Strike Signals Rising Unrest of Immigrants

Guadalupe Calderon has a green card. Now she wants a union card, too.

Until quite recently, Calderon, a 27-year-old Mexican immigrant, was a well-paid quilt maker at a Southeast Los Angeles bedding factory called India Ink.

Then, in a swift series of events, her pay and that of 11 other skilled workers was cut 37%; she started organizing a union; and she was fired. On Feb. 3, the first working day after Calderon was dismissed, many of her 90 colleagues, including a number who earned considerably less than she did, and virtually all of whom are Latino immigrants, went out on strike.

Although the strike involves fewer than 100 workers, some labor analysts view it as a signal of growing discontent among immigrant workers in Southern California and said it points up the potential for union organizing efforts among them.

Unusual Strike Action

Richard Bensinger, Southern California organizing director for the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, said this is only the second time in 10 years of organizing in Colorado, Utah and California that he has seen a strike precipitated by the firing of one worker.

Additionally, Rebecca Morales, an assistant professor at UCLA who specializes in immigrant labor, called the walkout a “very important” sign of unrest among immigrant workers, many of whom make the minimum wage, or just above it. She noted that the cost of living has continued to increase, while the $3.35-an-hour minimum wage has not been raised by the government in five years.

“There is an opportunity for unions to tap into a situation where people are fed up,” Morales said. “Workers tend to act when they think a union will support them.”

David Sickler, director of the AFL-CIO’s Los Angeles-Orange County Organizing Project, conceded that until recently, Southern California unions had done an “abysmal” job of organizing the thousands of immigrant workers who pour into the area yearly and are only now starting to take the task seriously.

Union Formed in 1914

The India Ink workers asked Amalgamated Clothing, a union formed by Russian, Polish and Italian immigrants in 1914, for help in late January. The piece rates paid to Calderon and 11 other workers had been slashed by 37%, which meant the $80 a day they typically had earned was reduced by $30, Calderon said in an interview on the picket line this week. She said a company official told her that the cuts were necessitated by competition and a rise in the cost of materials. “The supervisor said if we couldn’t adjust to the cut we could look for another job,” Calderon said.

Indignant, as well as pregnant with her second child, Calderon, a Pico Rivera resident, decided to fight back.

After consulting with Bensinger and other Amalgamated Clothing officials, Calderon and some of her colleagues in the virtually all-immigrant Latino work force started circulating union authorization cards in the factory. “Within two days, we got the majority of the people signed,” she said. “Then they fired me.”

The soft-spoken woman said factory officials told her she was being dismissed because she had failed to repair a bedspread. Calderon said this was a spurious charge. “I was fired because I was passing out cards for the union. In the four years I’ve been working there, I’ve never been criticized for my work.”

A company lawyer acknowledged that wages were cut for some workers but declined to comment further on working conditions or on Calderon’s dismissal.

But many of her co-workers--most of whom are paid by the hour--responded swiftly by striking.

Worried About Firing

“When they dismissed her, we decided to go out because we were not going to allow the company to fire us one at a time,” said Graciela Hernandez, who was making $3.50 an hour as a sewing machine operator at India Ink before the labor dispute began.

“I knew it would be difficult,” she said. “But we’re doing it to improve our lives. It’s for our benefit,” said Hernandez, 29, who came here from Jalisco, Mex., four years ago.

Silvia Valladares, a sewing machine operator, said she was striking because she has no health insurance at India Ink and because she wants better treatment from company supervisors. Valladares, who was earning $3.75 an hour before the walkout, said she began working in the factory soon after arriving here a year ago from El Salvador. Like the other women, she said she had never been involved in a strike before.

It is not clear how long the dispute will last. There have been no talks since the first day of the strike.

Replacement Workers

The company has hired some replacement workers and Arthur Chinsky, India Ink’s lawyer, said production had not been adversely affected by the strike. India Ink had sales of $4.8 million and pretax profits of $125,000 for the fiscal year ended June 30, 1985. Sales are expected to rise to $7 million in the current fiscal year and profits have risen in the last six months, according to a financial report obtained by The Times.

Chinsky said, “The union is trying to bypass the orderly government process by trying to get recognition by means of a strike.” He was referring to the fact that unions commonly gain recognition by circulating authorization cards among workers and then winning a majority vote in an election. However, there are numerous instances where employees have gained union recognition by striking.

Chinsky declined to comment on Calderon’s firing, other than to say that “the union is using the incident to get recognition.” He said the company had secured a Superior Court injunction preventing the union from having more than 14 pickets at the factory and barring the union from “threatening or using intimidating language” in dealing with any of the company’s employees or suppliers.

Wider Impact

The union has attempted to broaden the impact of the strike beyond Los Angeles, using tactics generally reserved for much larger labor disputes. Besides picketing the plant, workers and Amalgamated Clothing staff members have thrown up informational picket lines at department stores here and in several other cities, including New York, Boston, Chicago and Atlanta, where India Ink’s quilts and bedspreads are sold.

Richard Rothstein, Amalgamated Clothing’s California director, denied that the union had threatened anyone. He also took issue with Chinsky’s charge about the union’s tactics. “The strike began as a result of their (India Ink’s) firing of the in-plant leader of the union organizing effort, which is not the kind of action you would expect from someone interested in the orderly processes of the National Labor Relations Board.”