Anti-sweatshop activists picket "Forever 21"

LOS ANGELES - Comrades from the Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist League recently participated in a series of actions supporting immigrant workers' demand for back wages, overtime pay, and decent working conditions. The actions' main target of the campaign is the Forever 21/Fashion 21 chain of retail clothing stores.

The owner of the store has refused to pay workers thousands of dollars of overtime and regular time wages. Led by Sweatshop Watch, the workers and their allies in Southern California picketed various Forever 21 stores during the Christmas holiday shopping season.

The workers have also held solidarity actions with workers from UNITE! who have picketed locations of the GAP, which are also produced under sweatshop- labor conditions. One of the realities that that workers have learned in their struggle against Forever 21/Fashion 21 is that the store owner has allies in the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). During the many weeks that activists have picketed the Highland Park-branch of Forever 21/Fahion 21, LAPD has kept a close eye on the demonstrators. Representatives of the National Lawyer's Guild were present to provide legal security. Managers of the store have come out and have cursed and shouted vulgarities at the workers while the cops watched. The actions against the Forever 21/Fashion 21 chain have served an educational and organizational purpose. People in the Highland Park and Glendale, California cities have received thousands of leaflets explaining the realities facing the immigrant workers: Low wages, work with minimum breaks, threats by garment factory owners against garment workers, etc. Amerikan capitalists use these workers' undocumented status to drive down their wages and keep them unorganized. All workers, internationally, should have certain basic rights protected, such as the right to organize freely, an international minimum wage and an international maximum work week length. Workers in the oppressed countries do not enjoy these rights and work in conditions of semi-slavery. Individual struggles aimed at securing these rights are just, winnable, and progressive. However, at this time there are plenty wannabe middlemen or "gatekeepers" around the world willing to keep "their" workers down with force for a share in the imperialists' profits. That's why hourly apparel wages in El Salvador are 59 cents per hour. In Bangladesh they are 15 cents per hour.(1) So Amerikan monopoly capitalists don't have to look to far to find cheap labor. This is why MIM thinks it will take more than "pressure from civil society" against individual capitalists to secure survival rights for workers. Reforms at the government level -- the level of organized force -- will be much more effective. While MIM sees some possibility for reforms such as an international minimum wage even under bourgeois rule,(2,3) ultimately only socialism and proletarian rule will ensure basic survival rights for the proletariat. Workers in industries dominated by undocumented immigrants (such as garment manufacture) are exploited and constitute a proletariat within U.$. borders.

Immigrants also have close social ties to their home countries. These factors give them an interest in socialist revolution. On the other hand, the majority of "workers" in the United $tates are not exploited. They share in super- profits stolen by the Amerikan imperialists from the oppressed nations; the average U.$. "worker" makes $16.40 per hour while the average Third World worker makes workers $0.48. Amerikan "workers" form a new kind of petit bourgeoisie.(3)

A majority of white "workers" are in traditional white-collar jobs. While we approve of the work groups like UNITE! do in connection to sweatshops in the Third World, we don't like the fact that labor aristocracy issues from the imperialist countries (such as raising the Amerikan minimum wage or grandstanding about "fast-track" legislation) have been thrown in as well. These issues have a heavy reformist bent that will sidetrack people. September 11 made the costs of this reformist bent clear. Mainstream Amerikan unions such as the AFL-CIO took the lead calling for war. Machinists' leader President R. Thomas Buffenbarger put it this way: "Today, IAM members return to work. They will be prepping the planes that can just as easily carry troops to the farthest reaches of the earth. They will be building the F-15, F-16, F-18 and F-22's that will impose a new reality on those who have dared attack us. "For it is not simply justice we seek. It is vengeance, pure and complete." MIM has called on anti-sweatshop student activist to publicly break with warmongering unions.(4)

Notes:
1. "Vietnamese workers win partial victory," MIM Notes 232, 15 Apr 2001.
2. See, for example, our campaign against "Operation Gatekeeper" and repressive immigration restrictions,
http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/cal/OpenBorder.htm.
3. Imperialism and its Class Structure 1997, sections C.4. and C.6.,
http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/mt/imp97/
4. MIM Notes 246, 15 Nov 2001.