Time to ramp up struggle for workers’ rights

By s t a r r
San Diego

Mailboxes are no longer crammed full of expensive election campaign propaganda. TV sets have gone back to the mind-numbing drone of reality shows. We voters were sullied relentlessly all summer long; it reached a fevered pitch by late October.

What did we, the workers and the voters, want to hear? What we have always wanted to hear — information. We didn’t want shiny campaign ads — we wanted details. Like how to figure out California’s budget shortfalls. How to prevent the state government in Sacramento and municipalities, such as Bell, Calif., from taking workers’ wages. How to restore mental health services, which have been gutted in recent years while the privileges of the wealthy remain intact.

But very little of this ever came up in the campaign. Instead, many on the right, and a good number of centrists, used so-called “illegal immigration” as their primary talking point. Their goal was to divide and conquer.

To this writer’s knowledge no California candidate took a stand against racist Arizona law SB 1070, nor vowed to stop rabidly racist Sheriff Joe Arpaio. A disturbing trend of violence against day laborers here in California can be traced directly to Arpaio’s influence.

Cowards, all! The candidates threw money around while Californians phase out of their own unemployment benefits. One in five children in California is starving. Three in five kids in certain communities report feeling hungry “on an ongoing basis.”

While it would be easy to sit back now, post-election, and listen to the silence, we must resist the temptation. We have got to redouble our efforts to restore workers’ rights statewide — for teachers, construction workers, line workers, day laborers, students.

A coalition of community groups is organizing here in San Diego, based on the Puente model being utilized with great success in Arizona. Community organizers there took to the streets by day, storming Sheriff Arpaio’s jailhouse in Phoenix, and to the neighborhoods by evening, talking to local residents, assisting families of the detained and deported. Activists with night-vision equipment filmed children left abandoned in cars while family members were detained and eventually deported. Food banks and “Know Your Rights” workshops serve local people who are feeling the hit of racism.

In San Diego we are focusing on the City Heights area, where many undocumented workers live in terror of raids and the threat of deportation. Their “crime”? Working at a car wash or in the fields.

This is the sort of action that can combat complacency. Only those representing workers should get elected, until we workers ourselves take power.