Subscribe to Workers Vanguard

View archives

	Workers Vanguard No. 942	11 September 2009

L.A.: Anti-Union Onslaught at Overhill Farms

Labor: Fight Victimization of Immigrant Workers!

No Deportations! Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants!

As part of a recent blitz of measures to crack down on “illegal” immigration, the Obama administration has been pushing employers to fire workers whose Social Security numbers do not match government records. To force the issue, Obama expanded many of the anti-immigrant programs of the Bush White House, such as the E-Verify database and I-9 audits of employer records. Mass terminations of immigrant workers have followed the audits at one industrial plant after another, from 254 workers, mostly women, at food processor Overhill Farms in May to about 1,500 at clothing maker American Apparel in September, both in the Los Angeles area.

These “desktop raids” have ravaged immigrant families, as the Los Angeles Times (12 June) described in the case of Overhill Farms: “There were no frantic scenes of desperate workers fleeing la migra through the gritty streets of the industrial suburb southeast of downtown Los Angeles. For more than 200 Overhill workers, however, the effect was devastating: All lost steady jobs last month and now find themselves in a precarious employment market, without severance pay or medical insurance. It wasn’t a hot tip or an undercover informant that helped seal their fates, but a computer check of Social Security numbers.” The Overhill firings are a window into what the Democrats have in store for immigrant workers everywhere. On July 1, the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) announced that it was initiating audits of an additional 652 businesses nationwide. We demand: Reinstate the fired workers now with full back pay and benefits! Down with the I.C.E. raids!

Where the Bush regime reveled in raw terror as it unleashed I.C.E. agents on workplaces to round up and deport immigrant workers, the Obama administration puts a premium on “efficiency.” In a major speech on August 11, Homeland Security head Janet Napolitano bragged of arresting 181,000 immigrants and deporting 215,000 people so far this year, both numbers greater than for the same period two years ago under Bush. The Obama strategy is also better tailored to the profit needs of the companies involved. Workplace raids disrupt production for days at a time as the bosses scramble to replace detained workers, but the I-9 audits allow employers the opportunity to find lower-pay new hires in advance and are an open invitation to get rid of union activists and other “troublemakers.” At Overhill Farms, the company hired part-time replacements for its dismissed union workers, who were full-time, mostly high-seniority employees.

The fired workers, members of United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 770, have shown courage in the face of a vindictive employer. After the “no match” letters from the company were received, a protest was organized in front of the plant on May 1. The next day, the company stopped the lines, accusing four people of “terrorism” for supposedly tampering with production. The 254 workers who were to be fired on May 31 were sent home after the protest and never called back to work for their final 30 days at the company. When the protests outside the plant continued, the company responded by firing three more workers, including UFCW shop steward Marcelino Arteaga, on June 26.

The following week, Overhill Farms filed a lawsuit against Nativo Lopez, the head of Hermandad Mexicana Latinoamericana (HMLA), an immigrant rights organization helping to organize the protests, and six UFCW workers, among them Arteaga. It charges “an unlawful campaign aimed at coercing the company to violate federal law by rehiring former employees who have no legal right to work in the United States.” If the company gets its way, this will set a dangerous precedent, equating protest of the mass firing of immigrant workers with attempted extortion. This lawsuit is part and parcel of the anti-immigrant witchhunt, partaking of earlier attempts by the capitalist state to go after Lopez and the HMLA for assisting immigrant workers in gaining citizenship. It is an attack on the labor movement as a whole and must be defeated!

Labor Lieutenants of Capital

In response to the firings at Overhill Farms, the UFCW leaders have done next to nothing except file a few grievances. What’s needed is a concerted effort by the whole union, backed by all labor, to beat back company/government victimizations. The potential to fight and win was shown in the campaign for union recognition by the workers at Smithfield’s Tar Heel, North Carolina, pork processing plant. When the Smithfield bosses tried to fire 75 “no match” workers in November 2006, a two-day walkout that included black and white workers as well as Latinos forced the company to rehire everyone. However, by the time workers won their union in late 2008, I.C.E. workplace raids had driven out a significant number of immigrant workers. The battle at Smithfield underlines the need for a mass, militant union organizing drive throughout the country and particularly in the open shop South.

It will take the fighting unity of Latino, black and white workers against the bosses and their government to defeat the anti-immigrant, anti-union attacks. But this necessity runs straight up against the pro-capitalist program of the labor bureaucracy, which sees allies in bourgeois politicians, especially the Democrats, the government and the courts. Embracing national chauvinism, the union tops sacrifice the membership on the altar of maintaining the competitive edge and profitability of American capitalism.

As a domestic reflection of this chauvinism, these labor traitors accept the government’s campaign against undocumented immigrants, seeking only to tinker with its methods of repression. The “unified framework” put forward by the AFL-CIO and Change to Win union federations in April is indicative. Its starting point is that immigration must be controlled in order to “build a stronger American economy.” To regulate immigration the union tops urge an “independent commission that can assess labor market needs on an ongoing basis,” leaving open the possibility of their own participation on such a commission as labor police for the capitalist state. The union bureaucrats dream of working together with the Obama White House to implement an “effective worker authorization mechanism” and “improve” the existing guest worker programs, which are the modern equivalent of indentured servitude, tying a worker’s right to stay in the country directly to an individual employer.

As the last two decades of labor battles in L.A. in particular have demonstrated, immigrant workers form a key and vibrant component of the U.S. working class. Enlisting immigrant workers, many of whom have a history of militant struggle, in the front ranks of the labor movement is an urgent task both to fight the exploitation of the most vulnerable layers of the population and to reverse the decades-long decline of the trade unions. Labor must use its power to fight deportations and organize immigrant workers, demanding full citizenship rights for everyone who makes it into this country. If the unions are to be organizations of struggle by the working class, there must be a political fight against the labor bureaucrats who subordinate the class interests of the proletariat to those of the class enemy and their political parties.

Class Struggle vs. Liberal Pressure Politics

At a protest against the mass terminations of immigrant workers in downtown L.A. on August 1, fired Overhill Farms workers expressed to Workers Vanguard salesmen their anger at the inaction of the union. Spurned by Local 770, workers turned to the HMLA and the Hermandad General de Trabajadores Union International (HGTUI), a “union” being formed by Nativo Lopez. According to a 20 June article on Overhill in the Web publication truthout by journalist David Bacon, “That new organization [HGTUI], which will organize workers on a community basis, opposes employer sanctions and advocates helping workers to resist them…. What attracts the fired workers to the Hermandad is that it goes beyond the legal machinery of the grievance procedure, and organizes an active resistance.”

Despite Lopez’s activism, all this Obama supporter has to offer is the same pressure politics practiced by the UFCW and other union tops to channel working-class unrest into support for the Democrats. One example was the large immigrant rights demonstrations in 2006. On May Day, plants nationwide were idled when hundreds of thousands of overwhelmingly Latino immigrants took to the streets in cities across the country to protest anti-immigrant repression. At the same time, the main slogan of these protests, organized by Latino groups, the Catholic church, Democratic politicians and their allies in the trade-union bureaucracy, was “Today we march, tomorrow we vote.”

Since then the vote has taken place and Obama was elected—and the situation for immigrants in this country is more precarious than it was under Bush. Amid the capitalist economic meltdown, jobs for immigrant workers, from construction to the sweatshops of the L.A. area, have increasingly dried up. At the same time, government repression is intensifying. In addition to aggressively pursuing the I-9 audits, the Obama administration has recently doubled the number of border agents, expanded the 287(g) program, which deputizes local and state law enforcement agencies to carry out anti-immigrant sweeps, and announced plans to revamp the immigrant detention system to accelerate the processing and deportation of undocumented immigrants. All the while, I.C.E. officials have promised to continue to detain workers in workplace raids.

As a signatory to a “Call for Immediate Action” on Labor Day and October 12, the HGTUI appeals to everyone from unions and churches to state and federal legislators to “honest employers that depend on immigrant labor” to join the “movement” for “fair and humane immigration reform.” One widely touted “honest employer” is American Apparel CEO Dov Charney. The “progressive” gloss provided by his “Legalize L.A.” ads advocating immigration reform makes it all the easier for Charney to exploit his workers and keep the union out. Despite the fact that he fired close to one-third of his manufacturing workforce, mirroring the recent drop in American Apparel’s earnings, he has been welcomed, not targeted, at the protests. In 2003, this “honest employer” engaged in the tactics of fear and intimidation to defeat a UNITE garment workers organizing drive. The interests of labor and capital are diametrically opposed. The class collaboration promoted by the “Call for Immediate Action” is a recipe for defeat.

The main form of “active resistance” now pursued by Lopez is to call for a national consumer boycott against Overhill Farms and its products. This losing strategy seeks to pressure the bosses by building a public outcry based on moral indignation at the company’s anti-labor practices. While sometimes a useful auxiliary tactic to a strike, a consumer boycott cannot substitute for getting Overhill Farms where it hurts: by shutting down production and stopping profits. Local 770 is the largest in the UFCW and includes veterans of the hard-fought UFCW supermarket workers strike of 2003-04, during which whites, blacks, Latinos and Asians joined together on the picket lines. That strike was knifed and defeated by the labor tops, who prevented it from being extended nationally out of deference to the bosses.

The problem is not the union but its leadership. It is the class-collaborationist program of the union bureaucracy that impedes militant struggle to defend immigrants and the unions. The way forward is to oust the bureaucrats and replace them with a class-struggle leadership that will mobilize workers independently of and in opposition to the capitalist rulers and their political agents.

John Grant, director of Packinghouse, Manufacturing and Food Processing Division for Local 770, told WV that workers at the UFCW-organized Farmer John meatpacking plant in Vernon, the industrial city in L.A. County where Overhill Farms is located, have also received “no match” letters. A group of workers from Overhill Farms, American Apparel and Farmer John distributed an “Open Letter” at rallies on July 29 and August 1 in downtown L.A. that said: “This is certainly not the change we voted for, and not the immigration reform promised by President Barack Obama.” In fact, it was. During his campaign, Obama pledged to “remove incentives to enter the country illegally by cracking down on employers who hire undocumented immigrants”—i.e., the desktop raids.

Advancing the class struggle in this country goes hand in hand with the fight to break workers and minorities from illusions in Obama and the Democratic Party and to forge a multiracial revolutionary workers party. Only through a socialist revolution that smashes the capitalist state and erects in its place a workers state based on the expropriation of industry and the banks can there be an end to the destructive boom-bust cycle of capitalism and all manner of racial, sexual and national discrimination. This ABC of Marxism is rejected by the various phony socialists who join the labor bureaucrats in fostering illusions in the Democratic Party.

Among the organizations that sponsored the rallies is the liberal Southern California Immigration Coalition (SCIC), which includes the reformist International Socialist Organization (ISO) and Freedom Socialist Party. In March, SCIC held a demonstration in L.A. under the slogans “Ayer Votamos y Hoy Marchamos [Yesterday We Voted and Today We March]! Full legalization NOW! Stop the I.C.E. Raids! YES WE CAN!” The self-proclaimed socialists of the ISO are past masters of the political shell game that is a pillar of capitalist rule in America—the notion that the Democratic Party is the “friend” of labor, blacks and immigrants. In a 25 August article posted on socialistworker.org, the ISO hails Obama’s campaign promises “to end the scapegoating of immigrants” and concludes by advising the imperialist Commander-in-Chief: “The idea of accepting concessions—in this case, more arrests, detentions and deportations for immigrant workers—before Congress even considers a carrot to match the stick gives away far too [sic] ground.”

The agenda of the reformist ISO is to prettify the ugly face of U.S. imperialist capitalism. We understand that there cannot be a just immigration policy under capitalism, an inherently unjust system rooted in the exploitation of the many by the few. As we explained in the International Communist League Declaration of Principles (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 54, Spring 1998):

“Modern capitalism, i.e., imperialism, reaching into all areas of the planet, in the course of the class struggle and as economic need demands, brings into the proletariat at its bottom new sources of cheaper labor, principally immigrants from poorer and less-developed regions of the world—workers with few rights who are deemed more disposable in times of economic contraction. Thus capitalism in ongoing fashion creates different strata among the workers, while simultaneously amalgamating the workers of many different lands. Everywhere, the capitalists, abetted by aristocracy-of-labor opportunists, try to poison class consciousness and solidarity among the workers by fomenting religious, national and ethnic divisions. The struggle for the unity and integrity of the working class against chauvinism and racism is thus a vital task for the proletarian vanguard.”

Our program is for a series of workers revolutions that would lay the basis for an international planned, socialist economy. This is the only road to eliminating poverty, the main driving force for mass migrations throughout the world, and providing a life of abundance for all.