Chinese Progressive Association, San Francisco, CA

Abstract

Chinese Progressive Association, San Francisco, CA* Alex Tom (bio) We're really talking about labor issues [at this symposium], but talking about it in a transnational perspective is actually really important because it gets to some of the root causes around globalization, imperialism, and the state of capitalism right now. … We were founded about forty-three years ago and the basic mission is that we educate, organize, and empower working-class folks, low-income folks—workers, tenants, their families. And we do that to build collective power with other communities of color. This is a principle of the organization—that we work in solidarity with other communities of color. This is something that came out of the seventies. We were actually very inspired by the Black Liberation Movement and also the Black Panther Party specifically in the seventies. … We believe in leadership development, organizing, and alliance building as a core strategies. I will get into what that means. Let's talk about San Francisco. If people don't know, San Francisco is at a very important crossroads right now of a widening gap of the rich and the poor. And for many reasons that's happening, primarily because of neo-liberal policies and the way capitalism is structured. Just to give people an example, a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco right now on average is over thirty-four hundred dollars a month. For a two-bedroom apartment, that's four thousand. A lot of people wonder how working people work and stay there. A lot of people shack up in homes, three to four families, or they live in a one bedroom (single-room occupancy or SRO) in Chinatown for very low rent. It's really hard; people are really struggling to get by. A worker needs three minimum-wage jobs even at the high minimum wage [End Page 79] we have now in San Francisco to have basic needs met and have a two-bedroom apartment. That's just San Francisco. The population of Asians in San Francisco—a lot of people don't know this—is about 38 percent, including Filipino, Chinese, Vietnamese, though primarily it is Chinese. It is an Asian city, although you may not necessarily know that from watching movies, but that's San Francisco. The API Council has done a report and showed that Asians have the fastest growing poverty levels. Thirty-five percent of the people living in poverty are Asian Pacific Islander. Since the recession from 2007 to 2012, it grew the fastest by 43 percent. Nationally, there are over two million Asians that are under the poverty level with a 37 percent increase. We organize a lot of different sectors from youth, tenants, women to workers. I'm going to talk about workers this time,. These are some quotes that we pulled up from one of our community participatory research projects we did in 2010. We interviewed four hundred restaurant workers in Chinatown and these are some of the quotes that came out. These are mostly monolingual Chinese women workers from China. Being a dog would be better than being a worker in the United States. They also talked about their [working] conditions. … We don't even have minimum wage, maybe four dollars an hour. Think about it, twelve hundred for an entire month, working ten hours a day, six days a week. These are present-day conditions. People always ask if these are people that are undocumented. These are folks that have papers, and this is to show that even people who are so called legalized and have citizenship face this high level of retaliation in this country. And this is really how the system is designed. You need exploitation in this system in order to actually maintain it. But, this is not what I want to focus on. I want to focus on positive things. We can talk about how we passed the highest minimum wage at fifteen dollars in the country, the first paid sick leave policy in the whole country, but really what I want to emphasize is that under this system there is only so much that you can do. What we really believe in...