Chinese Staff and Workers’ Association (CSWS) is a community-based workers’ center that brings together Chinese workers of all trades to fight for their rights where they work and where they live. In its 16 years, CSWA has helped to create an influential new model of workers’ rights organizing. Since CSWA began in 1980, it has attracted almost a thousand members; developed a board of directors composed of workers; and opened walk in centers in Manhattan’s Chinatown and Brooklyn’s Sunset Park. Most importantly, CSWA has shown that Chinese working people can and will take leadership in almost every key issue affecting their community.
Most Chinese workers in New York City are working under illegal and abusive conditions. While working 70 or more hours per week in restaurants and garment factories, many do not receive minimum-wage or overtime pay; waiters have portions of their tips illegally taken by bosses; garment workers have months of wages withheld and develop debilitating occupational-health injuries.
In this unregulated labor system, unethical employers use their ties to organized crime and their influence on the local police and media to silence dissent by threatening workers with harassment, firing, blacklisting, deportation, gang retaliation, and public denunciation. Ins spite of this, CSWA is activating more and more workers to stand up for their rights and to become leaders in organizing other Chinese workers to claim the respect and dignity to which they are entitled.
CSWA’s recent work includes a campaign for the enforcement of labor laws in Chinatown. Two years ago, CSWA kicked off this effort at the Silver Palace restaurant with a community campaign to win a fair contract and legal conditions in Chinatown’s only unionized restaurant. Its current campaign at Jing Fong, the largest restaurant in Chinatown, has challenged both the indifference of government toward widespread illegal labor practices there, and the community’s organized alliance of repressive institutions.
With CSWA, garment workers are leading the effort to abolish sweatshops. Thousands of garment workers signed petitions last year calling for the enforcement of labor laws. Three hundred came to a town meeting that – along with pickets at Jing Fong and a student hunger strike – compelled the United States Labor Department to create a task force targeting Chinatown’s sweatshops.
Sam Wallach was a member of the NYC Teachers Union from 1935 to 1964, the chair of its Organizing Committee from 1937 to 1944, and its president from 1944-1947. The Teachers Union, 1916-64, was for decades on the forefront of organizing for teachers’ rights, fighting for equal educational opportunities for the city’s African-American school children (well before the rise of the civil rights movement), and battling the forces of McCarthyism. The union fought against “sweatshop wages” and oversized classrooms; and for academic freedom and equal pay for women.
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the union called attention to the inferior facilities that prevailed in the schools with predominantly African-American students and published studies on bias in school-board-approved text books. The TU’s Harlem Committee worked closely with community activists, developed curricula on African-American history, and published a critical study of the “deplorable” numbers of African American school teachers.
Beginning with the years following World War I, the union waged a bitter battle against the Lusk Commission (which investigated Bolshevism in the New York schools) on behalf of several teachers who were dismissed for not signing a mandatory loyalty oath. Charges of subversion reemerged in the 1940s, when the loyalty oath, eliminated in 1924, was reinstituted. Sam Wallach was among the first to be called up before the Hartley Congressional Labor Committee, in 1948. A vigorous and inspiring defender of the Bill of Rights, Wallach repeatedly asserted that the Committee has no right to investigate personal or political beliefs. His eloquent statement, published in The New York Times, was defended by 60 notable thinkers and educators, including Albert Einstein.
In 1949, the state legislature passed the Feinberg Law, which demanded that the Board of Education seek out “subversives” and Communists and bar them from teaching. From 1951 to 1956, dozens of city school teachers were dismissed and blacklisted using this law, including Sam Wallach. The New York Age, one of the city’s African-American newspapers, wrote, “Two disturbing facts about the continued firing and suspension of teachers in the Board of Education’s drive against subversives are that the ax appears directed primarily at Jews and that most of these teachers have been active in fighting against discrimination and fo school improvements among minority groups.”