5, Handyfat sacked nine workers, some of whom had worked there for more than a decade. The reason given was failure to submit I-9 Employment Eligibility Verification forms. The real aim: union-busting.

Last April, the owner of Amersino Marketing fired workers and threatened to close the warehouse in the lead-up to a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) union representation vote. To rig the election, the boss invented a non-existent “night shift” consisting of his friends. Although workers at Sunrise Plus/EZ-Supply voted for the IWW in an NLRB-certified vote, the owner refused to bargain. Under pressure from the union, in November the bosses agreed to a contract including a $2.45 per hour increase in wages, a grievance procedure, paid vacation and sick days and anti-discrimination provisions. But on December 26, the bosses reneged and ripped up the tentative contract.

Two days later the union, the IWW’s Foodstuff Workers Industrial Union 460, submitted a federal labor complaint over back wages and overtime. Within hours, Sunrise Plus fired union supporters, and the rest of the workers walked out. Likewise, the owner of Handyfat Trading fired the workers within days of the union’s federal lawsuit, preferring to shut down rather than pay over $100,000 in unpaid back wages. At Top City, workers demonstrated at 5 a.m. on December 18, backed up by IWW members and other supporters, refusing to go to work until the company agreed to start paying minimum wage and overtime. The boss agreed. But on February 3, he closed the plant, supposedly to “restructure” and pay off debts. 

The bosses are closely coordinating their anti-labor drive, sending identical letters to workers demanding I-9 papers. They are being advised by a notorious union-busting lawyer, Alred DeMaria, whose firm specializes “in the field of combating union organizational campaigns” (see Diane Krauthamer and David Graeber, “Not Without a Fight: NYC’s Food Warehouse Workers Unionize,” NY Indymedia, 28 January). The union is fighting in court, picketing and mobilizing on the streets. But these are small companies, located in an isolated warehouse district deep in the industrial backwaters of Brooklyn and Queens. To win will require bringing the power of New York’s organized workers movement to bear.

The struggle of the Brooklyn immigrant workers is part of a class struggle and it requires a class-struggle political program to win. Since the employers are Chinese (Yu Q Wang at Amersino, Denis Ho at Handy Fat, Lester Wen at Sunrise Plus) and a few Chinese workers are scabbing, the union and largely Latino workers must underline that they are fighting in defense of all the workers, whatever their ethnicity. (Several Chinese immigrant workers were among those fired.)

IG contingent in February 19 march to defend immigrant workers fighting for their rights in Brooklyn. (Internationalist photo)

Although undertaking legal action against the bosses’ union-busting actions can be a correct tactic, it is necessary to make clear that there is no justice for the workers in the capitalist courts. And the police are the armed fist of the ruling class, who gunned down Sean Bell with 50 shots and have been trying for a quarter century to execute former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal, the powerful “voice of the voiceless.” Union conditions will not be won by relying on rigged NLRB “elections” but by exercising the workers’ collective strength.

This requires a sharp break from the capitalist parties, both Republicans and Democrats and their satellites. In New York City, the stench of the Democratic Party is so great that a “Working Families Party” was set up by pro-capitalist union bureaucrats so that working-class and minority voters could elect Democratic candidates while holding their noses. To defend immigrant workers it is necessary to build class-struggle oppositions against the bourgeois labor fakers who shackle the unions to the class enemy. What’s urgently needed is a struggle to cohere the nucleus of a revolutionary workers party that would wage a class war against bosses’ war on working people and the oppressed, from Brooklyn to Baghdad.

At the January 15 march in defense of the immigrant workers in Brooklyn, a spokesman for the Internationalist Group emphasized the need to broaden the struggle:

I bring you greetings and solidarity from the Internationalist Group, part of the League for the Fourth International. The importance of the struggle by the fired and locked-out immigrant workers in Brooklyn cannot be overstated. Your fight is the fight of immigrant workers all over the country.

Last month [December 2006], the migra immigration cops staged factory raids at Midwest packinghouses, arresting more than 1,200 workers, most of whom will be or already have been deported. But they can’t deport more than 12 million immigrant workers, the U.S. economy depends on them. We don’t give a damn about the papers the bosses and their government demand. We are all sisters and brothers in struggle. We are members of an international class, the working class, and we have a common enemy, the capitalists. We demand full citizenship rights for all immigrants.

I want to call your attention to a similar struggle going on in North Carolina, at the Smithfield Packing plant, the largest pork processing plant in the world. The company fired 50+ immigrant workers, supposedly over problems with their papers, in the middle of a unionization drive. But 1,000 workers walked out and forced management to back down. The workers stood together – black, Latino and white – even though the company had deliberately tried to set one group against another. That’s why they won. We have an article on this in our paper.

This struggle in the heart of Brooklyn is not isolated from what’s going on around the world. The same ruling class that is carrying out a bloody war and occupation of Iraq is also waging war on us here in the U.S. It’s necessary to defeat the imperialist war abroad and to defeat the bosses’ war on immigrants, on working people, on democratic rights “at home.”

It’s all the same war, and we can defeat it. In December 2005, the transit workers showed that they could bring New York City to a screeching halt. And they did. But the Democratic Party attorney general, Elliot Spitzer, who is now governor, slapped a million-dollar-a-day fine on the union and a thousand-dollar-a-day fine on the members, and the union tops buckled.

The Democrats just as much as the Republicans are a war party, they are a party of the bosses, they are no friends of the workers, and to stand up to them and their state apparatus, we need a revolutionary workers party.

I want to end by saying that the immigrant workers in Brooklyn must not stand alone. All of New York City labor should come to their aid. If workers at each small shop act alone, the employers can pick us off. But if we act together, we have the power to win! n