EDITORIAL
Organize Wal-Mart
If anything shows the AFL-CIO was right to
mobilize immigrant workers last Oct. 4, it was the brutal
government roundup of 250 janitors at Wal-Mart on Oct. 23. The
giant retailer, which pays its own employees sweatshop wages,
had contracted out its janitorial work to companies paying
slave wages.
Workers from Poland, El Salvador, Russia, Mexico and the
Czech Republic were paid under $7 per hour with no special
overtime pay for the seven days and 56 hours many were working
each week. Of course they get no vacations, no health-care, no
Social Security, and so on.
Now that Eastern Europe is capitalist, its economies have
been taken over by Western banks and monopolies. They lay off
half the work force, pay as little as possible to those still
working, and use the pool of unemployed they have created as
pressure on the wages of workers here in the U.S. It's what
U.S. monopolies have been doing in Latin America for a century.
They lure unemployed workers from poorer countries oppressed by
imperialism, making rosy promises which always sound better
than being without work at home.
Whether we're talking about workers in a steel mill in
Serbia, a textile mill in El Salvador, or those lured here to
clean a warehouse or an office building, the big monopolies
exploit them doubly and triply. The only way for U.S. labor to
fight back against this relentless capitalist globalization is
to help organize and support the struggle of immigrant workers.
There are no borders in the workers' struggle.
Reprinted from the Nov. 13, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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