Protesting a toxic corporation

STUDENT, COMMUNITY and labor activists in Urbana-Champaign, Ill., continued their campaign to support a union drive at Flex-N-Gate factory with an April 26 march and rally on the University of Illinois (UIUC) campus.

The demonstration was outside the Khan Annex, an addition to the Applied Health Sciences building built with $10 million donated by Shahid Khan, the multibillionaire owner of Flex-N-Gate.

The irony that Khan has donated money toward health education on campus is lost on no one. At the plant in Urbana, employees work with hexavalent chromium, a highly toxic substance that can cause respiratory illnesses. They say they are often not given proper protective gear against inhaling the substance, nor to avoid other types of injury at the plant.

They also say they have no means to complain about health and safety hazards, nor to receive compensation for health-related needs--because many are immigrant workers, often Congolese or Latinos.

According to the United Auto Workers, which is sponsoring a union drive at Flex-N-Gate facilities around the country, workers have identified more than 30 violations of federal government workplace standards at the Urbana plant and have filed several complaints with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), but nothing has changed.

According to supporters, in a move aimed at blocking unionization, the company makes a regular practice of hiring a workforce that is divided along language lines. One-third of workers at the Urbana plant, for example, are French-speaking Congolese, one-third are Spanish-speaking immigrants from Latin America, and another third are English-speaking African Americans and whites.

Because many of the Congolese workers support the UAW's unionization drive and are active in it, the corporation has reportedly retaliated against them--both indirectly (by getting its landlord cronies, who happen to rent to some of the Congolese, to threaten eviction) and directly (by refusing to hire more Congolese workers through their temp agency, which acts as a middleman between the company and its prospective and returning employees).

This aggressive behavior set the context for the march and rally on April 26, which was organized by campus labor groups, including the Graduate Employees Organization, which successfully struck for tuition waivers in the fall of 2010; the Undergraduate Graduate Alliance, which formed out of that strike; and SEIU Local 73, which represents building and food service workers on campus). Some of the Flex-N-Gate workers spoke and led the crowd in chanting "Power to the people!"

The theme of the rally was to point out Khan's hypocrisy in failing to respond to employees' health and safety concerns, whil donating to health education on campus and in the community. A fake trophy made out of "chromed" aluminum foil parodied the awards that the university keeps giving Khan, one of which he will receive at this year's graduation ceremony.

"With the help of the community," said one Flex-N-Gate worker who wished to remain anonymous, "this public pressure can push Khan to think like a human being."

Community organization has been instrumental in creating publicity for the union drive. Khan's deep financial connections with the UIUC campus have created a point of leverage for public pressure. We planning showing Kahn that we won't let his corporation poison workers and our community.