Harold Meyerson tells the story of Wal-Mart and other discount retailers exploiting their workers in California warehouses, and asks whether organizers can make a difference:
Like the Los Angeles and Long Beach harbors, to which few Angelenos travel, the Fontana warehouse district, which employs roughly 100,000 workers, is one of the key crossroads of the new global capitalist order, where Asian production meets American consumption. Yet it has stolen quietly into the landscape. But for the trucks pulling on and off the freeways (and belching the smoke that makes Fontana the planet’s fourth-highest center of diesel particulate pollutants), the warehouses — individually, in aggregate, and as an industry — are easy to miss.
“I’ve been living in Claremont [a college town about a dozen miles away] for seven years,” says the Rev. Chris Hartmire, who for decades headed a farm-worker ministry that was at the side of the United Farm Workers in all its battles and who went to Fontana this May to be arrested at the Wal-Mart warehouse’s gate. “But I never heard about the industry or the plight of warehouse workers. Nobody knew about this.”
