[Marxism] Wobblies organize Immigrant Workers in Brooklyn Warehouses

[Greg McDonald <sabocat59@xxxxxxx>]

The Brooklyn Rail
April 2007

Wobblies Organize Brooklyn Warehouses
by Caitlin Esch

In 1903, when Japanese and Mexican immigrant workers wanted to  
unionize in California, the American Federation of Labor denied them  
a union charter, refusing to work with non-whites. The Industrial  
Workers of the World, on the other hand, embraced workers of all  
colors, as long as they were a little “red.” At less than $4 an hour,  
some Mexican workers in Brooklyn today earn little more than they  
would have in 1903—and these workers are again turning to the IWW.

On March 10, in the sparsely inhabited industrial graveyard that  
straddles the borough divide between Brooklyn and Queens, 15 to 20  
people picketed outside EZ-Supply/Sunrise Plus, a food distribution  
warehouse, to protest labor abuses. EZ-Supply/Sunrise Plus employs  
about 25 workers and is the largest of five food distribution  
warehouses in the area where workers are trying to unionize. The  
others—Amersino, Giant Big Apple Beer, Top City and Handyfat—employ  
about 65 workers total.

IWW organizer and do-rag bestyled Billy Randel explains that the  
point of the small picket, far from the eyes of the public, is to  
remind the owner, one Mr. Lester Wen, that he is being watched.  
Randel elaborates, “This warehouse is really bad. It’s one of the  
worst. When we first came in here about a year ago, workers were  
working 60 to 70 hours for around $350 a week.”

José Vaquero, a Mexican laborer in his 50s, says he made even less  
than that at Handyfat, a nearby warehouse in Brooklyn. Vaquero was  
employed at the warehouse for 12 years before allegedly being fired  
for his involvement in the IWW. “I was making about $280 a week,  
working about 60 hours. And the work was physically exhausting.”

Bert Picard, an IWW organizer, said the firing of Vaquero was  
“gratuitously evil.” He recounts, “After José was fired, he picketed  
in front of the warehouse with six other guys and Dennis Ho (the  
owner) called the cops. Six cars came and Ho insisted that the  
picketers were illegal and tried to get the cops to deport them.  
That’s just kicking a man in the teeth when he’s down.”

In June of 2005, immigrant laborers from Brooklyn warehouse Amersino  
approached the community group, Make the Road by Walking, and  
together they filed a Department of Labor back wage claim requesting  
compensation for hours worked at below minimum wage and unpaid  
overtime. Juan Antonio Rodriguez, 23, was one of those laborers. “We  
went to a (Make the Road by Walking) meeting because we knew the  
general labor laws of this country and we knew that (Amersino) was  
breaking them.”

Rodriguez and others met Billy Randel and Bert Picard at the Make the  
Road meeting, and together they started to unionize workers at  
Amersino. The movement grew and four other warehouses joined the  
effort. There are currently about 50 laborers throughout the five  
warehouses involved in the union.

When Rodriguez started working at Amersino a year and a half ago, he  
was paid approximately $4 an hour. He usually worked from 5:30 am to  
5:30 pm and if he was five or 10 minutes late, he was penalized a  
$5-10 fee. There were no schedules, no job security, no vacations, no  
sick days, and no overtime.

Rodriguez says he was fired for joining the IWW in an attempt by the  
owner to discourage union activity. After he and five others were  
fired, the IWW filed a complaint against Amersino with the National  
Labor Relations Board. Almost a year later, on March 7, 2006, the  
NLRB ordered Amersino owner, Henry Wang, to reinstate Rodriguez and  
pay thousands of dollars in back wages.

Pedro Campos, 28, was an employee at Handyfat for seven out of the  
last ten years, until he was fired three months ago. Before workers  
started unionizing, he was paid $270 a week for 60 hours of labor.  
“Conditions were bad,” he says, “They yelled at us and said horrible  
racist things. We didn’t have vacations, we didn’t have sick days and  
they paid us less than minimum wage. We worked very hard there,  
moving one-hundred pound cargoes of rice and soy sauce.”

In December, Handyfat owner, Dennis Ho, locked out his employees and  
demanded they submit I-9 employment eligibility forms. I-9 forms are  
supposed to be submitted within 72-hours of hire. The fact that Ho  
did not ask for the I-9 forms until, in some cases, a decade after  
hire suggests he was using the employment eligibility forms as an  
intimidation tactic to discourage undocumented workers from unionizing.

“Even though employees don’t always have proper papers, they aren’t  
afraid of unionizing,” says Campos. “We want respect.”

This kind of treatment is far from rare. A new report released in  
December 2006 by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU estimates that  
13% of all New York City workers were paid below minimum wage in  
2005. The report continues: “Half of day laborers surveyed in 2003  
experienced non-payment of wages—that is, they were not paid at all.”

Says IWW organizer Bert Picard, “$4 an hour is the norm. Vacation and  
paid holidays don’t exist. It’s flagrant. It’s like, law? What law?  
The Department of Labor certainly doesn’t enforce the laws. We bring  
these cases to the Department of Labor on a silver platter and they  
sit on them for a year. If there’s no union behind them, the workers  
get ignored, and the owners know that. They have complete impunity…EZ- 
Supply workers were in the dark (as to the status of their case) for  
a year. And then (the workers) called up and found out that the owner  
had settled over six months ago and was supposed to pay them back  
wages.”

“People are used to it. It is what we have come to expect,” Rodriguez  
concurs.

Picard explains that warehouses often illegally pay employees by the  
week, instead of by the hour, thereby forcing workers to work  
unlimited and indefinite hours. “If they don’t finish a delivery,  
they won’t have a job tomorrow. So they stay late and finish the  
delivery.”

The Brennan Center report states that, “While New York’s economy has  
changed the (Department of Labor’s) strategies and resources have  
failed to keep pace.” The report explains that the Department of  
Labor “has insufficient investigators to address a tremendous backlog  
of individual complaints—it has approximately 120 investigators on  
board, compared to more than eight million workers in the state.”

Robert M. Lillpopp, spokesman for the Department of Labor, responded  
by saying, “We continue to be as aggressive as possible when we  
pursue violations. When we get tips, we investigate.” In fact, the  
Department of Labor has collected more back wages in recent years  
than in the past. The New York Times reported that over $10 million  
were collected in back wages in 2005, a figure 36% greater than the  
year before. Although clearly an improvement from 2004, many say it  
is still not enough. Picard estimates that the five warehouses alone  
owe millions in back wages.

Just how common are immigrant unions? According to the AFL-CIO  
President John Sweeny, only about 13% of all workers in the U.S.,  
including immigrants, are unionized. And while the National Labor  
Relations Act was passed in 1936 to protect unionizing workers from  
being fired, the AFL-CIO estimates that about a third of organizing  
campaigns result in the dismissal of those involved. Businesses today  
are doing their best to prevent workers from unionizing—and for  
undocumented immigrants with a lot to lose, the risks of forming a  
union are sometimes too severe.

“The people who work (at Amersino) have a little bit of fear about  
organizing,” says Rodriguez. “They have families to support so they  
need to work. They don’t want to be fired but they want things to get  
better. It’s not so easy to find good work in this country.”

Yet another obstacle to unionizing efforts, Picard postulates, is the  
possibility that the warehouse owners have formed their own  
organization. “Now, this is complete conjecture,” he qualifies, “but  
I think there is an owners’ association or some group that convinced  
EZ-Supply that they couldn’t recognize the union because it will hurt  
business across the board if they do.”

Picard says that EZ-Supply/Sunrise Plus was ready to negotiate with  
IWW before abruptly going back on its word. The union fought back by  
striking and convincing restaurants to buy from other warehouses, but  
to no avail. “It just doesn’t make sense. (Wen) is losing money.  
Who’s compensating him? Who’s paying him? We feel there is something  
happening on a larger scale and the Department of Labor doesn’t want  
to deal with this.”

As the first warehouse to unionize, Handyfat workers saw some early  
successes. Six employees joined the union and entered into  
constructive dialog with the owner, Dennis Ho. In January 2006,  
Handyfat agreed to pay workers fair wages and require fewer hours.  
Although this initial goodwill did not last, Joel, a longtime  
Handyfat employee, got his first paid vacation in 12 years, which he  
took immediately.

In November 2006, EZ-Supply/Sunrise Plus owner Lester Wen agreed to  
recognize the union as well, and negotiated with the IWW for improved  
conditions. But one month later, Wen recanted and stepped up threats  
against union members. He fired 13 workers after the IWW served him  
with a federal complaint. Handyfat was also served papers and  
subsequently fired any employees suspected of unionizing.

Most recently, on March 13, 2007, a lawsuit was filed in federal  
court by the IWW for $812,000 worth of back wages owed by Amersino.

Workers at the five warehouses are in the throes of a potentially  
historic moment. They follow in the footsteps of Starbucks workers  
who have also unionized with the IWW in New York City. Picard  
reflects, “This is part of a larger movement. People are unionizing  
all over. There are worker centers across the country. But it’s hard  
not to lose faith sometimes. I think this thing has to grow more  
before it starts to have an impact. And the Labor Board system is  
broken.”

“We, the IWW, are interested in rekindling an institutional  
presence,” he says. “I blame the other labor unions for letting it  
get to this point. We were so busy protecting what we have that we  
didn’t notice how bad things were getting. My wife and I worked in a  
factory in the 70s. We had a health care plan. We had vacation time  
and sick days. We considered it a sweatshop at the time, but we had  
benefits and only paid $100 a month in rent. If anyone had told me  
then that labor would get this bad, that people would be working 60- 
plus hours a week making $4 an hour paying $1200 a month in rent, I  
would have said you were crazy. What’s next? Working 16 hours a day  
for $2 an hour?”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:  Caitlin Esch is a writer who lives in Greenpoint.


The Upstate New York "James Connolly" General Membership Branch of  
the IWW has given thousands of dollars in support of the laid-off  
Brooklyn warehouse workers, but not enough to make up for the  
millions owed in back wages. The cavalier treatment of workers by  
callous and greedy bosses described above, in combination with real  
slave wages, is reminiscent of labor conditions at the beginning of  
the 20th century, before FDR, the CIO, left-wing parties, and the  
IWW, (not necessarily in that order), organized to make life better  
for the working class. The recent Circuit City massive layoff is a  
provocation and a warning for US workers to prepare for more blatant  
class warfare in the near future.  We have to send the owners a  
message. Begin by boycotting Circuit City and joining one of the many  
IWW pickets which will soon be springing up outside Circuit City  
stores,  to reduce their sales and force the bosses to hire the  
workers back at their previous wage. They must be made to pay for  
their anti-social behavior. Layoffs for union organizing has the same  
rationale as layoffs of senior workers with experience and higher  
wages: to force wages down so that big business can accumulate more  
capital, and to instill fear in people who still have their jobs.   
The message is clear. Be happy with your slave wage and treatment.  
Live in fear and don't join a union, or you could be fired. As the  
rate of capital accumulation decreases, attacks on the working class  
increase in frequency and severity.  Meanwhile, the Federal  
government turns a blind eye to employer malfeasance, guts the NLRB,  
and takes the leash off their ICE attack pack.

To counterbalance extremist  federal policy which seeks to roll back  
the remaining vestiges of the new deal, state government needs to  
step up and support union organizers by punishing owners who violate  
labor law, even if the workers choosing to join unions have no legal  
documentation.  Gov. Spitzer and company, for example, need to be  
convinced to hire more than 120 Labor Dept. investigators to cover  
the 10 million workers in NY State. The blatant and cynical attack on  
the Circuit City workforce has gained alot of press, mainly due to  
the fact that the majority of those workers are US citizens. But  
among immigrant workers in this country at the moment, above and  
beyond massive roundups by the ICE gestapo,  Circuit City-type  
lowballing is standard fare.  A more vicious form of class warfare is  
emerging. The strategic solution at the point of production is to  
start with the most vulnerable and work from there, to bring wages up  
for everyone in the short term, and in the long term prepare  
strategically to end wage slavery,  and for the goods.

OBU,
Greg


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