One thing is clear now. Bañuelos isn't likely to win votes for anyone among the workers at her plant. They're on strike against sweatshop wages and working conditions.
More than 200 workers at Ramona's Mexican Food Products went on strike March 8, three months after their last contract expired. According to Rosa Peres, a young woman who makes tamales at the plant, a major demand is the 40-hour week. Many workers get only three or four hours' work a day at $1.95 an hour. Their union, Teamsters Local 630, is also demanding a 50-cent-an-hour wage increase, longer vacations, and dues checkoff.
Work is being speeded up considerably on the production line. Rosa Peres says that workers who have been making 17 dozen burritos in 45 minutes in the past are now told to make that many in 15 minutes. Many workers have quit, unable to keep up with the new pace. Some can't last more than a few hours.
The company, which does an annual business of $6 million, subjects women workers to humiliating purse searches, suspecting they might be stealing a few tacos.
March 29, 1947
Three weeks ago the Chiang Kai-shek dictatorship began a
wholesale bloody massacre of unarmed workers and peasants in
Formosa, through General Chen Yi, governor of the island.
Brutal suppression and a continuing reign of terror is
Chiang's reply to the demands of the Formosan people for
self-government and relief from the strangling rule of
foreign monopolists, their corrupt government officials, and
military depotism.
The massacre began on March 8. Some 4,000 people were killed. Large-scale arrests of Formosan leaders swept the island, many of whom were executed. Those arrested included public leaders, publishers and members of the National Assembly, which was to have convened on March 15 to present the demands of the people. This monstrous crime was committed by Chiang in the name of "preserving order" and wiping out "Communist inclinations."
The "sullen, bitter resentment" of the masses is so deep that on March 22 a resolution demanding the dismissal of Governor Chen Yi was adopted by an overwhelming majority of the Kuomintang's Central Executive Committee. Although such committee resolutions are usually mandatory on the government, Chian has as yet taken no action to dismiss the bloody butcher who is carrying out his orders in Formosa.