Oakland Strike Catches Fire

[Rich Winkel]

/** headlines: 136.0 **/
** Topic: Oakland Strike Catches Fire **
** Written 4:11 PM Dec 16, 1996 by josue in cdp:headlines **
/* Written 8:55 PM Dec 15, 1996 by labo...@igc.org in labr.newsline */
/* ---------- "Oakland Strike Catches Fire" ---------- */

From: Institute for Global Communications <labo...@igc.apc.org>

December 11, 1996 LABOR SF Bay Guardian

Oakland strike catches fire

Walkout at stamp factory sets off
political furor

A MOVEMENT that began Nov. 13 as a
walkout by immigrant Latino workers
in Oakland has created a political
firestorm whose effects are being
felt from the East Bay to Sacramento.

Following strikers' unsuccessful
attempts to negotiate with management
at the Rubberstampede stamp factory,
Oakland City Council members Sheila
Jordan and Ignacio De La Fuente are
calling for council hearings on the
issue. State senator Barbara Lee has
joined their efforts to resolve the
dispute, and Assemblymember Richard
Floyd plans to bring the Assembly
Labor Committee to Oakland to hear
testimony on the dispute. Strikers
say that even new assembly speaker
Cruz Bustamante has told them he will
demand a settlement from management.

The conflict has hit a rapidly
expanding company. Rubberstampede
started a few years ago as a small
shop on 10th Street in Berkeley,
employing fewer than 50 people. Now
it is an enterprise with four factory
buildings in Oakland and Emeryville,
and it employs more than 300.

Rubberstampede, which counts among
its customers such large retailers as
Costco, Michaels, Wal-Mart, and Toys
"R" Us, makes rubber stamps, stamp
pads, and small rubber toys for
children. It also produces a line of
stamps for the Walt Disney Company.

According to strikers, however, the
expansion has come at a high price.
Most of the factory's workers are
immigrant women from Mexico, many of
whom are single mothers who are paid
only slightly more than minimum wage.
Their strike resulted from the
company's attempt to speed up
production while continuing to pay
low wages. In addition, some workers
charge, the company has violated
their legal right to organize.

Last October Rubberstampede owner Sam
Katzen held department-by-department
meetings with workers. "In my
department Sam wouldn't let us speak,
only listen to what he had to tell
us," striker Amalia Cerrillo said.
Katzen's message, she said, was that
the company was switching from paying
its workers by the hour to paying by
the piece. "He told us he wanted to
double production, and that if we
weren't willing to go along with
that, there was the door," Cerrillo
said.

Another striker, Maria Angiano, told
the Bay Guardian that her job
required her to separate two
heart-shaped rubber pieces from their
foam backing, and then to push one
piece into the other. She was told
that under the new pay rate, the
company would pay one cent for this
operation, and it wanted her to
assemble 300 to 400 units an hour. To
equal her previous hourly wage of $5,
she would have to assemble 500 units
an hour.

Cerrillo said when she requested to
see a doctor after experiencing
symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome,
her supervisor told her the pain
wasn't due to her job and that if she
wanted medical help, she would have
to find it on her own.

"I was really afraid that having to
work much faster, because of the
piece rates, would make the pain
unbearable and damage my hands for
the rest of my life," she said. "Lots
of other women here have the same
problem and didn't want piece rates
for the same reason."

On Oct. 12 a large group of workers,
including Cerrillo and Angiano,
gathered in one of the factory
buildings and asked to talk to Katzen
about the switch to piece rates. He
refused to speak to them, Cerrillo
and Angiano said, and the workers
walked out the following day. Neither
Katzen nor the company's
Portland-based labor consultant, Rob
Tiernan, returned Bay Guardian phone
calls.

In April the International
Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's
Union sought to become the
Rubberstampede workers' bargaining
unit but was voted down, 114-78, in a
union-representation election
supervised by the National Labor
Relations Board. But on Oct. 31 the
NLRB issued a complaint against
Rubberstampede charging 37 instances
of anti-union threats that may have
affected the election. A hearing
before an NLRB administrative-law
judge is scheduled for January.

The situation has grown increasingly
tense. The company has hired
strikebreakers, and a number of
strikers say the windows in their
homes or cars have been broken.

David Bacon
** End of text from cdp:headlines **

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