Workers World Dec. 21, 2000: Immigrants step up fight from sweatshops to street

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------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the Dec. 21, 2000 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------

Immigrants step up fight from sweatshops to street

By Tony Murphy

New York

The movement for immigrants' rights based in New York's Latino community picked up steam in early December with a rapid-fire series of demonstrations that targeted sweatshops, Mayor Rudy Giuliani and anti-immigrant oppression.

On Dec. 6, the Mexican American Workers Association (AMAT) joined forces with the Community Labor Coalition and UNITE Local 169 to protest one of New York's "green" sweatshops--greengrocer delis that practice low-wage exploitation of workers, the vast majority of whom are Latino.
A throng of over 100 supporters with Mexican flags, puppets and whistles gathered in front of East Natural, one of the delis being boycotted by the coalition.
The anti-sweatshop forces led by AMAT, the CLC and UNITE included the International Action Center, the Rainforest Action Network, a legal monitor from the National Lawyers Guild, students from neighboring New York University and Parsons School of Design, and elected officials, including New York City Council members Margarita Lopez and Christine Quinn and New York State Assembly member Deborah Glick.
This two-year-old anti-sweatshop boycott campaign has led to eight delis signing union contracts with Local 169. The boycott of East Natural and its affiliate stores, Abbigail and Soho Natural, is entering its sixth month. Though the bosses have refused to recognize the union chosen by the workers, they are feeling the pressure of the boycott campaign. East Natural's business has decreased by about 60 percent and the Dec. 6 demonstration increased community awareness and support.
That night Local 169 joined over 2,000 people at an annual New York anti-sweatshop rally, part of the National Labor Committee's boycott campaign that has attracted national attention and embarrassed celebrities who sponsor clothing lines made in maquiladoras. Organizers are now focusing attention on Kohl's, a Long Island-based company that sells jeans made by workers in Nicaragua who are paid 53 cents an hour.
On the following Sunday, Dec. 10, many from the greengrocer boycott coalition joined AMAT and two busloads of marchers from the Mexican community for the annual Mexican Workers Day march across the Brooklyn Bridge to City Hall. This rally called for equal rights for immigrant workers and the official recognition of Dec. 12--a religious holiday in the Mexican community--as a holiday for Mexican workers. Many came on their only day off work to participate.
Giuliani's police created another struggle by denying permits for the Dec. 12 religious procession for the feast of the Virgin of Guadeloupe for the third straight year. Despite massive, traffic-clogging marches for the New York Yankees and others, Giuliani refused permits for this annual procession, organized by the immigrant rights group the Tepeyac Association, which brings out hundreds from the Mexican community.
In 1998 and 1999 the city's attempts to deny march permits were reversed. This year, organizers converted the procession into a protest march on the city sidewalks. "There are other groups--rich groups--who get their permits for whatever they want," said Jose Magellan Reyes, Tepeyac's executive director. "This for us is a fight."

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