On Saturday, July 21, I joined with members of Teamster Local 703 on strike against V & V Supremo Food Products at Throop Street near Cermak Avenue. A half hour earlier this site had been the scene of a violent attack by five strikebreaker thugs employed by the company. Strikers reported to me that these scabs had stormed out of the company's cheese production plant at 21st Street and Damen Avenue and threatened picketers with a club and beer bottles. The thugs named several strikers and demanded to know where they were, stating, "When we find them we are going to kill them."

When the strikers held their ground and refused to be provoked, the scabs proceeded to the Throop Street location where they smashed three windows of a car parked where the strikers normally picket and trashed the strikers' water dispensing station and literature table.

These threats and violent attacks on the right to organize should be protested by the entire labor movement.

Supremo's attack comes one month after the workers won a favorable ruling by the National Labor Relations Board upholding the validity of recent elections where a majority of the workers voted to join the Teamsters union. And the attack comes one week after brigades of strikers distributed leaflets calling for a boycott of Supremo products at the large gathering that came to hear Mexican president Vicente Fox.

Since the strike began on May 29, strikers and their supporters have faced constant surveillance by camera-toting company guards who video and photograph strikers' activities. Refusing to be intimidated by the spying and the scab attack, strike leaders have decided to double the size of their picket lines at each gate.

Among the strikers' materials that were scattered into the street was a leaflet announcing a "Mass Rally" timed for the kickoff of the annual Fiesta del Sol street fair in the Mexican immigrant community of Pilsen. The leaflet states, "Pilsen Defends the Right of all Workers to Organize" and demands "The Right of all Workers to form a Union, Immigration Reform, and Quality Education and Health Care for All."

The rally is called by the Pilsen Neighbors Council and will take place Thursday, July 26 at 5:30 p.m. at Carpenter St. and Cermak Avenue. I will participate in this rally and join the strikers' picket lines, and urge my co-workers and other unionists to do likewise.

Solidarity with the V & V Supremo strikers! Condemn the pro-company's brutal thug attack! An injury to one is an injury to all!  
 
 
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