excerpted from http://www.lavozlit.com
The immigrant community has been one of the hardest hit by the anti-worker policies of the Obama administration. This has been demonstrated by the record number of deportations (396,906 last year alone), mandating of the E-Verify program, promoting Secure Communities, and the exclusion of the undocumented from the health care plan and the stimulus tax refunds. The attacks on undocumented labor have weakened the labor movement as a whole. Countless organizing campaigns have been destroyed by well-timed E-Verify raids and deportations of union activists. Significant sectors of the workforce – meatpacking, restaurants, hotels, custodial, construction – could face the threat of deportation just for seeking improved living and working conditions.
The workers at Pacific Steel, one of the biggest steel foundries in the nation, face some of the toughest and most unsafe conditions imaginable. When the company threatened cuts to benefits in 2011, the workers went on strike and showed the power that they as workers in numbers have. Like any big capitalist enterprise, Pacific Steel called their allies in the federal government and instigated an E-verify raid to squash the militant struggle of the largely Latino and undocumented work force.* ICE raids under similar conditions have happened in the past in LA, in the South Bay, and in the East Bay.
Last Friday, Occupy Oakland, Occupy Cal and the east bay community joined 200 workers fired in the 2011 E-Verify raid at Pacific Steel in a march for worker and immigrant rights. The strength of the coalitions forged around this action continue to grow as workers and activists build for the May 1st global general strike.
*Editorial note: although Pacific Steel claims to have had no hand in instigating the 2011 raids, workers have suggested it was direct
retribution for their militant labor organizing.