New York grocery giant uses anti-immigrant intimidation to stall union drive

Nine hundred FreshDirect warehouse workers in the midst of a union organizing campaign are under attack from Immigration and Customs Enforcement in collusion with their employer, a Queens, New York-based online grocery delivery corporation. The company has suspended several dozen workers, predominantly Latina immigrants, and fired a few.

A union election is scheduled for Dec. 22-23. Both the Teamsters and United Food and Commercial Workers are on the ballot, along with a “no union” option. The company and ICE have embarked upon an illegal, ruthless anti-immigration investigation to sabotage the union campaign.

From 12 to 18 hours daily, the workers labor under mandatory overtime, standing in near-freezing temperatures to insure the freshness of the food they pack, price and label. They prepare the boxes, many heavy with canned goods, for the truckers and delivery helpers. For this exhausting labor where it’s winter all year long, they make around $7.50 an hour and no benefits. A supervisor reportedly told workers, “What’s wrong with working so many hours? Now you don’t have to look for a second job.”

Teamster Local 805 is the most visible, fighting back with picket lines and rallies, reaching out for public support, and exposing the brutal conditions the warehouse workers endure.

Local 805 has charged the company with unfair labor practices. FreshDirect should be investigated and charged with violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act and the health and safety statutes under the Occupational Safety and Health Act. Under these brutal conditions, the warehouse workers desperately need their own organization and it looked like a union victory was a sure thing.

Enter ICE, the gruesome guest invited by FreshDirect to wreck the organizing campaign with a reign of terror and fear.

On Dec. 9 at 4:30 a.m., as the workers were reporting for their shift in the bleak cold darkness, supervisors shocked them with a memorandum stating they were the target of ICE. Engulfed with fear of being detained and handcuffed on the job—and most terrible of all, being separated from their children—some workers chose to return home.

At work stations, supervisors demanded the workers produce papers proving their immigration status was legal. “Some people just walked out the door,” said Sandy Pope, president of Local 805. “They were sobbing [as they carried] garbage bags of clothes from their lockers. They didn’t feel they had any chance of fixing their paperwork, so they just left.”

Employees were warned by company officials not to show up for their paychecks, a grim threat that ICE would pick them up. Union officials scrambled around to find friends and supporters who could pick up paychecks for the workers.

‘No match’ a life-and-death illegal operation

Here was Bush’s “shock and awe” brought into the workplace, and calculated to break the will of the workers to support a union organizing drive. But the terror campaign is symptomatic of a broader sinister plot to rid the country of those who have come here from their impoverished homelands.

ICE’s national “no match” campaign—in concert with the Internal Revenue Service and the Social Security Administration—to force 12 million immigrants to prove their “legal” status is threatening the labor movement. FreshDirect claimed they received “no-match” letters from the SSA informing them that Social Security numbers provided by several workers were not legitimate.

Teamster President James Hoffa has questioned the right of ICE to investigate FreshDirect employee records. Hoffa quotes ICE’s own internal policy: “ICE will reserve [hold] immediate action on any information received concerning employment of undocumented or unauthorized aliens ... where it appears that information may have been provided in order to interfere with or to retaliate against employees for their rights” to form a union. ICE, a neofascist agency in the Department of Homeland Security, is operating above the law.

According to UE News Update, on Oct. 10 Calif. Judge Charles R. Breyer “ruled that the Bush policy is illegal, and ordered the Department of Homeland Security to halt it immediately. [His] decision also bars the Social Security Administration from sending out 141,000 no-match letters to employers, covering more than eight million employees. ... The judge said the government had failed to follow proper procedures in issuing the new rule, which would have ‘massive ramifications.’ ... The policy would have made employers liable based on SSA ‘no-match’ letters.” (Oct. 13)

Government bureaucracies are under orders to provide data riddled with errors in identification and misinformation to ensnare immigrant workers. The UE report states that “12.7 million of the 17.8 million discrepancies ... belong to native-born U.S. citizens.”

FreshDirect cooperated with ICE and the SSA illegally to entrap the workers and disrupt the union election. They turned on the very workers who are paying into the Social Security Trust Fund.

They must answer as to how they received these letters, which violate the federal judge’s restraining order. Did ICE and Homeland Security violate Judge Breyer’s ruling? Suspended and fired workers must be returned to their jobs with full restitution pending an immediate independent investigation by the Teamsters, the UFCW and other interested parties.

No worker is illegal!

“Divide and conquer,” say the government and the bosses, as a capitalist crisis is imploding by the hour. This struggle cries out for united independent classwide action in concert with the organized labor movement.

This attack on 12 million immigrants, documented and undocumented, can and must confronted and repelled. What has happened to FreshDirect, Smithfield, New Bedford workers and the many more thousands who have been hounded, driven underground, arrested and separated from their children is the challenge of the day.