US Left: Split, or Free at Last?

This article appeared in the July-August 1999 issue of The Socialist. I'm posting it here partly because it's no longer on line elsewhere, but also because the issues it deals with have been getting some play recently--as in this Salon piece. 

Many of the article's points are wrong or dated, but some aren't as off-base as they might appear at first. The WTO demonstrations hit Seattle just six months later, and many left-liberal activists did in fact break with the Democratic Party in 2000 to support Ralph Nader. The radicalization process was reversed in response to the September 11 attacks and the lunacy of the George W. Bush administration, but it started up again with the economic crisis in 2008 and the emergence of a new generation of activists. Since then we've seen the rise of the Dreamers, of Occupy, of Fight for 15 and Black Lives Matter, all movements that have shown little interest in the Democratic Party. And while the Sanders campaign is taking place within the party, its whole basis is defiance of the Democratic leadership's neoliberal orthodoxy.

I think my piece's biggest mistake was missing the importance of mass incarceration in the Clinton years. And the biggest irony is that in 1999 Bernie Sanders voted to back the Clintons' hawkishness; he seems to have improved a lot since then. --DW

The US Left: Split, or Free at Last?
By David Wilson

In just two months of bombing Yugoslavia Bill Clinton has done what Lyndon Johnson needed three years to do with Vietnam: he has split the majority of US activists from the Democrats in a way that is unlikely to allow any reconciliation in the near future.

It's hard to believe that just six months ago many activists were streaming to the polls to "hold their noses and vote for the Democrats." Now these same activists are forming picket lines outside the offices of the "Progressive Caucus" Congress members, who form the hard core of the war party.

On Apr. 26 some 30 former supporters sat in on the Burlington offices of Rep. Bernie Sanders, self-described "independent socialist" of Vermont, to protest his support for Clinton's war. Sanders' staff called the cops; 15 activists were arrested. Rep. Sam Farr (D-CA) has had to arrest even more activists--30 of his Santa Cruz constituents since May 13. In one protest, on May 22, the Coalition to Stop the Bombing of Yugoslavia protested as Farr spoke at a Democratic Central Committee Annual Awards dinner. The activists festooned the sidewalk with slogans and pictures, distributed paper "body parts" symbolizing people blown apart by NATO cluster bombs, played a tape of bombs falling in Belgrade, and serenaded Farr with a new song: "Sam Farr, weak in the cranium, bombs the Serbs with depleted uranium!" Police arrested five protesters, including a Free Radio Santa Cruz 96.3 FM reporter who was taping the action.

Getting the Monkey Off Our Backs

Many people have written sadly about the "split in the left." It is indeed a sad, even tragic thing to watch a few once-serious leftists--people with real character and intelligence--turning themselves into cogs in a war machine. But the real split is not in the left but within the ranks of left-liberals, who have finally been forced to decide which they are: left or liberal. And most have chosen the left.

There is in fact nothing tragic about this split, which finally frees activists from an alliance with the Democrats that did nothing but impede effective organizing.

Look at the actual record of the Clinton administration. Take the doctrine of "humanitarian intervention," a bit of war propaganda cooked up in the early 1990s by Establishment think tanks like the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.* Its first test was the Bush-Clinton invasion of Somalia in 1992-93. The avowed goal was to feed famine victims; the result was the massacre of hundreds of Somali civilians in the streets of Mogadishu.

Next came the comparatively bloodless 1994 invasion of Haiti, ostensibly to end the criminal rule of Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras and death-squad leader Emmanuel "Toto" Constant. Both turned out to be on the CIA payroll. Cedras now lives comfortably in Panama; Constant lives in Queens, with the Clinton administration shielding him from a Haitian extradition request. The third humanitarian intervention was the NATO's brief 1995 air war in Bosnia Herzegovina, which in effect gave the international community's seal of approval to Tudjman's ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Serbs from Croatia, legally recognized the fascist "Republika Srpska" in Bosnia, made Milosevic the "guarantor of peace" in the Balkans, and set the stage for the current war.

Understandably, the proponents of humanitarian intervention showed no interest in reviewing the records of their earlier adventures. Instead, they pushed ahead with the next intervention, recycling the rhetoric ("you can't just stand there and do nothing, we must stop the genocide, don't you care about the human tragedy?"). And now they've brought us, once more, a country bombed back to the Stone Age.

Organizing Against the Sweatshop President

Clinton's neoliberal economic agenda--NAFTA in 1993, "welfare reform" and "immigration reform" in 1996, plans to "save" Social Security, countless embargoes against developing nations, efforts to revive the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI)--will prove even more destructive in the long run than his military actions.

The president is reportedly concerned about how history will remember him. Many activists are starting to see his accomplishments in terms of how many welfare recipients are forced into slave labor programs, how many undocumented immigrants are working in sweatshops, how many production jobs have moved to low-wage havens in the "Third World." When Clinton took office in 1993, about 400,000 Mexicans worked in northern Mexico's vast maquiladora zone, making $50 or less a week assembling products sold mostly in the US for the benefit of US corporations; last January the number of maquiladora employees officially passed the one million mark. History will probably remember Clinton as the sweatshop president.

Throughout the world left and grassroots organizations have been working together over the last decade to build opposition to these neoliberal economic policies. Just since the Balkan war began, the Americas have been convulsed by strikes and militant protests against IMF austerity programs, against privatization, against union-busting. In Mexico and Argentina, university and high school students organized two of the largest student strikes of the last 30 years. The Argentine strike quickly won a rollback of education cutbacks; the Mexican strike is still continuing after more than a month, with broad support from other sectors.

There are a number of reasons for the failure of activists to build this sort of resistance in the US. The main reason, of course, is that the economic crisis has yet to strike here. Although Clinton's welfare, immigration and trade policies have been a significant drag on wages, so far the effect has been not so much to hurt the majority of workers as to keep them from participating in the boom. But the left's de facto alliance with the Democrats has had an important effect on organizing. How could activists organize effectively against the neoliberal economic program when they still called neoliberal legislators "our friends in Congress," when they were still rallying to defend Sweatshop Bill from "the vast rightwing conspiracy," when they were still supporting the US's ability to intervene everywhere and anywhere it chooses?

The War Room antics in Washington have helped us kick the Democratic Party habit. Just as in 1967 and 1968, activists at last have the scary but liberating ability to act on their own. We may not use our new freedom wisely--to a large extent we failed then--but at least we have it. Now let's get down to work on some long-overdue organizing.

May 29, 1999

* See the Endowment's 1992 report, Changing Our Ways: America in the New
World, pp 50-51.

Textile Workers Mobilize in Haiti for Minimum Wage Adjustment — Press Conference

By PLASIT, via Workers Struggle
April 19, 2016

Press Conference on April 14, 2016

Greetings to all our media friends, print as well as television, that come to provide coverage for the conference that PLASIT, which is Textile Plants Union Platform, to launch the mobilization for the minimum wage adjustment for the year 2015-2016. In PLASIT, we notice that 8 months following the beginning of the fiscal year, the Supreme Salary Council finally made recommendations to the government just as it did for the past 2 years. Thus, the Council has adopted a bad habit of not respecting what is stated in Article 4.1 in the Law of 2009 on the minimum wage.

In the Supreme Salary Council, it’s mainly delaying tactics and plots going on. Management and the two so-called union representatives in the Council are dragging their feet so that management may continue to steal several months of workers’ wages. So, management will have more leeway to continue to pay workers measly wages.[...]

Read full press release:
http://www.workersstruggle.org/textile-workers-mobilize-haiti-minimum-wage-adjustment/
Watch video (in Creole):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oka6qxkqSI

NYC, June 1: “The Global Minimum Wage Struggle,” at Left Forum

The Global Minimum Wage Struggle

Global capital’s “race to the bottom” in imposing ever-lower—even sub-survival—wages is generating resistance around the world. With a focus on the garment industry in Bangladesh and Haiti, the speakers will discuss the importance of working class internationalism. This includes not only building solidarity, but also coordination of struggles.

Panel at Left Forum

Noon - 1:50 p.m.

Sunday, June 1

Room 1.109

• David L. Wilson, Weekly News Update on the Americas
• Kiki Makandal, Batay Ouvriye Solidarity Network, One Struggle NY
• Stephanie McMillan, political cartonist, Proletarian Alternative, One Struggle FL

Recommended reading:
Stephanie McMillan: “A Garment Worker in Bangladesh Speaks Out”
Kiki Makandal: “Ten Years of UN Military Occupation of Haiti: Background and Current Effects”

Jan Makandal: “Wage Struggles: Reformist or Revolutionary?”

David L. Wilson: “Thinking Big: The Global Minimum Wage”

Thinking Big: The Global Minimum Wage

If the apparel industry can globalize production, the producers need to be able to globalize the minimum wage.

By David L. Wilson, Truthout
April 24, 2014

After years of neglect, the minimum wage has suddenly become a major national issue. President Obama has proposed an increase in the federal minimum to $10.10 an hour, fast food workers are agitating for $15, and candidates who back a higher wage floor, including an avowed socialist in Seattle, are winning local elections. In February, the retailer Gap Inc. announced that it was implementing a nationwide minimum wage for 65,000 of its own 90,000 employees (although only $9 an hour).

The minimum wage is an important issue in other countries as well, although we rarely hear about these cases. [...]

Read the full article:
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/23273-thinking-big-the-global-minimum-wage

Fight For 15 Confidential

How did the biggest-ever mobilization of fast-food workers come about, and what is its endgame?

By Arun Gupta, In These Times
November 11, 2013

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU)-backed campaign to organize fast-food workers nationwide is on a roll. It’s entering its second year in the public eye, having staged four one-day strikes, culminating in a 60-city walkout on August 29. It’s a bold move by one of the nation’s largest unions to organize an unorganized private-sector workforce numbering in the millions.[...]

Read the full article:
http://inthesetimes.com/article/15826/fight_for_15_confidential

Stand With Haitian Workers for a Living Wage!

On November 29th, after years of delay and wage theft, a minimum wage increase will be announced in
Haiti. Batay Ouvriye (Workers' Struggle), an autonomous workers' organization, is mobilizing around the country to demand an increase to 500 gourdes (approximately $11.50)--the minimum for a family to survive.

The current minimum wage is only 300 gourdes (85 cents/hour), and even that is not being paid by the factories. Most receive only 200 gourdes (57 cents/hour).

Batay Ouvriye is mobilizing around the country for workers to voice their demands, what they say they actually need for a minimum wage. This takes money to travel, print thousands of flyers, host trainings and protests.

The US-based organization One Struggle has set up an indiegogo campaign to raise $3,200 to help pay for the mobilization in Haiti. To learn more and to contribute, go to:
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/stand-with-haitian-workers-for-a-living-wage

For more information on the minimum wage situation, go to:
http://inthesetimes.org/working/entry/14391/7_per_day_haiti_anti-sweatshop_revival/
http://inthesetimes.com/uprising/entry/14685/surveillance_beatings_firings_how_apparel_companies_suppress_the_minimum_wa/
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/16/world/americas/group-says-haitian-garment-workers-are-shortchanged-on-pay.html

Queens 'Carwasheros' Strike to Demand Owner Recognize Union

By Stephanie West, Labor Press
October 29, 2013

New York, NY – Workers at Off-Broadway Car Wash in Queens walked off the job today to demand that the owner recognize the union. The owner has been ducking the efforts of the National Labor Relations Board to set up an election despite a government subpoena being issued.

The “carwasheros” left their posts at 42-08 80th St. in Elmhurst, at 8:30 a.m., soon after clergy, elected officials, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), community supporters and advocates from New York Communities for Change and Make the Road New York held a press conference denouncing the owner for ignoring federal regulators. [...]

Read the full article:
http://laborpress.org/sectors/union-retail/2963-queens-carwasheros-strike-to-demand-owner-recognize-union

The Wobblies — another way forward for low-wage workers?

By Chris Longenecker, Waging Nonviolence
October 4, 2013

With next to no planning and little experience with labor law or direct action, all four workers on the late-night shift at the Insomnia Cookies store in Cambridge, Mass., walked off the job on August 18, declaring themselves on strike. Fed up with inadequate wages, long shifts without a break and no benefits, they timed the strike to begin with Insomnia’s midnight rush, causing maximum financial damage to the firm. As striking Insomnia worker Jonathan Peña put it, “We don’t have anything to lose.”

Insomnia Cookies has more than 30 branches nationwide. The chain specializes in delivering cookies and milk in areas with large college-student populations. Its busiest times are between midnight and 2:45 a.m., when students have returned from a night out and are willing to pay a premium for Insomnia’s treats to be delivered to their dorm rooms. [...]

Read the full article:
http://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/wobblies-another-way-forward-low-wage-workers/

Opportunities Present for “Labor Left” in Walmart and Fast Food Fights

By Ryan Hill, Solidarity
October 1, 2013

For the first time in many years, there are not one, but two exciting new campaigns that have great potential to put unions back on the map of public consciousness. The efforts to organize workers at Walmart as well as workers at fast food restaurants and other big box stores in cities across the US have caught the attention of millions of people who previously had little to no connection to organized labor.

In this article, I offer some thoughts on what makes these campaigns so exciting, followed by a sober assessment of the challenges that they face. I’ll close with four recommendations for radicals looking to get involved in supporting these efforts, as I believe they should.[...]

Read the full article:
http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/4006

Low-wage workers, top-down unions

As large unions orchestrate dramatic actions around the plight of low-wage workers, it remains an open question what control the workers themselves will have.

By Peter Rugh, Waging Nonviolence
September 30, 2013

August 29 was a typically cool, wet summer day in downtown Seattle. “We support you!” cried the crowd of 30 or so gathered outside Specialty’s Café, their voices reverberating off the glass facades of adjacent downtown buildings. To remain open, the restaurant had been forced to call in extra staff. Six of its workers had joined the national fast-food workers’ strike that day to demand $15 per hour and a union.

The crowd in front of Specialty’s was distinctly of the type able to attend an anti-corporate demonstration in the middle of a workday — young and mostly white, trying to act as allies. Their chants were not those of workers with a grievance so much as those of outsiders seeking to connect with Speciality’s labor force inside. [...]

Read the full article:
http://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/low-wage-workers-top-unions/

Did War Talk Drown Out Anti-Sweatshop Activism at NY Fashion Week?

by David L. Wilson, Grassroots Solidarity
September 16, 2013

Fashion models and a Bangladeshi labor organizer joined some two dozen local activists outside a New York Fashion Week show on Sept. 6 for a press conference highlighting the use of sweatshop labor by Nautica and the VF Corporation, which owns Nautica and 29 other garment companies.

Photo: Josh Koenig

Standing on the sidewalk in front of Lincoln Center's main plaza, Kalpona Akter, the executive director of the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity (BCWS), described her conversations with a woman who lost a limb last April in the collapse of Rana Plaza, a commercial building in the Dhaka area where more than 5,000 garment workers were employed in several different factories. According to Bangladesh's government, 1,132 workers are known dead, with many still missing; some 2,000 of the survivors were injured.

“Who is responsible for this?” Akter asked the protesters. “Definitely the retailers like VF,” she said, answering herself.

Corporate responsibility was the focus of the press conference, which included Sara Ziff, a model and activist who modeled in a Nautica advertising campaign ten years ago. The organizers—the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF) and United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS)—are pushing U.S. apparel manufacturers and retailers to sign the Accord on Fire and Building Safety, an agreement that would commit the companies to improving conditions in the Bangladeshi factories where many of their products are assembled.

So far 86 companies, largely European, have signed on, but major U.S. retailers like VF and Walmart have refused, insisting that their own monitoring system will be adequate.

From Dhaka to Greenwich Village

U.S. anti-sweatshop activists are hoping that the Rana Plaza disaster will arouse the public here to demand safety conditions for overseas garment workers in the same way that the 146 deaths in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York built up the public pressure that resulted in a number of U.S. workplace safety laws. USAS’s Caitlin MacLaren noted the parallel at the press conference; the Greenwich Village building where the fire broke out is still standing today and is part of the campus at New York University, MacLaren’s school.

“This year,” she warned the retailers, “students across the country will be saying: ‘You are going to sign the accord.’”

But even with Sara Ziff and four other models, the press conference faced a lot of competition on the sidewalk outside Fashion Week. Vendors were hawking a “fashion model diet,” young women in bright red were rollerskating to promote some other product, and several nearly naked activists painted with green scales were promoting a campaign by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) to protect endangered reptiles. Media coverage of the anti-sweatshop event was mostly limited to a dispatch by Agence France Presse and an entry in the Fashionista blog.

But the main problem wasn’t the other actions at Fashion Week: it was simply the fact that the news cycle had moved on. On the day of the press conference the headlines were dominated by the threat of a U.S. air strike on Syria, where the White House said 1,429 civilians were killed on Aug. 21 in a gas attack by government forces. For most people in the United States, the deaths in Syria had displaced any memory of the comparable number of deaths in the Bangladeshi factories that produce the clothes sold here.

Circumventing the News Cycle

Not everyone has forgotten Rana Plaza, of course. Akter and ILRF and USAS activists held two brief protests after the press conference, one outside Lincoln Center--closely watched by the New York police--and another at a Children’s Place outlet some 15 blocks up Broadway; the corporation had some of its clothes made at a Rana Plaza factory, but so far it hasn’t paid any compensation for the victims. “I’m going to put this on my Facebook page,” a well-dressed older woman said as she stopped to photograph the Children’s Place protest. ILRF director of organizing Liana Foxvog started to explain the labor situation in Bangladesh, but the woman cut her off. “I know,” she said. “It’s disgusting.”

Other passersby would pause to look at the protest. Most seemed to have forgotten about the April disaster—one of the worst industrial accidents in history—or maybe had never heard of it, although they were sympathetic when they learned the protest’s purpose.

“I didn't think about the garment workers who made the clothes I was wearing,” Ziff had remarked at the press conference when talking about her time modeling for Nautica. A visit to Bangladesh in the summer of 2012 was “eye-opening,” she said, and led her to work in the anti-sweatshop campaign.

Activists are now confronting the problem of how to open more eyes, and how to mobilize public support without having to rely on the media. Akter, for example, was stopping in New York on her way to the AFL-CIO’s Sept. 8-11 convention in Los Angeles. She expected to work with union leaders on strategies for the campaign to get U.S. companies to sign the fire and building safety accord.

At the press conference youth organizer Rishi Singh pointed out the importance of building direct links between low-wage workers here and in the Global South. Singh, who works with the Queens-based South Asian organization DRUM (Desis Rising Up and Moving), described the situation of South Asian immigrant workers in New York. “These are the conditions we face here,” he said, “but we just need to look around” to see how much worse it is in places like Bangladesh. There’s a real potential for direct worker solidarity there, Singh indicated, adding: “The struggle of one is the struggle of all.”

David L. Wilson is co-author, with Jane Guskin, of The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers, Monthly Review Press, July 2007. He also co-edits Weekly News Update on the Americas, a summary of news from Latin America and the Caribbean.

Walmart Workers Flash Mobm Raleigh, NC

September 5th, 2013, Raleigh, NC - As Walmart workers petition managers to reinstate employees who have been unfairly treated, a flash mob breaks out.

Standoff in the strawberry fields

By David Bacon, AlJazeera America
August 19, 2013

In July, Washington berry pickers went on strike. A week after their return, farm owners brought in H2A guest workers

BURLINGTON, Wash. — Over a tense two-week period in July, at the peak of the summer harvest season, almost 250 workers at the $6.1 million Sakuma Brothers strawberry and blueberry farm — one of the largest in Washington state — went on strike twice. Workers fought with the farm’s owners over wages, overtime pay, alleged racist treatment and conditions in their housing camp. They won concessions but lost on most of their monetary demands. With few resources left, they returned to the fields.

Sakuma Brothers Farms could afford to play hardball because it had an ace in the hole: It had been certified to bring 160 new workers from Mexico under the restrictive H2A guest-worker program. And the lower wages mandated for guest workers under U.S. immigration law proved to be the limit not just for the H2A workers but also for all the other pickers at the company. [...]

Read the full article:
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/8/19/stand-off-in-thestrawberryfields.html

A Grocery Boycott Resumes in Brooklyn

by David L. Wilson, Grassroots Solidarity

August 14, 2013

[This article is also available at: http://www.indypendent.org/2013/08/26/grocery-boycott-resumes-brooklyn]

“Welcome back,” community organizer Lucas Sánchez called out to some 35 demonstrators in front of a small supermarket in Brooklyn’s Kensington neighborhood the afternoon of August 10. “It’s as if we never left,” he added with a smile.

The Saturday rally, announced just two days before, marked the resumption of a consumer boycott at the Golden Farm grocery store in support of Latino produce workers currently in negotiations with the shop’s owner, Sonny Kim. Kensington residents and local labor rights activists started the boycott one year earlier, in August 2012, but suspended it last March at the urging of the workers’ union, Local 338 RWDSU/UFCW, in the hope that this would advance the contract talks.

“We lifted the boycott so Mr. Kim could negotiate in good faith,” Sánchez, who works for the advocacy organization New York Communities for Change (NYCC), told the group of supporters, which included the area’s City Council member, Brad Lander, and a Brooklyn state senator, Eric Adams. But after five months management is still refusing to budge on demands for higher pay, job security, and paid sick days, holidays and vacations, according to the union.

This time the consumer action will continue until the workers have won their contract, Occupy Kensington member Eleanor Rodgers announced as the crowd applauded. “Sonny Kim needs to understand that last time, when we suspended the boycott,” she said, “that was his last chance.”

The Golden Farm struggle may just involve a handful of workers in an out-of-the-way Brooklyn neighborhood, but speaker after speaker stressed that it was part of a large and growing movement of low-wage workers. “Forty-four grocery stores are organizing in Brooklyn,” Sánchez said. “Hundreds of car wash workers are organizing around the city, and thousands of fast food workers are organizing around the country. People are saying it’s time to rise up.”

For decades U.S. labor unions tended to view these workers as too difficult to organize: most are employed in small, isolated shops, and many are vulnerable to employer threats because of problems with their immigration status. Council member Lander commended the courage and dedication of the Golden Farm workers, immigrants who started organizing themselves in December 2010. Since then they have won a raise—to minimum wage—and a back-pay settlement; in September 2012 their efforts resulted in the National Labor Relations Board’s certification of Local 338 as their union.

The struggle gained special emotional resonance when 34-year-old Golden Farm worker and union supporter Félix Trinidad died of stomach cancer in July 2012; unable to get paid sick leave, he had continued to work 12-hour shifts while undergoing chemotherapy.

But Senator Adams emphasized that despite their admirable courage, low-wage workers need the sort of support the Golden Farm workers have been getting in Kensington.

Occupy Kensington’s Rodgers, who has lived in the neighborhood for six years, estimates that the earlier seven-month boycott cut Sonny Kim’s business by about 30%. Was she optimistic about prospects for restarting the campaign? “I’m not just optimistic, I’m absolutely certain we can do it,” she said. But she was less certain that they would win. For one thing, Rodgers suspects that Kim has been stalling as the September 20 anniversary of the union’s certification approaches. After that management can push for a decertification vote.

Kensington residents are mostly working-class or lower-middle-class. Many are immigrants, with no one ethnic or social group predominating: the awning at Golden Farm advertises “Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Turkish, Israeli, kosher, organic, gourmet food.” There’s plenty of sympathy for the Latino workers, who live in the community. But the supermarket’s low prices, variety of food types, and convenient location near the subway on Church Avenue make it attractive to consumers. As in many New York grocery stores, the cashiers, the workers that shoppers interact with most, are not Latino and are less likely to support the union.

Rodgers, herself an immigrant from Northern Ireland, says Kim has tried to play on potential divisions, depicting the boycott as the work of “outsiders.” At the rally she called for neighborhood people to staff the picket lines on weekend afternoons and in the evenings on weekdays. “We aren’t NYCC, we aren’t the union,” she insisted. “We live here.”

For all the difficulties they face, labor rights supporters were in good spirits as they started the first picket line of the renewed boycott. Drivers on Church Avenue regularly honked in support when they saw the picketers’ signs.

Laura Castro, a schoolteacher and one of the Kensington residents on the line, admitted that the neighborhood was polarized over the boycott but said she was hopeful that most people would back the workers. She’d observed a change in the political climate over the last few years, she explained. “It’s surprising how much feeling there is out in the community about depressed wages, about unions being dismantled. The big media aren’t telling us about this.”

David L. Wilson is co-author, with Jane Guskin, of The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers, Monthly Review Press, July 2007. He also co-edits Weekly News Update on the Americas, a summary of news from Latin America and the Caribbean.

Viva la Huelga! The Agricultural Strike at Sakuma Brothers Farms and the Tradition of Oaxacan Resistance

By Brendan Maslauskas Dunn, MRzine
July 25, 2013

Strike Heats Up as Over 200 Immigrant Workers Are Threatened with Mass Firing

July 24, 2013

As workers walked past fields of strawberries and blueberries into a negotiation meeting this morning with Sakuma Brothers Farms, Inc. management, they were told to accept management's terms or lose their jobs. This threat comes amidst a heated strike of over 200 immigrant farm workers at the Burlington, WA farm which is just north of Seattle. It is the second strike the workers initiated in the last two weeks over a list of demands over wages, dignity, and respect.

The strike started after the firing of farm worker Federico Lopez on July 10th. Lopez and his coworkers believed he was targeted for bringing up grievances with his superiors. Some of the workers were listening to an interview of Rosalinda Guillen on a Spanish-language radio show on a local radio station. They decided that they wanted her to assist them with their struggle at Sakuma Brothers Farms. [...]

Read the full article:
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2013/dunn250713.html

Hot and Crusty film featured in the New York Times

By Laura Gottesdiener, Waging Nonviolence
July 16, 2013

As the debate over immigration reform continues in Washington, the victory of one group of mostly unauthorized workers is now in the national spotlight — demonstrating a direct-action path that unauthorized workers across the country could adopt to win rights both at work and in broader society.

Robin Blotnick and Rachel Lears’ film “The Hand that Feeds” — featured today in the New York Times Op-Docs series — chronicles the year-long struggle of Mahoma López and his co-workers at Hot and Crusty, a bakery on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. [...]

Read the full article:
http://wagingnonviolence.org/2013/07/hot-and-crusty-struggle-in-national-spotlight/

Watch the NY Times documentary:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/16/opinion/occupy-bakery.html

Visit the documentary's website:
http://thehandthatfeedsfilm.com/news

An Interview with an Organizer for Batay Ouvriye (Workers Struggle)

By One Struggle
May 1, 2013

[Batay Ouvriye is the main labor group working in Haiti's assembly sector. They organized the assembly workers union in the northeastern city of Ouanaminthe, the union in the sector with a contract.]

One Struggle: Can you give me a brief description of what Batay Ouvriye* is and a little bit of the history of it?

Batay Ouvriye: Batay Ouvriye is part of a whole current that had roots in Europe and the United States where many of the resistance, many of the leftist people, or many of the progressive militants were exiled from the country. So we organized a kind of line against Duvalier1 which was not the classical front. It was a class line against Duvalier.

They called us sectarian much of the time, but we weren’t sectarian, it’s a line. And we participated with many of those people. But we didn’t enter an organizational front, you see? But if they had a demonstration we were always there.\\

Read the full article:
http://onestruggle.net/2013/05/01/interview-with-batay-ouvriye/

Wealth and Deprivation: Ready-made Garments Industry in Bangladesh

By Anu Muhammad, One Struggle
May 1, 2013

Anu Muhammad is with the Department of Economics, Jahangirnagar University, Dhaka, Bangladesh. This is a brief excerpt of his article, reprinted with permission. For the full text please see meghbarta.info

Bangladesh’s ready-made garments industry has taken the low road to competitive advantage. Local capitalists, the big retailers and western governments are reaping the benefits of the super-exploitation and repression of the (mostly women) workers. Inevitably, the resistance of the victims is taking shape. The annual turnover of the readymade garments (RMG) industry in Bangladesh is now almost $9 billion; it employs around 3.5 million workers, more than 80% of them women. RMG account for nearly 80% of the country’s export earnings and are the second largest source of the nation’s foreign currency after remittances.

According to official estimates, nearly 4,500 garment factories are now in operation in the country, some of these factories work as subcontractors of the bigger ones. Over 70% of these factories are located in and around Dhaka, the capital city. The rapid expansion of this export-oriented industry has given the industrial sector a new landscape. The RMG industry has also created a huge labour force, mostly women, with lower wages and severe regimentation. Many workers were tortured and killed for their attempts to organise struggles for rights and decent levels of living. [...]

Read the full article:
http://onestruggle.net/2013/05/01/wealth-deprivation-ready-made-garments-bangladesh/

A Hard Day’s Labor for $4.76: The Offshore Assembly Industry in Haiti

By Beverly Bell and Alexis Erkert, Other Worlds
April 25, 2013

As we mourn the deaths of nearly 200 people in yesterday’s garment factory collapse outside of Dhaka, Bangladesh, we publish this article about the very issue of garment labor exploitation on the other side of the world. Economist Paul Collier's 2009 report "Haiti: From Natural Catastrophe to Economic Security" recommends for Haiti the same model that in Bangladesh has resulted in a race towards lower pay, disastrous working conditions, and the deaths of more than 800 garment workers since 2006. This article begins to explore the implications of sweatshop labor as a model for development.

“Haiti offers a marvelous opportunity for American investment. The run-of-the-mill Haitian is handy, easily directed, and gives a hard day’s labor for 20 cents, while in Panama the same day’s work costs $3,” wrote Financial America in 1926.[i] That may be the most honest portrayal of the offshore industry in Haiti to date. Today, the US, the UN, multilateral lending institutions, corporate investors, and others are more creative in their characterizations. They spin Haiti’s high-profit labor as being in the interest of the laborer, and as a major vehicle for what they call “development.”

In the export assembly sector, the minimum wage is 200 gourdes, or US$4.76, a day. According to the Associated Press, the minimum wage in February 2010 was “approximately the same as the minimum wage in 1984 and worth less than half its previous purchasing power.” Three years later, the wage has only been raised by 75 gourdes (US$1.79). [...]

Read the full article:
http://www.otherworldsarepossible.org/another-haiti-possible/hard-day-s-labor-476-offshore-assembly-industry-haiti

Labor, Worker Rights Activists Condemn Attacks on Workers' Rights in Mexico

Mexican Labor News &Analysis
March 2013.

Unions and worker rights supporters took action around the world as part of a week of action running from February 18 to 24, 2013. The Days of Action in solidarity with the independent trade unions in Mexico focused on the need to roll back regressive labor law changes that were approved in the fall of 2012, to support workers at key conflicts, and to end the persecution, arrests and criminalization of struggles of democratic trade unions and the workers they represent.

Another key demand was that the Mexican government take action in accordance with the International Labor Organization recommendations to address the pervasive protection contract system that is used by employers, company-friendly “unions,” and the government to avoid representation by democratic unions and to deny workers their basic rights.

In the United States where comprehensive immigration reform is under consideration, unions also called on the Mexican government to reaffirm its commitment to protect the rights of immigrant workers in the United States while also ensuring that the rights of all workers are also rigorously protected and enforced in Mexico. [...]

Read the full article:
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/mlna_articles.php?id=212#1568