I work in a pharmaceutical plant in the Bronx. Approximately 200 workers are Latino and about 30 are black. When I told several co-workers I was writing an article for CHALLENGE I asked them what I should write about. They said, “the racism of the factory.” Guys, this one is for you.
When the manager does hire, he mostly hires black temporary workers, using them for the two months that the temp agency, not the factory, pays their wages. Then, when the company has to decide if they will hire them, the company fires most but keeps what they call the few “good workers,” or favorites that they think will produce the most profits for the company.
The night crew that I’m on has 60 workers,
almost half of whom are black. The morning crew outnumbers us 3 to 1, yet the bosses still have us compete with the morning crew for more production. The bosses even told us that if the morning shift finds a mistake from our work we have to find TWO mistakes from their shift. The night crew has always been pressured to work harder than the morning crew because of our small numbers.
Our boss tries to keep us divided from our morning-shift brothers and sisters, yet he fails to do so. We stay united on the same issues, like fighting for better air conditioning in the factory. Once it was so hot a worker almost passed out due to heat exhaustion. At a recent company meeting intended to be about how much we were slacking off and costing the company money, we spoke one after another turning it into a meeting about our concerns. We supported each other concerning the heat. We controlled that meeting.
This is why we need to organize to fight for communism; a society built upon workers’ needs, where the workers lead every aspect of society. Under communism our meetings wouldn’t be based upon the bosses profit but simply what we workers need to figure out to get it done. Bosses will be a thing of the past. We won’t need any bosses standing around getting rich off of our labor telling us how we need to make them more money.
Most of my co-workers I’ve talked to recognize the racism running the factory and dividing the workers. The bosses just made a new rule that divides workers more, giving us separate lunch schedules, and preventing us from socializing with one another. Some of the black workers on the job can see the racist ways of the company but blame it on their Latino brothers and sisters. I struggle with them not to fall for another “divide and conquer” tool of the bosses.
The bosses need racism, and not only to keep workers divided. When they want to increase their profits, they hire immigrant workers, pay them less and/or don’t give them any benefits, and tell us that they are stealing our jobs. In our case, the disproportionally black night-shift workers are
being worked harder to produce the same
extreme amount of profits as the morning crew.
Now I have four workers on my job that regularly receive CHALLENGE. They all really enjoy reading the paper. They love how it’s written by the workers for workers. They find it encouraging to read about all the other workers around the world experiencing the same racist exploiting cruelty by the bosses. We need to have these discussions on the job about what concerns us, continuing to struggle with each other. The only people we should be fighting are the bosses, just as we stood up to the district manager, for they don’t care about workers’ needs. Only a communist revolution can end the tyranny of these money-hungry bosses, and allow us to unite as one international multi-racial working class.