r/antiwork

I demand that all charges against Chloe Freeman be dropped immediately and unconditionally. Every UAW member, every worker, and every young person should demand the same.

My name is Will Lehman, I work at Mack Trucks in Macungie, Pennsylvania, and I'm a rank-and-file candidate for president of the United Auto Workers union.

Chloe Freeman is a registered nurse who worked at Trinity Health in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In May, Border Patrol agents chased a Mexican worker through the city. He tripped, smashed his face on the pavement, and was taken to her hospital bleeding. While he was alone in the CT room, Chloe took out his IV and walked him out the ambulance entrance. She told investigators she didn't agree with ICE tearing families apart. Now the Trump administration is prosecuting her and she faces up to a year in federal prison.

This is a political vendetta. The message is, defend an immigrant and you'll be treated like a criminal.

This is part of the biggest assault on immigrant workers in American history. Hundreds of thousands have been detained and deported. ICE arrested about 51,000 people in July alone. Nearly $250 billion has been handed to ICE and the Border Patrol, including $45 billion for detention camps where men, women, and children are held without charges.

Though this is occurring, people are fighting back. 100,000 marched in Minneapolis. Neighbors are confronting raids in city after city. More than $30,000 has been raised for her defense. Working people are coming to an understanding that an attack on immigrants is an attack on all of us.

The same police state methods are being prepared for any worker who strikes, protests, or speaks out against war and dictatorship. We cannot count on the political establishment or the union bureaucracies which sabotage the call for a general strike in Minneapolis and has done nothing to defend our immigrant brothers and sisters.

Healthcare workers, form rank-and-file committees in your hospitals to protect your patients and co-workers from ICE. Auto workers, nurses and all workers in every industry must unite to stop the raids and deportations. Defend Chloe Freeman and drop the charges now

>Meatpacking workers: Speak out against the Tyson closure in Joslin by filling out the form below. All submissions will be kept confidential.

>About 2,500 workers at Tyson Foods’ beef plant in Joslin, Illinois, face the end of their regular pay on October 12, two months after the company abruptly shut down production. Families who spent decades working at the slaughterhouse are seeking food and clothing assistance, while laid-off workers struggle to find employment in the Quad Cities region along the Illinois-Iowa border.

>Tyson announced the closure on August 13 and stopped slaughter and processing operations that day and the next. Its state filing covered 2,495 employees; it was submitted no more than an hour before the plant’s closure was announced to workers. To avoid running afoul of laws requiring advance notice before layoffs, Tyson agreed to continue paying them for the next two months. Sanitation contractor Fortrex subsequently announced another 103 layoffs at the site.

>Laid-off workers rallied outside the plant after the announcement, demanding a plan either to keep it open or six months of severance. The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), which represented the Joslin workforce, subsequently signed an agreement committing it to cooperate with the shutdown and oppose actions that interfere with it.

>Tyson cited the historic shortage of cattle in announcing a restructuring of its beef business. It is also closing its facility in Eagle Mountain, Utah, and pursuing the sale of its plant in Pasco, Washington. The company said it would shift capacity to plants in Nebraska, Kansas and Texas, concentrating production at locations it considers more competitive.

>Despite losses in its beef division, Tyson as a whole remains profitable. In its third-quarter results, released 10 days before the Joslin announcement, it reported $13.87 billion in sales and $362 million in operating income, up 39 percent from a year earlier. It had $4 billion in liquidity as of June 27. Workers are being made to bear the cost of a restructuring aimed at protecting returns to shareholders.

>In its response to the closure, Local 1546 President Robert O’Toole praised the union’s “long-standing and proud union partnership with Tyson Foods.” The plant-closing agreement dated August 18 translated that partnership into binding commitments: The union agreed to cooperate with the closure, refrain from interference and withhold support from others taking such action. If workers interfered, officials were required to publicly disavow the action and order members to stop.

>In return, the agreement provided just one to four weeks of severance, depending on length of service, calculated at 36 hours per week. Even workers with more than 10 years at Tyson received only four weeks. The agreement also contained a broad release of claims against the company, including claims under the federal plant-closure notification law.

>Joslin workers need full wage and benefit continuation, financed by Tyson, and a fight against further closures and layoffs. Rank-and-file committees can unite workers across Tyson and other meatpacking companies, defend immigrant coworkers against raids and deportations, and coordinate actions through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC). Workers who built their lives around these plants must have a decisive voice over their jobs and the conditions of production.

>WSWS reporters spoke with former workers and immigrant support organization Akwaaba QC about the closure’s consequences. Many workers have made the region their home, raising families while supporting relatives abroad. The shutdown now threatens to uproot them, while immigration arrests make even the search for another job a source of fear.

>Nana Ouro-Agoro, president of Akwaaba QC, emigrated from Togo in 2008. Akwaaba QC provides language assistance, housing support and help accessing services for immigrants and refugees.

>At a relief center established for displaced Tyson workers, she said the organization was expanding food assistance. She described a couple who came to the organization for food and clothing after working at Tyson for 25 and 23 years respectively.

>...

>She said the number of available jobs, compounded by language barriers, could not meet workers’ needs. Moving elsewhere would mean leaving communities built over many years.

>“When we try to approach them to go maybe out of state, maybe Michigan, JBS in Nebraska ... they don’t want to leave the Quad Cities. They say, ‘We love the Quad Cities. We have our family here.’ This has become home for a lot of people.”

>The Trump administration’s assault on immigrants adds the threat of detention to the loss of employment. Ouro-Agoro reported arrests among Akwaaba’s clients, including asylum seekers with current work permits.

>“The fear is there, especially for asylum seekers. Those who have work permits—They are arresting them! They are detaining them. So we have clients, people who have work permits, who are fearful now: ‘Where am I going to go and find a job with my work permit? I don’t want to go far and be arrested.’

>“We have two clients who have been detained in Iowa ... and then we have one who was detained, and we worked with a lawyer and he was released one month ago. And now I got a call from someone who has been detained in Missouri who needs a lawyer to get released.”

>Workers seeking help after injuries and dismissals at Tyson had repeatedly encountered indifference from UFCW officials, Ouro-Agoro said.

It feels so silly for me to be ranting about this. Some people are years into corporate America while I’m only 5 months in. I just graduated college, I got a job immediately in a company’s HQ as a UI/UX designer. I should be grateful, I should be thankful, I should be proud… I’m fucking miserable. I’m miserable and blinking tears out of my eyes when I have to force myself out of bed every morning. Every Monday feels like a countdown to Friday. Every Friday feels like an anxious dread building till Sunday night. Maybe it’ll get better as time goes on, maybe I’m still adjusting, I hope that is the case.

Every older adult I talk to just says “welcome to adulthood”. There’s no actual optimism or hope or future to look forward to, it’s just a shitty reality that everyone sits down and accepts. Why is this the standard? Are people supposed to live like this? How do people tolerate actual years, decades, of this?

>Five miners were killed and two others were rescued injured on 1 October when a roof collapsed in an underground coal mine operated by İmbat Madencilik in the Soma district of Manisa province, western Türkiye.

>All of the dead—Ramazan İnce (26), Halit Ersay (37), Kerim Ören (37), Ömer Karakaya (34) and İsa Olcay (49)—were members of the Independent Miners Union (Bağımsız Maden-İş). İsa Olcay, who had returned to the mine because he could not make ends meet on his pension, worked in the same mine as his son. Mass marches and funerals were held for the workers. The miners’ deaths were protested in many cities, including Istanbul and Ankara. In Istanbul, police detained protesters with brutal violence.

>This new catastrophe, in the mining basin where the 2014 massacre claimed the lives of 301 miners, is neither an “accident” nor “fate.” These deaths are the product of the profit system, in which production is pushed forward under dangerous conditions, inspections are a formality and profit is placed above human life.

>Miners and their families cannot rely on the company, the state or the bureaucracy of the Turkish Mine Workers Union (Türkiye Maden-İş), which collaborates with them, to hold all those responsible to account. It is an urgent necessity for the miners to launch an independent workers’ inquiry through rank-and-file committees elected by themselves, with the support of experts they trust, and to seek to mobilise the support of the broadest sections of the working class. The findings must be made public. The miners must exercise, through their own committees, the right to stop work wherever they see danger.

>The Evaluation Board set up by the rank-and-file union Bağımsız Maden-İş, together with miners who survived the collapse, technicians and engineers, represents a step in this direction. According to the board, the collapse took place in the development roadway of the East-5 panel, which had not yet entered production. The company wanted to bring East-5 into production as quickly as possible to replace East-3, which had been closed due to a fire. To move equipment by monorail, it had the floor of the tunnel dug out. The ground beneath the roof-support props was excavated, the props were not set deep enough into the floor, and proper clamps were not used on the central props. According to the statement, it was known three days before the collapse that the faces were dangerous.

>A worker who was in the mine at the time of the collapse told soL Haber that the support sets gave way while 18-tonne conveyor pans were being moved through by monorail. “This is negligence, this is murder,” he said. A former İmbat worker reported that the company was notified of official inspections weeks in advance. As a result, risky areas were covered with tarpaulins, and work resumed as soon as the inspectors left.

>...

>The carnage in the mines is an international phenomenon. As the World Socialist Web Site noted in May, although mining employs only about 1 percent of the global workforce, it accounts for more than 8 percent of all fatal workplace accidents. This year, 82 workers were killed in a coal mine in China’s Shanxi province, and more than 600 in the Rubaya mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

>At the same time, a rank-and-file movement is developing against these dangerous conditions in the mines and against unpaid wages. In March, the Polyak miners broke through a barricade and seized the mine. In April, the march by Doruk Madencilik workers from Eskişehir to Ankara to demand what they were owed placed the miners’ struggle on the national agenda. In August, the Eti Gümüş and Doruk miners held out in defiance of a protest ban and waves of detentions.

>The fact that workers are forced to work, and die, under dangerous conditions testifies to the bankruptcy of the capitalist system. Today’s immense level of scientific and technological development makes it possible to organise production and supply chains on a world scale, under the democratic control of the working class, without endangering the safety of any worker. For workplace killings to end, the decaying capitalist profit and nation-state system must give way to a world socialist society.