Employer Sanctions Workshop: Sunday April 1 // April 4 Demonstration at 26 Federal Plaza

H.E.N.S. is holding its first Spring training workshop this Sunday around confronting capitalist oppression through an interrogation of immigration law. 

The focus of this workshop will be Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA 1986) and how and why the law is an act of class war which must be undone for effective organizing to happen. There are two versions of the announcement below. Please choose whichever invitation you feel most interpolated by.
Employer Sanctions Workshop

Date:  Sunday April 1st, 2012

Time:  6-9pm 

Place: 93 3rd Ave. Brooklyn, NYC.

           (corner of 3rd and Bergen) 

(Take the 2,3,4,5,N,D,or R trains to Atlantic or the F,G, trains to Bergen).

What are the strategic demands for organizing across the barriers imposed by immigration law? Please join us for a discussion of employer sanctions and the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA). We will investigate how employers have used workers'

 
immigration status to suppress organizing efforts across a range of industries and how workers have managed to assert their rights.

 
Presenters will include workers of the YES car service in Queens who have successfully organized documented and undocumented workers despite violent opposition. Other presenters will include members of Chinese Staff and Workers Association and National Mobilization Against Sweatshops, immigration attorney Sonia Lin, as well as legal workers and organizers who have witnessed how immigration laws, nominally intended to target bad employers, have been used to disenfranchise workers. The meeting will include a growing coalition of organizations coming together to achieve the right to organize for all workers.

As we approach May 1st and find ways of working together across the barriers which have served to fracture working class movements, we must look closely at the structural impediments to organizing. The slogan of the May 1st Coalition, "Legalize, Unionize, Organize," must be elaborated to find concrete ways of working together beyond previous divisions of the left. The repeal of Employer Sanctions is a crucial starting point for re-invigoration of working class organizing.