by David Bacon

The South Bay has its history of violence, structural racism and worker exploitation. But it also has a long history of resistance-of courageous organizers who built movements that have had an impact far beyond the Santa Clara Valley.

The Santa Clara Valley’s social movement history began with the indigenous resistance to colonization, followed by the annexation of California after the war of 1848.The original indigenous Ohlone people living at the south end of the San Francisco Bay were torn from their communities, and then enslaved in the missions built by the Spanish colonizers. But those communities fought the Spaniards and the land grant settlers.

Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz writes that in the civil rights era of the 1960s, California indigenous people researched this resistance.
“They found that no mission escaped uprisings from within or attacks from outside by communities of the imprisoned along with escapees,” Dunbar Ortiz writes. “Indigenous guerrilla forces of up to two thousand formed. Without this resistance, there would be no descendants of the California Native peoples of the area colonized by the Spanish.”

After Mexico freed itself from Spain in 1820 (throwing out the Franciscan friars who operated the missions), Valley residents rose in opposition to conquest by the United States in 1848.

Tiburcio Vásquez, who led a rebellion against the U.S. in the years after the war, was born in Monterey and fought with Joaquin Murrieta from the Santa Clara to the San Joaquin Valleys. After Vásquez was captured, he was tried in the Santa Clara County Courthouse, and hanged in St. James Park.

The growth of the South Bay’s population really began with the development of huge orchards of plums, nuts and other fruit in the late 1800s, and then the canning industry that allowed the shipment of fruit to the rest of the country. By 1930 the Santa Clara Valley was the fruit processing capital of the world, owing to the labor of thousands of immigrant workers.  It was the state’s largest employer of women. Thirty-eight canneries included huge corporations like Libby’s, Hunt’s and Calpak, employing up to 30,000 people.

Researcher Glenna Matthews says, “The fruit industry constituted a classic segmented labor market, with women’s work being systematically paid less then men’s.”  This pattern was duplicated years later in the other huge industry for which the valley became famous-electronics. The pollution of the South Bay’s water also has a long history prior to the emergence of the electronics industry in the 1970s. By 1930 ranchers and canneries were pumping so much water from wells that salt water from the bay had leaked into the aquifers. Even earlier, the disposal of organic waste from canneries had caused serious pollution of the bay itself.

Worker-to-worker organizing wins the canneries

To oppose the canneries, the Valley’s labor movement was launched in the 1880s with material support from the San Francisco Federated Trades Council. The Wobblies -the radical anarchist Industrial Workers of the World – organized the first unions for cannery workers, including an early one called “Toilers of the World.” It included both men and women, and people of color as well as white workers.
Then, in August 1931 every cannery from the border of San Mateo County to south San Jose went on strike, organized by a Communist union, the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union. Its main organizer was Elizabeth Nicholas, a Serbian immigrant and Communist, who won the support of the local labor council in 1929. Another strike organizer was Dorothy Healey, at the time 16 years old.

“We could not rent a single hall in San Jose,” she later recalled. “There was nothing which was legal, where people could gather together. The police brutality was of a far greater level than anything that the people have seen in later years. So we would hold these street meetings – I mean park meetings, strike meetings – at St. James Park, and the police would break them up.”
The main strategy used through the 1930s in the canneries was “workers organizing workers.” Despite obstacles, by the end of the 1930s the San Jose canneries were all unionized, and remained so until they closed six decades later.

In the red scares of the late 1940s and 1950s, however, UCAPAWA was expelled from the CIO for its radical politics and destroyed. Its union contracts in the canneries were taken over by the Teamsters Union, with the support of the companies who wanted to be rid of leftwing unions. Also expelled from the CIO were the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, which organized food processing workers in dried fruit plants in the Santa Clara Valley, and the United Electrical Workers (an expulsion that would later have a profound impact on the future of unions in the Valley’s electronics industry.)

Chicano labor start work in San Jose

After World War II, while the anti-communist witch-hunts were taking place, radical Chicano labor and community leaders began work in San Jose. Bert Corona, the father of the modern immigrant rights movement, moved there after being blacklisted by the Coast Guard on the Los Angeles docks. He and Lucio Bernabe, a cannery organizer, encouraged strikes among bracero contract farm workers brought from Mexico to work in U.S. fields as semi-slave labor. The pair organized food caravans when braceros stopped work, and tried to prevent their deportation.

Corona organized the local chapter of the Asociación Nacional Mexicana Americana (ANMA), a radical community organization fighting discrimination. He also belonged to the Community Service Organization, where Cesar Chavez got his original organizers’ training. Chavez’ family lived in San Jose for several years on 21st Street near the Sal Si Puedes barrio, and he and Corona both worked there with the CSO. But Corona also disagreed with “one of its [CSO’s] stated reasons for organizing … to keep the ‘reds’ from establishing a base in the communities.” Veteran San Jose activist Fred Hirsch says, “Fear that the CP might establish a base in communities was not unfounded. In fact, it had a base, and used it to strengthen community actions and organizing by workers in the canneries and fields.”

Lucio Bernabe fought off one of the most notorious political deportation cases of the era with the help of the leftwing American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born and local members of the CP. He eventually helped found the Cannery Workers Committee (CWC) in the 1970s and ‘80s, with another left-winger, Mike Johnston.

Ernesto Galarza also lived in San Jose in the postwar era. Galarza worked with Mexican and Filipino farm workers starting in the late 1940s, organizing the National Farm Labor Union and striking growers in the San Joaquin Valley. That union’s successor, the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, began the great grape strike in 1965 under the leadership of Larry Itliong, and later merged with the National Farm Worker Association to form the United Farm Workers (UFW). Galarza wrote several influential books about farm labor and Chicanos, particularly Merchants of Labor, which exposed the abuses of the bracero program.

by David Bacon

Ciudad Juárez, just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, is the center of a growing rebellion of laborers in the border factories. Since September, workers have set up encampments, or plantones, in front of factories, they’ve marched through the streets, they’ve demanded recognition of independent unions. In response, the companies have fired hundreds and tried to stop the workers’ movement from spreading.

About 255,000 people work directly in Juárez’ 330 maquiladoras, about 13 percent of the national total, meaning Juárez has one of the largest concentrations of manufacturing on the U.S./Mexico border. Almost all the plants are foreign-owned. Eight of Juárez’s 17 largest factories belong to U.S. corporations, three to Taiwanese owners, two to Europeans, and just two to Mexicans. Together, they employ over 69,000 people- nearly 30 percent of the city’s total.

Five companies (two U.S. and all three of the Taiwanese companies) are contract manufacturers of electronics equipment sold under the familiar brand names of huge corporations. One, Foxconn, is the world’s largest contract manufacturer. Its Ciudad Juárez plants assemble products for Hewlett Packard, Cisco and Dell. Three Juárez plants produce auto parts and electronics, including the city’s two largest factories: Delphi, which employs 16,000 workers, and Lear, which employs 24,000 workers.

In most other maquiladora cities like Tijuana or Matamoros, workers are rigidly controlled- and independent organizing is suppressed- by a political partnership between the companies, government authorities and unions tied to Mexico’s old ruling party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Juárez has been an exception. Its selling point to major corporations has been the fact that it has some of the lowest wages anywhere on the border; the average pay of Juárez maquiladora workers was 18 percent less than the average for manufacturing workers in Mexico’s other border cities.

The new workers’ movement in Juárez began last August at four maquiladoras: Foxconn, ADC Commscope, Lexmark, and Eaton Corporation. Commscope manufactures laser optic cable, Lexmark makes cartridges for inkjet printers, and Eaton is an auto parts plant. On Sept.16, Mexico’s National Independence Day, a group of 190 Commscope workers went to the local labor authorities at the Conciliation and Arbitration Board, and filed a request for a registro, or legal status, to form an independent union. At Foxconn, workers also asked for a registro for their own union that same month.

Both efforts were greeted by mass firings, which led workers to set up encampments in front of those plants last fall in protest. At Lexmark, 120 workers were fired in December for protesting bad wages and conditions, and they have maintained a plantón there ever since.

Workers lifted similar worker encampments at Foxconn and Commscope after the companies promised them a registro in November. At the time of this article’s writing, the Lexmark plantón continues in front of that factory. A network of supporters in the U.S. has organized solidarity demonstrations, including a concert headlined by folksinger legend Charlie King. One demonstration has even confronted the company at its headquarters in Lexington, Kentucky.

This insurgent wave of worker protests threatens the established economic order at the center of maquiladora production on the border, as Mexico continues to feel the impact of the U.S. recession. By U.S. standards, the companies are huge: Foxconn’s two factories alone employ over 11,000 people while Commscope employs 3,000 workers, and Lexmark another 2,800 workers.

While a wave of worker activism spread through Juárez in the 1990s, such militancy declined as the city’s women became victims of a notorious series of mass murders that terrorized the city for a decade.

Juárez has become a huge metropolis built on the labor of tens of thousands of young women, overwhelmingly migrants, who have traveled north from cities, small villages, and rural areas in central and southern Mexico. Between 1993 and February 2005, over 370 women had been murdered. In 2010 alone, 247 women were murdered, and between January and August of the following year, another 130.

The mothers of Juarez organized despite the terror to fight for the lives of their daughters. They charged that larger social forces are responsible for creating a climate of extreme violence against women. This new wave of worker protests, therefore, is breaking the cycle of fear and terror that has gripped working-class neighborhoods for over a decade.

In the two personal accounts that follow, Verónica Rodríguez, a fired Commscope worker, and Elvia Villescas, a community organizer, explain the origins of this new workers’ movement, and what it might mean for the maquiladora workers of Juárez.

VERÓNICA RODRÍGUEZ, was fired from ADC Commscope:

I’ve worked in many maquiladoras. I have three kids- two boys and a girl- and I went to work there because I was only able to complete secondary school. The workday is nine hours. You can get Saturday and Sunday off, so you can do the work you have at home, and at the end of the day you’re with your family and can help your children with their homework. But you have to ask permission from the company to let you go if your child is sick, and you practically have to pray on your knees. It’s kind of contradictory.

I began working at ADC Commscope twelve years ago. I worked for eleven years, was out for three months, and then came back for a year after that. When I began there, I worked really hard so that I could get a better job. But when I achieved that, I could see that there were a lot of abuses.

The other supervisors wouldn’t give them permission to leave the line, for instance. One of them I fought with all the time. Once a worker asked for the next day off because he had an appointment for his son, who’d just been born. The supervisor said, “No, tell him [the doctor] to do it another day.” I told him, the appointment is for tomorrow- he couldn’t change it. In the end, the supervisor said he had to find someone else to replace him, and so I told him I’d do it.

Due to lack of space, we are only printing a part of the article. For the complete article, visit: http://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2016/04/voices-from-juarez-workers-movement_6.html