Mei was speaking as part of a panel on defending workers’ rights on a May 3 San Francisco Militant Labor Forum celebrating May Day. Joining her on the panel were Emiliano Martínez, a Mexican worker who is part of the Voluntarios de la Comunidad (Volunteers of the Community), which has been organizing protests demanding drivers’ licenses for all, and Deborah Liatos, a meat packer and member of the Socialist Workers Party.

Twenty-three people participated in the forum, which was publicized with flyers in English, Spanish, and Chinese. Two members of the Chinese Progressive Association translated the meeting for the three Wins Fashions Workers who attended. Spanish translation was provided for three workers who are active in the fight for the right to a driver’s license.

Mei, who immigrated from China to the Bay Area in 1999, detailed the conditions faced by Wins workers. "Work was hard and wages didn’t make ends meet," she said. "While the workday was scheduled to run from 7:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., workers had to stay hours longer if they didn’t meet their quota."

The factory owners had a history of paying workers late, Mei said. Then, in April of last year, "all the checks for 230 workers in the three factories bounced."

Although the owners have declared bankruptcy, they "recently opened a restaurant and have another factory in Oakland," she said.

The Labor Department has collected $400,000 from the company, but it is not enough to cover back wages. Even though Wins workers demand that this money be used at least partially for payment of wages owing, the department refuses to do so.

One indication of the support that the Wins workers have won was the announcement that 30 garment workers at Ben Davis garment factory had signed a petition circulated on the job in support of the struggle.

In response to a question on whether Wins workers saw any potential in joining their fight with that of the garment workers at the Levi-Strauss plant, facing closure in June of this year, Leon Chow of the Chinese Progressive Association said that Levi-Strauss workers had approached them, "so hopefully in the next few weeks we’ll have some joint actions".  
 
‘We fight for dignity’
"We are the ones who work in the fields, in construction, in the factories," said Emiliano Martínez. "We fight for dignity and to obtain a driver’s license."

Martínez invited everybody to a May 7 demonstration at the state capitol in Sacramento where activists from throughout the state will be gathering to demand the state government sign a law that will give immigrants without documents the right to a license.

"This is hard work," he said of the campaign, "but I am not going to give up until we manage to get our licenses."

Deborah Liatos told the forum participants of a fight at Sara Lee/Galileo Foods where she works. The bosses began writing up workers in the packaging department for quality problems caused by the company’s attempts to speed up the line, she said. When they suspended a co-worker, all the workers in the department organized themselves to oppose this assault, and forced the company to downgrade all the written warnings to verbal warnings. The suspension was dropped from the worker’s record and she received back pay for the day she was suspended.

Like other fights by working people, Liatos said, the struggles described at the forum are winning support from other unionists and co-workers. "The U.S. government is at war against working people in this country, just as it is at war against the people of Afghanistan and the Palestinian people. It is again preparing a war against the people of Iraq. This is not in the interests of working people anywhere in the world," she said.

"As a socialist I believe that as long as the U.S. and other countries are run in the interests of the rich, workers’ rights will always be under attack. Through our struggles we will need to fight to replace the capitalist government with one of workers and farmers," Liatos said.

Rollande Girard is a garment worker at Ben Davis in San Francisco.  
 
 
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