The workers, members of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers union, are fighting for a guaranteed 40-hour workweek, a closed union shop, and improved benefits. Despite the company calling workers to try to convince them to cross the picket line, Dean said, only six have done so. Dean and Jagroop Dhaliwal, a shop steward at Superior Poultry, were guest speakers at a May 12 Communist League election campaign meeting featuring Joe Young, a meat packer who was the League's candidate in Vancouver-Langara in the May 16 British Columbia (B.C.) provincial elections.

Young and Dhaliwal, along with several other workers at the meeting, had earlier that day joined a rally of 300 people in support of striking Vancouver transit workers. The workers are fighting against the transit company's plans to replace full-time union positions with part-time and nonunion labor. Young warned that working people should oppose any attempt by the government elected on May 16--universally expected to be the B.C. Liberals--to force the transit workers back to work.

In addition to Dean and Dhaliwal, two other strikers from Purdy's and Superior Poultry and three other meat packers attended the meeting of 20 people.

At Superior Poultry, where workers recently concluded an almost nine-month strike, the company only hires immigrant workers, Dhaliwal explained. "They hire people who cannot easily speak English. People who they think don't know their rights," he said. "People who can't easily find other jobs." The owners hoped that as a result they could better exploit the workers, he pointed out. The workers decided that "the only solution was to form a union" and 70 percent of them signed up to become members of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW).

The company refused to sign a contract. After a year and a half of fruitless negotiations the workers were forced to go out on strike. Nine months after the walkout began, the company gave in, signed a contract recognizing the union, and granted some improvements in wages and working conditions.  
 
'Free ourselves from exploitation'
As a result of the workers' successful fight "people are feeling much more confident," Dhaliwal emphasized. "The workers know that if we are united there is nothing the company can do to us."

The labor movement needs to organize unions in more workplaces so other workers will be better able to fight for their rights, he stressed. "At the same time we should also tell them that a collective agreement is not the final solution," Dhaliwal said. "We need something more than that. We need to free ourselves from exploitation. The only solution is socialism."

Struggles such as these show that "immigrant workers are an important part of the fight to transform our unions into more effective weapons of struggle," Young said at the meeting. "The capitalist rulers are campaigning against immigrants in order to divide the working class and to turn us against our fellow workers."

As examples, Young pointed to the jailing and deportation of Chinese immigrants and the frame-up trial over the explosion of an Air India plane, in which the government is portraying Sikhs from the Punjab in India as terrorists.

"The starting point of the Communist League campaign is that we are part of an international class--the working class," Young said. Opposing the rulers' anti-immigrant campaign and building solidarity with workers fighting for their rights across Canada and around the world is essential to uniting working people in a common struggle. "We should fight to establish a workers and farmers government that can put an end to capitalism, which is the source of the exploitation of working people," Young explained.

He pointed to Cuba's socialist revolution as an example of the road forward. In order to fight for fundamental change workers need to take political action, Young stressed. "That's why we should oppose the campaign by leaders of the New Democratic Party (NDP) aimed at weakening trade union ties to the party."

The NDP is a social democratic party with a program that supports capitalism. Nevertheless, the NDP was formed in part as a result of a layer of the working class recognizing that the unions needed to take political action against the bosses and their governments, Young said. It remains the only party that is linked to the unions and not directly controlled by the capitalists.

The Communist League is calling for a vote for the NDP in all the ridings except Vancouver-Langara where the Communist League is running. "It is the only way that workers can cast a class vote against the bosses and their parties," Young explained.

"Rather than campaigning to weaken trade union ties, as some NDP officials raise, a fight can be waged to forge a different program, a socialist program, one that advances the struggle to end the system of capitalist exploitation," said Young.

Steve Penner is a meat packer.  
 
 
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