Community Rallies For Immigrant Strikers

Fair Haven immigrants striking at a metal factory won the support Thursday afternoon of neighbors and activists who marched to offer the kind of street heat they say is needed to combat employers’ leverage over undocumented workers.

The rally began at 4 p.m. at Cedar Hill’s busy intersection of State and Ferry streets, then concluded in a march to the factory gates.

Sixty workers in all have been on strike for three weeks at Porcelen Specrail, a Hamden factory just outside New Haven’s city limits that produces aluminum fencing and steel bakeware. The employees, many of whom are Latinos who live in Fair Haven, are represented by The International Union of Painters and Allied Trades’s Local 186.

As its five-year contract neared expiration, the union asked for a 75-cent wage increase, lower health insurance premiums and an employer-sponsored retirement account. The bosses have flatly rejected those proposals.

The labor dispute has been complicated by some workers’ immigration status. According to union members, right after the vote to go on strike, Porcelen asked for work authorizations and canned three employees who couldn’t produce the documentation. While federal law prohibits companies from firing strikers, any wrongful termination has to be appealed to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which now has a Republican majority appointed by President Donald Trump.

Figuring they had little chance before the NLRB, the workers have instead turned to community organizers to push back against Porcelen. At the Thursday afternoon rally, organized by the immigrant-rights group Unidad Latina en Acción, activists backed up the union members.

While a federal mediator is now involved in the case, the union is putting its hope in public pressure to speed negotiations.

“The exploitation of immigrants is nothing new; what has changed is the magnitude of the problem. As the Trump administration continues to persecute immigrants, we are hearing of more and more cases of workplace abuse,” said Kica Matos, the Center for Community Change’s director of immigrant rights and racial justice and a Fair Haven resident.

“The only way that we will succeed in putting an end to these injustices is by supporting courageous workers like those at Specrail. It will take unions, community members and the broader support of city residents to resist these attacks and support our workers,” Matos said. ​“This is part of the resistance, and we must rise to the occasion.”

Striking Workers Stage Rally from Made in New Haven by Steve Hamm on Vimeo.

During rush-hour traffic, about 50 people showed up at Thursday’s rally to wave signs at every corner of the State and Ferry intersection. Through bullhorns, they sang and chanted. One activist ran out into the street during red lights and distributed leaflets to drivers who’d roll their windows down.

John Lugo, an organizer with ULA, said he’d heard about the dispute because some of the group’s members work at the plant. So ULA decided to demonstrate ​“community support” for settling and signing new contract.

“The workers have been on strike for three weeks. Some of these workers have been working for 20 years at this plant, and some of them are making $10.40,” Lugo said. ​“This is the answer from the community.”

“¿Qué queremos?” Lugo asked the crowd.

“Más dinero!”

“¿Qué necesitamos?”

“Mejor seguro.”

“¿Qué buscando?”

“Los beneficios.”

“¿Quines somos?”

“¡La union!”

One woman heckled the crowd, yelling out, ​“Learn to speak English. You’ll get paid more!”

“We do!” Lugo shouted back, and he repeated the chant, in English: ​“What do we want?” Lugo asked. ​“More money.” ​“What do we need?” ​“Better insurance.” ​“What are we looking for?” ​“Retirement benefits.” ​“Who are we?” ​“The union!”

Another driver rolled down his window and cursed at them, screaming the f‑word. A few cop cars pulled up; the officers let the picketers carry on their rally.

Hector Zempoalteca (pictured), a shop steward involved in negotiations, said he hoped the strike made his managers realize how valuable their workers are at the Hamden plant, where they churn out coils of steel later stamped into baking sheets as well as aluminum gates, fences and railings.

“Maybe, if they shut down, at least we’ll prove a point that they actually need us as employees,” he said. ​“We have employees who have been here for so many years. This company has gotten so far because of them. We deserve respect as well.”

The union’s been willing to compromise, but Porcelen isn’t, Zempoalteca added. As an example, he said that the union cut down its demand for better pay to a 55-cent increase. Porcelen countered with a 25-cent offer, which another union members called ​“degrading.”

The union said that workers average $14 an hour at the job. Many worked there as long as 10 to 28 years, according to Zempoalteca.

One employee, Nemorio Romero (pictured at center), said he was still making $17 after 28 years of piecing together at least 50 four-by-six-feet gates every day. The pay is ​“very poor,” he said in Spanish. ​“Economically, it’s impossible to give my kids a good education.” He said he could afford to send only one of his two children to college.

Romero said he was proud to be on strike, supporting his coworkers. ​“I hope we get something out of it,” he said.

“They’re making on average $13, $14 an hour. No retirement. They’re paying 33 percent of their salary in some cases for health insurance. They have a $10,000 deductible” for a family, attorney general candidate Chris Mattei, who visited the picket line earlier in the strike, said in an interview this week.

Immigration Enters The Picture

As negotiations reached an impasse, workers said, John Fussell, an East Hartford attorney, filed two complaints to the NLRB on the union’s behalf against alleged hardball tactics.

On the night before the contract vote, Porcelen’s managers passed around a federal tax form that verifies workers meet the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate through their workplace coverage. But the managers misrepresented the document, claiming it was an immigration matter, Fussell wrote in the first complaint.

A week into the strike, Porcelen sent out letters to 25 union members claiming that their social security numbers didn’t match their names, according to the complaint. The letters asked for proof that ​“you are ​‘properly eligible’ to be legally employed here in the United States,” Fussell quoted the letter. ​“Should your name and/or social security number be found invalid, your employment with the company will be subject to immediate termination.”

Marc Bloch, a Cleveland attorney representing Procelen, said the verifications were a routine matter that had to be checked before tax season.

“We don’t believe we’ve intimidated anybody,” he told the Independent Thursday. ​“We absolutely do not want to lose these employees. We do not want to fire anybody. We hope they’re able to prove that social security numbers are correct. This strike is an economic strike.

“This is America, people are allowed to do that. If they’re all legal, all have documents, all have papers, they can come back and do good work for us.”

According to the second complaint, that didn’t happen for Jose Estrada, a union member. Fussell called his dismissal an act of discrimination because of Estrada’s ​“membersip in and activities on behalf of … a labor organization,” in order to ​“discourage employees from engaging in such activities.”

Bloch called that argument ​“totally off-base.” ​“They’re on strike, so no one can be fired,” he said. ​“We haven’t fired anybody.”

Estrada wasn’t at the rally on Thursday, but other employees who talked to him said Bloch may be right that Porcelen never issued a pink slip. Estrada told Zempoalteca he didn’t receive any paperwork; they simply told him not to come back to work.

(Estrada’s brother, Gabriel, a 19-year employee who’d worked his way up to management, was out marching with the strikers. He’d been let go because of his immigration status, a dismissal he called ​“unfair.”)

Representatives at Porcelen Specrail and its parent company G&S Metal Products both declined to comment for this article. Bloch said he couldn’t discuss the details of the collective bargaining process. ​“We have reasonable differences between where some of this should go,” he said, but ​“we don’t negotiate in public.”

An Escort Out

After an hour of sign-waving in East Rock, the crowd marched across the Hamden line to the factory. At the end of a mile-long walk, the strikers and their supporters crowded in front of Porcelen’s building.

Security guards, in all black, marched back and forth.

At 5:24 p.m., they escorted an exec to his Infiniti and out the front gate.

“This factory — and whatever comes out of here — it starts with the workers. In some way, this factory belongs to them,” Lugo told the crowd, as the boss sped off. ​“We’re not going to take over it today; we don’t have enough people. One day, we’ll march in, we will do it. But today, we just want better wages.”