Visually impaired workers fight boss attack in Ohio
https://themilitant.com/2021/02/27/visually-impaired-workers-fight-boss-attack-in-ohio/
BY JACQUIE HENDERSON
Vol. 85/No. 9
March 8, 2021
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — “Not just those of us who are visually impaired, but
all workers, have to fight for everything we get,” Dave Perry, a member
of Teamsters Local 100 in Cincinnati, told participants at the Feb. 5
Militant Labor Forum here.
Perry described how he and fellow workers at the Teamster-organized
factory run by the Cincinnati Association for the Blind and Visually
Impaired have stood up to the bosses’ attacks. Workers slit tape;
produce exit signs and craft and exam paper; assemble kitchen gadgets;
and prepare products for shipment. Two-thirds of the workers, including
Perry, are blind or visually impaired.
Bosses “tried to ignore seniority and pay rates, and workers’ safety,
when they brought back workers after a COVID-related shutdown last
spring,” Perry said. “And they put some people on different jobs, at
lower rates of pay. They rearranged machines, eliminating the physical
barrier keeping workers out of a danger zone where cranes move huge tape
rolls to slitting machines.”
A high proportion of workers at the plant who are visually impaired
weren’t initially called back to their jobs according to seniority,
Perry said.
Some workers organized a petition against these violations and presented
it to management. “We are still fighting for safety, pay, and to get
everyone back in the building,” he added.
“I have learned over the years that you can’t be afraid to fight for
rights — to get together, and really go for it,” Perry said. “Only by
all of us sticking together are the bosses going to understand that we
mean what we say.”
“All workers should support struggles of visually impaired workers,”
Maggie Trowe, speaking at the forum for the Socialist Workers Party,
said. “It’s part of unifying the working class and rejecting the bosses’
efforts to divide us. The fight of the Teamsters in Cincinnati
strengthens all workers in our fight for our rights and dignity.”
Trowe, a Walmart worker, pointed to the efforts by Amazon workers in
Bessemer, Alabama, to win representation for their union, the Retail,
Wholesale and Department Store Union.
“They have won the right to a mail-in vote for union recognition,” she
said. Trowe said the bosses are driven by the crisis of their capitalist
system to push hard to defend their profits, attacking workers’ jobs,
wages and working conditions. And there have been some important fights
against those attacks.
She pointed to the example set “by nonunion miners in 2019 when they
were laid off by Blackjewel Coal in Harlan, Kentucky, and bosses refused
to pay them what they were owed with the blessing of a bankruptcy court.
“The miners blocked the railroad track leading out of the mine for two
months, winning solidarity from working people and getting the pay that
was stolen from them,” she said. “Last year miners at Quest Energy
followed their example when bosses failed to pay their wages, winning
the pay they were owed in just three days.”
Trowe also pointed to lessons from the historic wave of strikes and
organizing drives in the 1930s described in the four-volume Teamsters
series by Farrell Dobbs, a leader of those battles and of the SWP. Perry
said he enjoyed hearing that the leaders of those fights preferred a
short, page-long union contract.
“While some of us might have trouble reading more than a page,” he said,
“the bosses clearly seem to have more difficulty sticking to even that
length of a contract without us making them do it.”
“Taking part in labor struggles, protests against police brutality and
other actions in the interests of the working class, builds workers’
self-confidence and class consciousness. Only working people can resolve
the crisis we are facing today,” Trowe said.
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members against attacks by Marathon Petroleum — the largest refinery
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is critical, and…
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Emmett F. Fields “ Atheism is more than just the knowledge that gods do
not exist, and that religion is either a mistake or a fraud. Atheism is
an attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world objectively,
fearlessly, always trying to understand all things as a part of nature.
” ― Emmett F. Fields