WORKERS WORLD PARTY CONFERENCE
'Immigrant workers always on capitalism's hit
list'
Excerpts from a talk by Teresa Gutierrez.
William Gates III, founder of Microsoft Corporation
and the richest person in the world, is worth $90 billion. That
means he makes roughly $23 million an hour.
Compare this to the Thai workers discovered four years ago
in Los Angeles. Living behind barbed wire, some had been held
captive for over five years. They worked 84 hours a week in a
garment sweatshop, earning $1.60 an hour--wages they often did
not even see.
Now consider the enormous technological advances of this
decade. High-speed computers have opened up vast new worlds,
allowing people to explore a universe they had never thought
possible.
Yet a poor woman on welfare can't even get an ATM card. And
many workers in agribusiness throughout this country don't have
access to toilets.
Doesn't this gross inequality and obscene disparity in
access to wealth and technology expose the capitalist system?
Doesn't this show that capitalism is an outdated, inferior and
subordinate system that must be abolished?
Immigrant workers are a sector of the working class always
on capitalism's hit list.
Our party is paying attention to this important phenomenon.
As we enter the next millennium, the case of immigrant workers
utterly exposes the capitalist system as a decaying, filthy
system that cannot provide for the masses of people.
How else can it be that in 1999 there are work-place
conditions reminiscent of the 19th century? For no other reason
than that capitalism thrives on exploitation, that profit is
the guiding force in this economy.
Today's immigrant work force is composed mainly of Latino,
African, Asian and Caribbean people.
About 5 million undocumented workers currently live in the
United States. California is the leading state of residence,
followed by Texas and New York.
Most undocumented workers come from Mexico--about 2.7
million. Over 80 percent of all undocumented are from the
Western Hemisphere.
Those who come from Mexico are not all Mexican. A large
number are Indigenous and have their own languages and history.
But because of the particular oppression of Native people, they
get lumped in with the dominant culture.
As Leninists we must always be alert to the particularities
of the national question, even in a country like Mexico that is
oppressed by imperialism.
Most people in this country would be surprised to know that
120,000 Canadians a year remain in the United States without
documents--surprised because the U.S. government's immigration
policy is thoroughly racist.
The U.S./Canadian border is not patrolled and militarized
like a war zone. That's not where the Immigration and
Naturalization Service assigns 5,000 armed troops--the hated La
Migra--to patrol the border.
The INS says that last year it carried out 104,448
apprehensions.
That means gestapo-like raids at the work places and in the
communities of immigrant workers. Mothers and fathers were
separated from their children. The bosses pocketed their unpaid
wages.
Just like the NYPD or the LAPD, La Migra serves as a
state-sanctioned, repressive, occupying force with only one
objective--to terrorize immigrants of color.
That's why we demand that the INS get out of our
communities. That they be disarmed, disbanded and
abolished.
Imperialism now has tentacles all over the globe. The IMF
demands structural adjustment policies and privatization,
forcing millions to leave their homelands in search of
jobs.
The AFL-CIO estimates that over 100 million people in the
world have left their countries of origin in search of economic
relief.
Immigrant workers are on the move. They are organizing
unions in this country at an unprecedented rate. That is why
Clinton and Wall Street send INS goons to work places--to break
up union drives.
They did this at the Holiday Inn in Minneapolis, at the IBP
meatpacking plant in Nebraska, at the Stemilt Fruit Co. in
Washington state, and at Waste Management in San Leandro,
Calif.
The workers have little choice but to fight back. Their
struggles are changing the labor movement forever.
Karl Marx wrote over 100 years ago that the ruling class
would create its own gravediggers. In October, 20,000
immigrants and their supporters marched in Washington to demand
amnesty and an end to INS raids and deportations. Throughout
the demonstration, workers recognized the vital importance they
played in society. They tapped in to the fact that without
their labor the capitalist system would come to a screeching
halt.
Without them, the food could not be picked, delivered or put
on the table, the grocery stores would not be staffed, the meat
would not be packaged, the buildings would not get
constructed.
So this is our message to Bill Gates and all the other dot
com billionaires: While you surf the web, immigrant workers at
the Omaha Packing Plant do not get bathroom breaks. They have
been forced to relieve themselves in their clothes. This is a
humiliation that cannot be tolerated.
You, the capitalist pigs who control society today, can do
no better than this. We created the wealth. Now we want it
back.
Tomorrow, the workers will run society in a just and humane
manner.
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
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