Eighth Annual “Meeting the Challenge” Conference

Twin Cities Activists Focus on Corporate Globalization and Solidarity with Immigrant Workers

by Andrew English

Solidarity with immigrant workers and the fight against corporate globalization were the key themes of the Eighth Annual “Meeting the Challenge” Labor Educational Conference held Friday, March 17, and Saturday, March 18, at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.

The annual conference is organized by the Meeting the Challenge Committee, made up of grassroots labor activists in the Twin Cities area. Endorsers of this year’s conference included local and regional bodies of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees; American Postal Workers Union; Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees; Communications Workers of America; Graphic Communications International Union; Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees; Minnesota Nurses Association; Teamsters; United Auto Workers; and United Food and Commercial Workers; as well as the St. Paul Trades and Labor Assembly.

The official theme of the conference was “Organizing from Our Strengths — Becoming a Social Movement.” The conference opened the evening of Friday, March 17, with 200 person in attendance, over half of them young people. The highlight of the Friday evening program was a performance by the Solidarity Kids Theatre.

The 13 young teenage performers, presented an original play entitled “If Memory Fails You” focusing on the struggles of today’s immigrant families and their children against exploitation and prejudice. This year’s play was inspired by the struggle of the workers at the Holiday Inn Express in downtown Minneapolis, where leading activists were targeted for deportation by their employer after Local 17 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union won a union election there last fall. (For background on the Holiday Inn Express workers struggle see articles elsewhere in this issue or go to the the web page http://www.americas.org/action/index.htm.) The Solidarity Kids players portrayed a diverse group of Hmong, Mexican, Somalian, Austrian, Vietnamese, and Guatemalan high school students and family members who encounter and resist oppression and anti-immigrant bigotry.

The Solidarity Kids have become a tradition in Minnesota. Each year, the young members of the Theatre write and produce a new play on another aspect of the labor movement, which premieres at the Meeting The Challenge conference, and is performed at other union gathering throughout the rest of the year. The Solidarity Kids Theatre is financially supported and assisted by the American Postal Workers Union in collaboration with the Labor Education Service at the University of Minnesota.

Following the 90-minute play, the next item was a screening of the video “Global Village or Global Pillage,” a documentary on the effects of capitalist globalizations narrated by Ed Asner. The video was followed by a panel discussion. Speakers included student activists from University of Minnesota and Macalester College, and Larry Weiss, director of the Minnesota Fair Trade Coalition, a project of the Resource Center of the Americas (www.americas.org). The panel discussion was enlivened by a recent victory accomplished by anti-sweatshop activists at Macalester College.

For the past year, many college students at dozens of schools have engaged in sit-ins and other protests over their schools’ arrangements with apparel manufacturers to sell university-imprinted sweatshirts and other products made in low-wage Third World sweatshops. A central demand of the protests has been for colleges to quit the Fair Labor Association, a front for apparel industry corporations, and to join the student-supported Workers Rights Consortium. Activists believe the WRC, which is backed by unions and independent monitoring groups, will uphold stricter standards and more effectively monitor university compliance with anti-sweatshop codes.

Students had been occupying the offices of the Macalester College administration over this issue during the two weeks prior to the Meeting the Challenge conference. The day before the conference opened, the Macalester College administration surrendered to the students’ demands and quit the FLA to join the WRC.

Approximately 100 activists were present when the conference reconvened early Saturday morning. The conference participants were brought up to full attention by an energetic and spirited performance by the Aztec Dancers, a local group of Chicano dance artists. This lively cultural performance was followed by three reports on important labor struggles.

The first report was by Bruce Lotti, president of United Steelworkers Local 1028 in Duluth on the strike by 143 workers at M.E. International, a foundry which makes machine parts for the mining industry. M.E. International is owned by GSI, which also has foundries in Guadalajara, Mexico, and Tempe, Arizona. The main issues in the strike, which began August 25, are forced overtime and unsafe conditions (more information is available on the union’s website, http://www.local1028.allhere.com).

The second report was by Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 17 organizer Kate Shaughnessy on the continuing struggles in the Twin Cities hospitality industry. Shaughnessy announced that the master contract for 1,500 workers at nine hotels will expire on April 30. The workers are carrying out a visible contract campaign, complete with buttons, petitions and T-shirts. The main issue is obtaining employer-paid health care coverage for workers’ children and other dependents. The workers are preparing to engage in mass picketing on May 1 if there isn’t a contract settlement.

The third report was by Jay Berger, an activist in Teamsters for a Democratic Union, who spoke about the national Teamster strike at the Overnite trucking company. Jay reported that members of his local, who work for a different trucking firm, have joined Overnite workers in ambulatory picketing and have also approved a special assessment to support the strike financially.

The reports on local labor struggles were then followed by a panel of youth activists talking about the work of their organizations. The speakers included university and high school anti-sweatshop activists and anti-racist activists. Groups represented included the Macalester Student Labor Action Coalition, the University of Minnesota anti-sweatshop student group, YO!, a high-school based anti-sweat organization affiliated with the Resource Center of the Americas, and the Student Association for the Advancement of Children as People (SAACP). The SAACP has members in several Twin Cities high schools and middle schools. Their organization sponsors educational programs on the civil rights movement, including a yearly tour by youth to historic sites in the southern states. YO! is actively involved in the national “Sweat-free Schools” campaign, organizing high school students to pressure school boards into adopting anti-sweat codes of compliance applying to purchases of school uniforms, athletic equipment, and other items.

The next item on the conference agenda was the presentation of the Solidarity Award, which each year goes to commend persons or organizations that have engaged in outstanding acts of solidarity with working people. This year’s award was presented to the Holiday Inn Express workers and to their supporters at the Holy Rosary Catholic Church. The award consisted of an attractive quilt made out of various union T-shirts illustrating many different struggles. As part of the presentation, Kate Shaughnessy and Ricardo Morales of the Northland Poster Collective explained the history of the Holiday Express struggle and gave an update on the 9 workers’ fight against deportation.

Following lunch, there were two additional presentations. The first was a presentation by Nadia Marin-Molina, the director of the Workplace Project, a workers’ center which organizes Latino immigrant workers in Long Island, New York. During the 1980s and ’90s, approximately 200,000 Mexican and Central American workers immigrated to the wealthy suburban New York area. The immigrants work as domestic workers in wealthy homes, in landscaping and gardening, in construction, in factories, restaurants, and a variety of low-wage service industries.

The Workplace Project began as an organization providing legal services to workers. One of the major problems is employers’ refusing to pay wages for work done. The Workplace Project would sue an employer to recover back wages for the worker. However, they noticed the workers would continually have to come back with the same problem — either the same worker with a different employer, or a different worker with the same cheating employer. So the Workplace Project decided on an alternate method of struggle — organizing immigrant workers to take direct action by picketing employers’ homes. They found this method was much more effective in correcting the behavior of these employers.

Now the Workplace Project has 460 members. Each worker becomes a member after completing a nine-week course on workers’ rights which covers the minimum wage, overtime pay, workmen’s compensation, and right to unionize. The two biggest campaigns of the Workplace Center are (1) a project to organize domestic workers, who are often cheated out of wages or exploited by long hours (especially if they are live-in domestic workers dependent on the boss for a place to live); and (2) a campaign to defend the rights of day laborers.

The Workplace Project has pressured 5 of the 6 major agencies placing domestic workers into job situations to adopt a code of conduct. They are also sponsoring a project for domestic workers to start a cooperative employment agency run by the workers.

The day-laborers project organizes workers who stand on well-known street corners where employers commonly pick up workers for short-term jobs each morning. Non-payment of wages and many employers’ failure to provide workmen’s compensation benefits are major issues. Often, a worker injured in construction (or landscaping) is dumped at a hospital by a contractor. The contractor is then nowhere to be found, and his last name is often unknown to the worker. The injured workers are then forced to fend for themselves without benefits. An additional serious problem is efforts by residents of the middle-class and wealthy suburbs where workers are gathering for jobs to restrict the workers’ right to assemble and find work. These neighborhood groups are pressuring the police and INS to harass and drive out the workers. The Workplace Project is fighting for these suburbs to provide safe, regulated places for the workers to gather.

The second presentation was a panel of speakers on the fight against privatization. Shar Knutson, president of the Saint Paul Trades and Labor Assembly, spoke about the recent successful fight by Saint Paul city workers and community groups against Republican Mayor Norm Coleman’s sweeping privatization initiative “Compete Saint Paul.” Workers and community allies mobilized massive pressure on the city council to pass a comprehensive ordinance blocking the mayor’s risky privatization scheme. The key to this victory was the unity of all city unions with community groups, Knutson said.

The second speaker on the panel was United Transportation Union Local 650 chairperson Dave Riehle, a local labor activist who has been researching the effects of the privatization of water services. He spoke about the maneuvers of a French-based multinational corporation to grab control of the St. Paul Water Utility. Putting profits first over the delivery of safe water is a potential threat to the health of the St. Paul area’s quarter-million residents, Riehle noted. (See articles by Dave Riehle on this subject in the previous two issues of Labor Standard.)

The final speaker in the anti-privatization panel was Kamau Marcharia, the director of rural organizing for the southern regional anti-privatization group Grassroots Leadership. Marcharia is based in Jacksonville, South Carolina, and has worked with community-based movements in a series of anti-privatization fights in several southern states. Marcharia noted that the anti-union “right-to-work” South has been a magnet for multinational corporations seeking to privatize community assets, cut public services, and extract larger profits.

The Eighth Annual Meeting the Challenge Conference then broke up into four workshops related to the main themes of the conference. Topics of the workshop included “Beyond Wages and Benefits” (e.g., health care, affordable housing, child care); “Post-Seattle WTO organizing”; “Immigrant Workers Rights”; and “Fighting Privatization.”

All considered the conference a very educational experience which helped build connections among activists in many local struggles.