2-17-08, 9:30 am

BERKELEY, CA - 12FEBRUARY08 - Foundry workers from the Pacific Steel plant demonstrate outside a meeting of the Berkeley City Council, protesting a measure that could lead to the factory's closure.

The foundry workers are mostly Mexican and Asian immigrants and African Americans. The workers union, Glass Molders, Plastics and Allied Workers Local 164, spearheaded the movement against plant closures in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1980s, and won an Industrial Retention Ordinance to keep an area of the city zoned for manufacturing

Pacific Steel is the only working foundry, and one of just a handful of manufacturing plants left in Berkeley, despite passage of the ordinance years go.

The cost of living and housing is very high, and the union factory jobs that remain in the city are some of the few still able to provide families with an income high enough to live in Berkeley and the surrounding Bay Area.




--For more articles and images about workers, see http://dbacon.igc.org/Work/work.htm

See also the photodocumentary on indigenous migration to the US, Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006)

See also (University of California, 2004)

Coming this fall from Beacon Press: Illegal - How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants