Letter from America – Struggling workers suppressed at the point of the boss’s gun

In Spokane Washington, USA, a stunning union struggle has been taking place with little national attention.

Workers at Ruby Ridge Dairy workers have been laboring under horrendous conditions: workers have had to work 12 hour days without breaks, drink from the same water barrels as the cows, and put up with abusive language and racial slurs. When finally they could put up with it no longer and demanded fair treatment, the owner, Dick Bengen, confronted them with a gun. This latterday Jay Gould has even been quoted as saying, “This rifle is for those people with the union”.

In pursuit of better working conditions, the Ruby Ridge workers approached the the factory creditor, Northwest Farm Credit Services asking them to cut funding until work conditions improved. Having met with no response the United Farm Workers union returned to NFCS with 30,000 signatures. As a result, 12 workers were fired from the dairy, and nothing has been done to help them.

To make a nightmarish situation worse even worse, on February 17 Ruby Ridge Dairy made good on it’s threat to sue 17 workers. This is clearly a campaign of intimidation to frighten the outraged workers into keeping their

mouths shut. The UFW, it must be said, have been highly ineffectual. Although a major union they are beholden to Democratic Party bosses, and have done little to help beyond providing a bit of publicity.

This is further evidence that the workers in the United States, as elsewhere in the world, will need to rebuild their unions so they are able to effectively express the class interests of their members. This means fighting to establish broader and broader connections between different sectors; reaching out beyond the narrow confines of the factor and the workplace; beyond particular sectors and regions in order to build once again the ‘one big union’. But unlike its illustrous predecessor, which forgot that the working class needs to fight both on the economic and poitical fronts, this class union will have to accept that the working class has its own political programme, and its own political party, and the goals of both will only be obtained when they both work together, and understand each others’ respective roles in the struggle.