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| Workers rally outside of Paleteria La Michoacana factory in solidarity with fired workers. |
The recent firing of workers in Modesto is telling, because it shows
that bosses regardless of color, are scared of the potential of workers organizing
on their job sites. It also shows that when faced with workers talking and
organizing with each other on the shop floor, their immediate reaction is the
firing and removal of ‘problem’ workers. In this way, rebels and militants are
removed from the work site, while others are sent a message of what will happen
to them if they speak out and organize among each other. Despite these
threats, the recent taking up of support of the fired Michocana workers by
other people and different Teamster locals is exciting, because it represents a real potential of solidarity
and cross-racial class struggle. How deep
this solidarity will be, and if it will express itself in action is up to the
workers themselves who will have to take up this project outside of the union apparatus which seeks to channel class struggle out of the streets and the job site and into the halls of power and the court room.
But
while both white and brown workers face attacks by bosses on their wages,
health-care, and working conditions, working-class Latinos and Mexicano workers
face a much deeper onslaught of hyper-exploitation that many white workers
simply do not. Bosses, whether Mexican-Americans like Ignacio Gutierrez, or the
plethora of white business-owners who reap massive rewards off of the backs of
migrant workers, depend on the constant threat of deportation backed by the
state to keep workers from organizing and taking action. Fear and the breaking
up of families is their main weapon; one that they aim at every worker who
lives precariously and ‘illegally’ without papers while in the US.
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| Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez |
Thus,
many workers throughout the Central Valley and the United States live under
threat of reporting working conditions, racist attacks, stolen wages and
non-payment of hours, as well as sub-human living conditions which many are
forced to live in. Membership to unions, which many white workers take for
granted, is often completely unheard of in industries dominated by undocumented
migrant workers. Those that speak up or attempt to legally address their
situation, much less organize on the job against these attacks, are quickly
fired and in some cases, turned into ICE by their employers or landlords. These
attacks at work are also coupled with the thousands of deaths people face while
crossing the Mexican-American border looking for work, the ever growing amount
of immigrant detention facilities across the US to house those captured in
raids, and the very real threat of death while on the job (such as the recent
passing of Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez, 17, near Stockton, who died while
picking grapes). While this means living in Apartheid like conditions while in
the US, it also means massive profits for owners, regardless of color, which
employ migrant workers.
At
the same time, an ever increasing social war is being waged on American streets
aimed at poor and working class communities largely of color; communities and
neighborhoods which could give power and support to a very real expressions of class
struggle in the US (and which have,
as in the May Day walkouts in 2006, the LA Rebellion in 1992, and the Oscar Grant riots in Oakland in 2009 and 2010). Surveillance, increasing
incarceration rates, rampant police brutality and shootings, gang injunctions,
and drone operations all act to aid in a counter-insurgency campaign aimed at
stalling any sort of grassroots potential insurgency against capital. This
repression shows the state to be what it is, a repressive set of apparatuses
designed at keeping the inequalities and divisions in society firmly in place.
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| Teamsters clash with police during 1934 strike in Minneapolis. |
Recently,
many state governments have attempted to pass legislation aimed at curtailingthe ability of labor unions to strike, engage in collective bargaining, and
fight pay and benefit cuts. At the same time, the union bureaucracies which
base much of their activity in supporting the Democratic Party have worked to
capitulate to these attacks (being that they don’t threaten the functioning of
the union as a business) as well as their pushing of many of the austerity
measures put forward by Democratic politicians onto their constituents. If a
grassroots rank-and-file movement is to grow, not only against austerity, wage
cuts, and threats to benefits, but also against capital itself, such a movement
much come from the workers themselves, self-organizing and taking action, not
from the unions which instead act as a police force against such expressions of
working-class power and organization.
Now, many white workers are
increasingly seeing that their “rights” are under
real threat. Many of the privileges granted to them by the ruling elites as a
way to create a “middle-class” which thought it had more in common with its
oppressors than those further on the bottom are been eaten away. More than
ever, white workers are in a position of being able to again take up a clear proletarian position: one that sees the subversive goal of struggles over wages
and against firings is to ultimately negate our position within class society
and launch a revolution against it. Such a struggle can only come from workers (or those who could only work to survive) of all colors and national origins realizing their common interests and common
enemies and starting to fight together. Such a project can begin here and now, in
Modesto, in the fight to re-instate the fired workers of the Paleteria La Michoacana plant.
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