Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants!

Berkeley: Latino Unionists Fired in Desktop Raid

More than 400 people, including unionists and Occupy activists, joined a February 17 march in Berkeley in support of over 200 unionized Latino workers who were fired following a “desktop raid” computer check of social security numbers by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.). The majority of these workers, members of Glass, Molders, Pottery, Plastics and Allied Workers (GMP) Local 164B, had worked at the West Berkeley plant of Pacific Steel Casting for anywhere from 5 to 20 years. With the cloud of possible deportation hanging over their heads, these workers are barred from applying for other jobs and collecting unemployment benefits, while their health insurance benefits have been cut off.

Jesus Navarro, who had worked at Pacific Steel for 14 years, had been at the top of the list for a kidney transplant at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) medical center when he was fired. But he found himself denied this lifesaving operation, even though a donor was available and he had kept his health insurance by paying $1,100 a month. UCSF argued that it wouldn’t foot the bill if this “illegal” immigrant was denied government assistance for post-surgery care or lost his health insurance. This literal death sentence was only reversed in the face of a massive outcry, including a protest petition signed by 140,000 people.

In a statement to the Berkeley protest, the Pacific Steel bosses hypocritically declared their support for “a peaceful expression of frustration with the policies and actions of the federal government.” They went on to “strenuously object to criticism that the company was in any way complicit” in the firings. The workers say otherwise. Speaking at the rally, one of the fired workers, Ana Castaño, told protesters that the company began hiring new workers early last year amid contract negotiations with the union. The I.C.E. audit of the social security numbers of the workforce, which was aimed at driving out undocumented workers, began in February 2011. A month later, the union went on strike for three days over health care benefits and wages, forcing Pacific Steel to acquiesce to most of their demands. But in October, the company began firing workers—most of them active participants in the strike—in groups of 20 at a time.

Despite the evident complicity of Pacific Steel in getting rid of these workers, Ignacio De La Fuente, the International Vice-President of their union, declared that “the company had no choice” in the firings, arguing that the Obama administration was ramping up such raids because “it’s a presidential election year.” More than 1.2 million people have been deported under the Obama administration, the highest number in more than 50 years. De La Fuente is himself a Democratic Party Oakland City Council member, and one notorious for his support to the racist Oakland cops who run amok in the ghettos and barrios. He has led the charge in City Council meetings for greater police repression of Occupy Oakland after earlier accusing them of engaging in “domestic terrorism,” even as some Occupy activists have taken up the cause of the Pacific Steel workers.

Not surprisingly, De La Fuente has not gone to bat for the immigrant members of his own union. Other than filing a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, the GMP leadership has barely lifted a finger in defense of the fired workers. At first, the union tops insultingly offered to provide them with “rice, beans and tortillas” (and even that was never fulfilled). Not one GMP official was present at the recent Berkeley protest or a December rally in defense of the workers.

De La Fuente is the literal embodiment of the labor bureaucracy’s subordination of the unions to the Democratic Party, which no less than the Republicans represents the interests of the capitalist class enemy. The 200 Latino immigrants thrown out of their jobs by Obama’s I.C.E. police are part of the growing army of working people whose lives have been destroyed by the labor misleaders’ alliance with the Democrats.

Hoping to win back disillusioned Latino voters, Obama is now promising to “ease the transition” to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and their families. But while the Republicans scream that this is a “backdoor amnesty,” the truth is that the Obama administration has outdone the Bush Republican regime not only in deportations but also in busting up immigrant families with U.S.-born children. Between 1998 and 2007, only 8 percent of those deported were parents of U.S. citizens; in the first half of 2011 they totaled 22 percent. The Democratic Party president has also vastly expanded Bush’s “Secure Communities” program, a federal dragnet whose purpose is to round up immigrants as suspected “criminals” for detention and possible deportation. Under this program, even Latinos who are U.S. citizens have been kept in jail for the most minor offenses, with many held for days before they are allowed to contact anyone. Immigration detention centers are a living hell, with widespread reports of abuse, beatings and rapes, leading many to sign deportation papers just to get out.

The Obama administration cynically packages the “desktop raids,” like that at Pacific Steel, as going after “unscrupulous employers.” But, as an article by David Bacon titled “Increasing Reliance on Guest Worker Programs” (cipamericas.org, 14 January) pointed out, the raids are often aimed at unions and their supporters:

“The DHS [Department of Homeland Security] workplace enforcement wave is focusing, not on low-wage employers, but on high wage and often unionized ones. There is a long history of anti-union animus among immigration authorities. Agents have set up roadblocks before union elections in California fields, conducted raids during meatpacking organizing drives in North Carolina and Iowa, audited janitorial employers and airline food plants prior to union contract negotiations, and helped companies terminate close to a thousand apple packers when they tried to join the Teamsters Union in Washington state.... Deportations, firings and guest worker programs all make labor cheaper and union organizing harder.”

The capitalist rulers are getting away with such attacks thanks to the treachery of the labor tops. A statement building for the February 17 Berkeley rally noted that these workers “feel abandoned by their union.” And they have been. Such betrayals only further open the door for the bosses to use undocumented immigrants as a club against the unions and to heighten the increasingly brutal exploitation of all of labor.

Defense of immigrants is of vital importance for the defense and revitalization of the unions. There will be no effective resistance to the immiseration of the working people without the unity in struggle of the multiracial labor movement and the black and Latino poor. Such unity was crucial to the successful 2008 union organizing of the massive Smithfield pork processing plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina, after a 15-year battle. What we need is a class-struggle fight against deportations and workplace raids and a drive to organize immigrant workers into the unions with full rights and protections. A fighting labor movement would inscribe on its banner the call for full citizenship rights for all immigrants!

Latino and other immigrant workers often bring militant traditions from their countries that can serve as a catalyst for class and other social struggles as well as providing a human bridge to workers internationally. Out of such struggles the basis can be laid for ousting the sellout labor misleaders and forging a new class-struggle leadership of the unions. Our aim as Marxists is to advance the solidarity and consciousness of the entire working class—black, white, Latino; native-born and foreign-born—in the struggle to build a workers party in opposition to all the parties of capitalist class rule. A revolutionary internationalist workers party is the necessary instrument to lead the working class in the fight for its own class rule.