Around 100 workers have been on strike for five months. Since the walkout began the company has used office workers and hired strikebreakers to keep producing the high-priced Mexican-style cheese and chorizo.

A negotiating session was held October 22, but company representatives walked out after receiving a ruling from the National Labor Relations Board. This ruling upheld the union's right to represent production workers at the factory, along with warehouse workers and truck drivers. This is an important victory for the workers since the bosses, in an attempt to divide the workforce, maintained that the union could represent only the warehouse workers and truck drivers.

The following day union representatives met with officials of the Jewel supermarket chain, asking them not to carry Supremo products. According to workers at the picket line, Jewel officials told them they would give an answer in two weeks.

The union decided to continue picketing at the Supremo warehouse but not the factory after an attack last July on the workers' picket line. In that assault, strikebreakers demolished the strikers' water station and literature table, vandalized several cars, and threatened pickets themselves with violence. The company and the police are also harassing the strikers. The police arrested one worker on trumped-up charges of threatening to bomb a strikebreaker's car and prohibited him from participating in the picket line and other strike activities.

"We are forced to work up to 16 hours a day, six days a week, and so we went on strike," production worker Marcos Nava told the Militant. "The company does not want to negotiate with the union, but they have to, there is no alternative. We will not step back, come snow or whatever. We must win."

Marcelina Pedraza is a member of the Young Socialists and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 134 in Chicago.  
 
 
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