I just received an email detailing the whole story behind Chertof's dawn raids of Smithfield Packing plants last December and why they closely followed a successful strike by Smithfield's workers in November!!
"It would be difficult to overstate the importance of the strike victory by the more than 5,000 workers employed by Smithfield Corporation, at its meatpacking plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina—the largest hog-slaughterhouse and processing plant in the world.
The strike erupted on November 16 and ended on the morning of the 17th, when the company asked for a meeting and made important concessions to strikers' demands. The ramifications of this stunning victory go far beyond this one plant, one company, one industry, or one small part of the American working class.
Highlighting the extraordinary importance of this walkout is the unusual reason why they walked—to demand that Smithfield's bosses reinstate over 75 allegedly undocumented workers. No less remarkably, 1,000 of the company's 5,000 workers, 60 percent of whom are immigrants and 30 percent Black, along with the white minority, stuck together and forced Smithfield bosses to reinstate those fired—and to make further concessions as well. Here are the most important:"
The capitalist government counterattacks;
"Not quite a month had passed before the inevitable happened. As Smithfield bosses had confidently expected, the U.S. government came to their rescue. On December 12, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff retaliated against Smithfield's striking workers and the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), whose organizers had helped them coordinate their strike. Chertoff launched simultaneous dawn raids on six Swift & Company meatpacking plants, in six states—all of which were under contract with the UFCW.
The federal government's Homeland Security cops swept across the six plants, arresting nearly 1,300 UFCW members on the charge of illegally living and working in the United States. To further demonize these workers in the eyes of the public, he charged them with having stolen the identities of American citizens. But nothing was stolen. Because undocumented workers are unable to get real Social Security numbers, all they need to do when applying for work is to simply put down a fictitious nine-digit number. Thus, some of these fake numbers coincided with real Social Security numbers owned by real people. But nothing is stolen. In fact, the Social Security and income taxes deducted from the paychecks of undocumented workers are automatically credited to the real owners of the Social Security numbers."
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/janfeb_07/janfeb_07_01.html
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