Estimated 2004 sales revenue of $300 million. A sports car fleet estimated at $5.5 million. Six million dollars to name a stadium.
Does that seem like the portrait of an ailing corporation, unable to afford a modest severance package to its laid-off
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Monster Cable CEO Noel Lee would have us believe so.
In October 2006, Lee—the “Head Monster,” as he fittingly calls himself—laid off over 120 employees from the production and shipping departments of his company’s Brisbane facility in the Bay Area. The work is being outsourced to Mexico, where Lee expects to extract even greater profits for what is already an extremely lucrative enterprise specialized in high-end audio cables, home theater equipment and related products.
The laid-off employees are mostly Chinese, Vietnamese, Latino and Eastern European immigrants. Having worked as many as 20 years for the company, they now find themselves thrown to the curb. Most of the workers are middle-aged and do not speak English, which will make finding a new job very hard.
Lee acted in a typical capitalist fashion, treating his employees as nothing but disposable commodities. With 70 workers laid off less than a year earlier, this round of layoffs is the 5th to take place in six years. However, the most recently laid off workers were offered only four weeks pay as a severance package—a significant drop from what other others were given in the past.
Shaw San Liu, a community organizer with the Chinese Progressive Association (CPA), explained that her organization was contacted by workers who were angry at the imminent layoffs and the highly insulting severance packages they were offered.
“Just to be perfectly factual, CPA was also called by Monster Cable to come and do a workshop for the workers who were about to be laid off, because we have had a long history in the community of working with Chinese immigrant workers who were laid off from the manufacturing industry,” Liu explained.
Monster Cable clearly hoped that the CPA—a well-known grassroots organization working with low-income and working-class Chinese immigrants around different social justice issues—would simply assist the laid-off workers in accessing federal benefits, freeing the company from any further responsibility. They certainly did not expect the CPA to join the workers in what has become a militant struggle against Monster Cable’s anti-worker actions.
Worker demands
The workers are demanding the same severance package offered to employees who were laid off in the past—four weeks pay plus one week pay for each year worked—plus contributions to a Community-Worker Transition Fund to address the workers’ long-term unemployment issues.
“We think that by laying all these workers off, he has put the burden on society for the welfare of the workers,” explained laid-off worker Anh Huynh. “For that he owes the community some kind of a contribution to show that he’s taking some responsibility for the impact of the layoffs on the community.”
Huynh, a mother of two school-aged children, said that her family is now struggling to pay rent and other bills after eleven years of hard and dedicated work soldering cables, packing and providing team leadership. Despite the personal hardship caused by her layoff, Huynh is not giving up the fight.
Given their many years of hard work and the millions of dollar in wealth they have created for Lee, the demands of the workers are at best quite modest. Yet Lee refused to give in one inch, which forced the workers to escalate the struggle.
In February, the workers called a boycott of Monster Cable products, staging pickets outside the Apple Stores in San Francisco and, more recently, in Burlingame. With English and Chinese chants such as, “Monster took the loot and gave us the boot,” the workers pass out flyers and talk to passersby and customers about their fight.
Apple is a major reseller of Monster Cable products, and the workers are hoping that shoppers will support their fight—something that Apple has not done. The store manager refused to talk to the workers altogether during an April 1 Burlingame action, a hardened response that signals Apple’s growing concern for the impact of the pickets on their corporate image.
Liu explained that moving the picket from San Francisco to Burlingame was meant to bring the struggle a little closer to home for Lee, who lives in an extravagant mansion in nearby Hillsborough.
‘Monster Bash’
And bringing the struggle even closer to home, the workers and the CPA organized the Monster Bash—a March 3 action right outside Lee’s Hillsborough home. Nearly 100 people attended the bash, including members of Unite Here, Local 2, American Federation of Teachers, Local 3267, the San Mateo Labor Council, and a number of student and community organizations.
Chanting “Beware, beware, Monster living there,” the laid-off workers and their supporters refused to be intimidated by Lee’s security personnel. A company rep was put on duty to talk to the media, armed with handouts that falsely claimed the highly-profitable company had done everything it could for the workers.
It seems surprising to some that a successful corporation such as Monster Cable would deny such modest concessions to their former workers. However, the driving force behind a successful capitalist enterprise is no different than that behind an ailing one: profits. While for some corporations that translates into desperately trying to get out of the red, to others it means taking profits from the tens of millions to the hundreds of millions—something that can only be achieved by the ever greater exploitation of the working class.
The capitalist class, by virtue of the power it derives from the ownership of the means of production, simply assumes that it may do as it pleases to the workers without consequence. Struggle built upon united and determined action is the workers’ way of challenging the capitalists’ arrogant presumption of limitless power.
The militancy of this struggle has compelled even the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to pass a resolution of support for the workers, yet as of now Lee has chosen to continue ignoring the workers’ demands.
How much longer he will be able to hold out remains to be seen, but the workers have no intention of giving up. The positive impact of this struggle can already be seen.
“I believe they had plans already to eliminate the remaining jobs [in our production facility] as well,” Huynh said. “Only because we’ve been waging this campaign, they don’t dare to lay off those other workers now.”
