GREELEY, Colo. — Members of the Socialist Workers Party and Communist League in Canada have spent a few weeks here in late March and early April to support and learn from the strike by 3,800 workers, members of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7, at the giant JBS beef processing factory. Many of us brought statements of support from our unions.
We discussed how more and more bosses are attacking their workers today, driven by the deepening crisis of the dog-eat-dog capitalist system. In the long run, SWP and CL members said, the only way to change this is to build a revolutionary working-class party, a class alternative to the bosses’ parties, capable of taking political power.
Striking workers, other union members and strike supporters picked up over the past week 19 subscriptions to the Militant and bought 18 books by SWP and other revolutionary working-class leaders. They got books in English, French and Spanish, reflecting the international character of the working class in Greeley. Workers in the meatpacking plant here speak 57 languages.
The union membership includes over 1,000 workers from Haiti who face the government cancelling their Temporary Protected Status, which allows them to live and work in the U.S.
Margaret Trowe, a hotel worker from Oakland and member of the UNITE HERE union, who is also the SWP candidate for governor of California, told striking workers that her campaign demands a government amnesty for all undocumented workers in the U.S.
“There are millions of so-called illegal workers in this country because that’s the policy of the billionaire bosses and both of their parties, the Democrats and Republicans,” Trowe said. “This is how they try to pit workers against each other, to drive down our wages and get away with abusive treatment. They tell U.S.-born workers ‘foreigners’ cause crime, low wages and unemployment, and then turn around and tell immigrants that workers born here are racist and lazy.
“Neither is true. We are fellow workers and have the same class interests,” she said. “That’s one reason why this strike is so important and why the Socialist Workers Party calls on all workers to demand the government end the illegal status of millions, with a mass amnesty.”
One worker thanked Trowe for taking this position in defense of immigrants. “It’s what we all need,” Trowe responded. “Workers born in this country have a compelling interest in fighting for amnesty. If we don’t unite the working class by fighting to end the pariah status of our immigrant brothers and sisters, we can never build a movement strong enough to take political power and end exploitation and war once and for all.”
‘Militant,’ books popular
Knocking on workers’ doors here, Joe Young, a member of the Communist League in Canada, and this reporter met Mary Ditirro, who works from home for an accounting firm. She said she supported the striking JBS workers and signed up for a Militant subscription. After Young showed her the book The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch: Stakes for the International Working Class, she decided to buy it. She also got The Low Point of Labor Resistance Is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward; Women’s Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle by Thomas Sankara, who led the 1983-87 popular revolution in Burkina Faso; and Are They Rich Because They’re Smart? Class, Privilege, and Learning Under Capitalism by SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes.
Olivier Malanau, whose job is to gut the calf carcasses on the line at JBS, met Young at the end of his shift on the picket line and explained he is originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo. He signed up for a subscription to the Militant and got nine books in French, including Sankara’s We Are Heirs of the World’s Revolutions. He said he wants to understand how working-class politics can be applied to eliminate the poverty and exploitation in his home country, as well as in the fight they’re waging for workers’ rights on the job.
While not everyone we spoke to going door to door, or in the shops and restaurants here supports the strike, we found many young people working in the restaurants were very supportive.
Layla Fischer, 21, is a server at a local restaurant who works six days a week to help support her family. She said she learned about the strike from social media. “I learned they have no breaks or short breaks and can’t easily get off the line to go to the bathroom,” she said.
Between serving customers Fischer looked at a few issues of the Militant. She said she agreed with the headlines on the need to fight Jew-hatred, “US hands off Cuba!” and “US out of the Middle East!” She bought an introductory subscription to the Militant and said she would like to visit the picket line with us.
We met a number of strikers originally from Cuba on the picket line and got into discussions about Cuba’s socialist revolution, as well as the need to protest today’s escalating U.S. attacks on Cuba. Strikers from Africa and Haiti we met described getting medical care from Cuban doctors.
“I was very impressed when a Cuban doctor who treated me in Port-au- Prince spoke to me in Creole. He had studied and learned it,” Aveline Joseph, from Haiti, told Young. Young said this is a reflection of the Cuban Revolution’s internationalism.
The eight-week effort by the SWP and Communist Leagues in Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom to sell 1,300 subscriptions to the Militant, the same number of books and raise $165,000 for the Militant Fighting Fund opens opportunities to take these discussions across the country and internationally.
We come away with many workers here to keep in touch with and work with.