Datelines

...They are maintaining morale arid finances with benefit film showings, dances, and their own anthem: To the tune of "We Are the World," they sing, "We are the strikers, we are from Commerce, we are the ones who need a better contract, so let's keep on striking...

...We've found that we don't need to be as confrontational as we once were," says defrocked pastor Douglas Roth, a DMS leader whose disgruntled congregation had him dismissed from the Clairton Trinity Lutheran Church pulpit...

...The Canadian Labor Congress (CLC) is making a major commitment to the strikers in hopes of gaining a foothold in the as yet unorganized banking industry, which employs 150,000 workers...

...If everyone donates one dollar, these women would also be able to enter...

...Until January 1983, Sprowal lived a rather prosperous if uneventful life: Married with two young children, he owned two cars and enjoyed his $65,000 suburban Louisiana home...

...You've come to the point where you won't even say something when you see terrible things happen.'" But the following night, he did say something...

...Strikers and supporters see no end in sight...

...We cannot survive by having people hold us by the hand and lead us through the system for the rest of our lives...

...More than 800 women from all over Latin America, as well as from North America and Europe, came to this four-day meeting...

...Gloria Bonilla-Santiago (Gloria Bonilla-Santiago is director of Hispanic affairs at Rutgers University...

...The Puerto Rican migrant farmworker faces many problems," says Cecilio Borges, an organizer for CATA...

...The organizing commission refused to budge, arguing that these women had been manipulated by the interests of a political party and were engaging in "a macho practice greatly utilized in this country...

...But its most impressive victory came in September, when fourteen migrant workers at a Cumberland County farm successfully unionized—a first in New Jersey...

...We went out to the beach and talked with the women from the slums about their experience as feminist organizers in their neighborhoods...

...Bank Workers Take to the Line TORONTO Bank strikes are hardly a common occurrence in the United States or Canada, but the one under way at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce here has galvanized the entire Canadian labor movement...

...She could not keep still and began walking around...

...You're crazy...

...Most of the strikers work in Commerce's VISA department, and since most of the VISA department's work is done by telephone, the strikers have organized a coordinated call-in—a "blitz"—to tie up the lines...

...In September, they were joined by workers from the bank's mail room...

...We see Chris as a major force, as somebody who needs to continually stretch the bureaucracy and the system, because we who are part of the system can get bogged down in it," says Marion Reitz, head of the Mayor's task force on homelessness...

...Many of them earn only $3,000 to $4,000 a year...

...And a group called the Women's Strike Support Committee drew 500 people to a rally in September for the workers...

...Companheiras," they began, "we are from a slum in Rio and are here because we were given a scholarship to attend this meeting...

...I left New Orleans with a couple hundred dollars, a car, and some belongings," says Sprowal, "expecting that in no time at all I'd have a job and get myself back in shape again...

...Both were reelected by lopsided margins despite the enmity of—and in Becker's case, official disqualification by—their international unions...

...Union presidents threw skunk oil in banks and left dead fish stinking in safety deposit boxes to protest "disinvestment" in the steel valleys...

...Unlike the U.S...

...They have traveled to union halls across the country, raising money for Pittsburgh's unemployed and drumming up opposition to big labor's complacency...

...labor movement, which has seen the rate of unionized workers fall to 19 per cent, the Canadian labor movement has kept a steady 38 per cent of the work force in the ranks...

...But now, membership in these activist groups has dropped by 50 per cent, and they have been forced to shift gears in their drive to make giant corporations accountable...

...Activists Bottle Up the Skunk Oil PITTSBURGH For two years, the radical coalition of labor leaders and activist clergy known as the Network to save the Mon/Ohio Valley and the Denominational Ministry Strategy (DMS) made people around the world think about plant closings in the poverty-stricken Pittsburgh area...

...If the activist agenda of the Network and DMS appears to have exhausted itself, the cause of uniting the employed and the jobless lives on...

...Eighty per cent of the strikers are women, and most are clerical workers who handle customer services, accounting, and the like...

...But the most controversial guests came from the slums of Rio itself, which sent twenty-five poor, black, and uninvited women to the gates of the meeting...

...He enlisted the help of shelter operators and religious and community leaders...

...Sprowal and his followers have bathed in a pristine business district fountain during lunch hour to demonstrate the need for public showers...

...Bad press is good press as far as it goes," says the Reverend John Yedlicka of the Lutheran Church of Our Redeemer in McMurray, "but bad press must turn into good product...

...The workers unanimously voted to be represented by the Comite Organizador de Tra-bajadores Agricolas (the Farmworkers' Organizing Committee), the syndicalist wing of CATA...

...It began in June when 235 bank workers occupied their offices, and since then the strikers have moved on to more innovative tactics...

...They emerged the next morning to the cheers of fellow employees carrying picket signs, and they've been out ever since...

...I'm saying, 'Get up off your damn knees and be a part of the solution.'" —David Davis (David Davis is a free-lance writer in Pittsburgh...

...The hazards of pesticides are palpably real...

...We are charged very high prices for food, beer, and cigarettes," says Luis A. Cancel, a farmworker from Utuado, Puerto Rico...

...While mainstays of the coalition claim the tactical turnabout was planned all along, many outside activists and former members take a more critical view...

...The new approach means filing libel suits and lobbying the state legislature...

...Joseph Menn (Joseph Menn, an editor of the Harvard Crimson, was an intern last summer at the Pittsburgh Press...

...The strike was sparked in June when the bank management docked employees two days' pay in anticipation of a labor action...

...If a farmworker becomes ill from the spraying of pesticides or if he gets sick from the heat, the experience is that the farmers refuse, to take us to the doctor...

...When powerless people try to raise issues, it's very easy to dismiss them," notes Sister Scullion...

...After the inaugural presentations ended, two black women stepped onto the stage...

...When she didn't, they picked her up and threw her out...

...There's a lot to be done yet...

...CATA is a farmworkers' syndicate, a farmworkers' movement...

...It gave me the energy for the time to say, 'We don't have to take this just because we're homeless.'" The Center refused to acknowledge the problems, so Sprowal decided to hold a one-day demonstration in front of the facility...

...When Roth refused to leave the church, police broke in and arrested him, and Roth spent 111 days in jail...

...The purpose of the meeting was not to determine which feminist issues are most important, but rather to give Latin American women the chance to exchange ideas about their conditions as women...

...He moved to New York City...

...He was a broken man," recalls Sister Mary Scullion, director of the Women of Hope Shelter, who met Sprowal that spring...

...He argued with the man who had tossed the woman out...

...At peak season, Puerto Ri-can migrant farmworkers toil seventy hours per week...

...I would meet someone I knew as a kid and pretend I was either going to or from work, or some bullshit like that...

...Becker and another key figure in the Network, United Steelworkers Local 1397 president Ron Weisen, remain overwhelmingly popular in their locals...

...In the dormitories, the narrow cots are almost broken, and the sheets and pillow cases haven't been changed for months...

...We're looking for a bit more of a positive approach," adds Darrell Becker, president of Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers Local 61, who served time for contempt of court after one of the actions...

...You're bums.' That day I learned that it takes a lot of courage for powerless people to stand up...

...But that winter, his business failed—and with it his marriage...

...The farmer often does not report the accident to Workers' Compensation...

...they are paid $3.35 an hour...

...We were all victims," she told us, "I and my son as well as the rapist...

...I ask him...

...The farmer doesn't care...

...Stop...

...The audience, which was more than...

...The counselors ordered her to stop it...

...Every Friday evening, members of the Toronto Labor Council march through a different Commerce branch, leafleting tellers and giving them a number to call if they are interested in the union drive...

...When her son arrived home with signs of having been violated, she brought him to a first-aid clinic, but the doctors refused to see him...

...More than a year later, one of the workers remains ill from the exposure...

...Letting these women in, said one member of the commission, would have been taking "an easy way out...

...Don't go in there, brother," shouts Chris Sprowal, a middle-aged black man in a maroon suit, as someone approaches the agency's door...

...A former student of Saul Alinsky, Honeywell adopted tactics that would draw media attention...

...Yedlicka, a former DMS activist, says the change is long overdue...

...It is late afternoon, and the men are talking about their first few days in the United States and the problems they face...

...They have conducted sit-ins at the 30th Street train station, and at the offices of Mayor Wilson Goode, Health Commissioner Stuart Shapiro, and Temple University President Peter Liacouras...

...They'll rip you off...

...Despite the negative publicity, Commerce, which has assets of $74 billion, has been intransigent...

...That changed me...

...The organizing commission had spent eighteen months planning their vision of a Utopian feminist encounter where women of different races, classes, nationalities, political leanings, and sexual preferences could share their experiences...

...All that day and the next day," recalls Sprowal, "I kept thinking, 'You're nothing...

...The group has also successfully sued the city in behalf of the homeless...

...I didn't want people to know I was homeless...

...They were saying, 'We're not listening to you...

...Sprowal decided to get out, to start again...

...To the surprise, and dismay, of the organizers, the theme of solitude was brought home in all too real a fashion...

...Throw me out," Sprowal challenged him...

...Jayne H. Bloch (Jayne H. Bloch, who lives in Sao Paulo, is writing a biography of Brazilian feminist Patricia Galvao...

...There is a bus outside the grounds with twenty-three other women from the slums of Rio who did not get financial aid and can't afford the $60 registration fee but would also like to participate...

...Puerto Ricans Harvest a Victory GLASSBORO, NEW JERSEY A short distance from the main street here, a small group of men walk toward town...

...Pastors barricaded themselves in their own churches and stood up in wealthier ones to read sermons about hypocrisy and corporate evil...

...Strikers have also engaged in "bank-ins": They open an account in a Commerce branch and distribute deposit slips to supporters, who all make $1 deposits at the same time every other Saturday morning and thus tie up banking business...

...The Homeless Elect an Ambassador PHILADELPHIA The street people march in a tight cricle in front of the Arrow Employment Agency in downtown Philadelphia, carrying signs that read We Tired, Poor, and Hungry...

...The counselor did just that, and officials told him never to come back...

...75 per cent white and 75 per cent college-educated, was taken aback...

...So opened the third Feminist Meeting of Latin America and the Caribbean, held this summer at a beach resort in Rio...

...How can we even think about our sexual pleasures," said one woman, "when our husbands come home, dirty and worn out from work, without enough to eat or a decent bed to sleep in...

...He has given power to people who are totally disenfranchised...

...Where are you headed...

...It was from that very moment when I went out that door and down those steps that I started talking to homeless people about organizing," Sprowal says...

...We exposed the problem," says former steel-workers' union president Mike Bonn...

...I think it is wonderful that women from different countries have a chance to meet and learn from each other's experiences," said one of the women...

...Sprowal is Philadelphia's homeless ambassador, a diplomat from the streets who carries the demands of the disenfranchised into the courtrooms, city hall, and the public view...

...The gates no longer separate us...

...They formed the Union of Bank Employees, a local affiliated with the Canadian Labor Congress, in September 1984 because they had not received a regular wage increase since 1981 —only "merit" increases...

...The Women Outside the Gates RIO DE JANEIRO "Solitude...

...They are members of the nation's only union for the homeless...

...We are having this meeting because we feel alone...

...CATA" stands for El Comite de Apoyo a los Tra-bajadores Agricolas (the Farmworkers' Support Committee...

...The women from the slums of Rio, though they never were allowed into the meeting, managed to benefit from participating in the gatherings on the beach...

...DMS's salaried strategist, Charles Honeywell, says the coalition "never tried to do mass organizing...

...Those participants who opposed the organizing commission's inflexible position concluded that if the Rio women couldn't come to us, we'd go to them...

...Perhaps not another word is necessary to define this meeting...

...They wanted to provide a tranquil and relaxed setting, and the shadow of the women outside the gates was undermining their efforts...

...They are opportunists," cried some, outraged that this "plea for handouts" was already disrupting the genial atmosphere...

...People went to jail, and the unemployed stayed in the headlines...

...He looked like just another homeless person—tired, old, and beaten...

...The bank actually downgraded its offer in the course of bargaining, and no negotiating sessions have been held since the strike began...

...Forty workers spent the night in the building, even though the bank would not allow food to be brought in or let the strikers call their families...

...The United Auto Workers has assigned a negotiator and a full-time staff person to work with the strikers...

...CLC spent $45,000 on two full-page advertisements before the strike and is now paying $300 a week per person in strike benefits...

...Homeless people must speak for themselves," says Sprowal...

...As president of the Philadelphia/Delaware Valley Union of the Homeless, which has recruited almost 5,000 street people, Sprowal wields clout...

...I don't even need to enter the resort any more because the companheiras that I had hoped to meet have come out to us...

...Other former members of the coalition fault it for not building a mass base and opting instead for sensational tactics...

...But he couldn't find a job, and as money ran out, he began living from friend to friend...

...You can't imagine how humiliating it is," he says...

...Workers still talk about an incident that occurred in the summer of 1984, when a farmer used dangerous chemicals (including ethyl parathion, which is Federally restricted) without a license and twice sprayed them without warning while farmworkers were in the fields and once while they were eating dinner...

...Sprowal remembers those long days and nights on the street and the hours spent in Philadephia's libraries, courtrooms, and hospital lobbies, keeping warm and out of sight...

...One bill the groups are urging the legislature to pass would require a $7.50 minimum wage for displaced industrial workers who land new jobs...

...Their confrontational tactics destroyed them," says former steel-worker Bob Anderson, director of the Homestead Unemployment Center...

...CATA was founded as an organization of farmworkers that fights for better working conditions and which will eventually be organized into a union," says Angel Domin-guez, CATA's director...

...I am going to CATA offices...

...CATA has helped us in finding better working and living conditions, to fight against the abuses of the farmer, to achieve the respect we deserve as human beings," says Carmen Jimenez, a migrant farmworker and organizer for CATA...

...A Bolivian woman explained to the beach group how she had organized a campaign to distribute milk to poor mothers in her community, pointing up a split among the delegates between those who wanted to talk about the problem of "how to meet basic needs" and those who were more interested in workshops about "our bodies, our desires...

...One woman described how her seven-year-old son had been raped in a bathroom by a man with a revolver who threatened to kill the boy if he told anyone...

...The group has initiated lawsuits and supported local legislation to protect migrant farmworkers...

...Jane Slaughter (Jane Slaughter is a staff writer for Labor Notes...

...In April of 1983, with $3 in his pocket, he returned to Philadelphia, his original home...

...Begun in 1979, CATA was formed to aid some 20,000 Puerto Ricans who migrate annually to New Jersey and Pennsylvania to work on the farms...

...In addition to regular picket duty, the strikers have invented a new tactic appropriate to the computer age— "electronic picketing...

...They object to favoritism and to widely disparate pay for workers doing the same job...

...This is working within the system, and I commend them for that," says State Senator Edward Zemprelli, who sponsored the bill...

...One fall evening in 1983 at the Drop-In Center where hundreds of homeless fight for fifty basement chairs, Sprowal sat next to a "mentally ill" woman...