‘Filipino Workers Organize in New York’ by Angel L. Mondejar from the Daily Worker. Vol. 10 No. 56. March 7, 1933.

N.Y. Exploited Filipinos Join With Anti-Imperialists

NEW YORK. —The newly-formed Filipino Anti-Imperialist League is becoming a center of struggle for Filipino workers in New York against a number of special forms of exploitation practiced on them by U.S. and Filipino businessmen and landlords here.

Slavery In New York

Filipino business men set up boarding houses or their own people, take in workers, run their own employment agencies, and practically rent out the worker to get his wages and pay rent to themselves. A variation of this is where the Filipino boss takes the Filipino worker into his own home, and segregates him there, to be handed over to the Filipino employment agency when wanted. To keep the worker penniless and in control, they sometimes run gambling games in the private apartments.

The Filipino workers chiefly subjected to this “crimp” system are those who work on merchant ships.

The American dance hall owners around 34th Street and Third Avenue, and 28th Street and Sixth Avenue, keep in touch with the Filipino petty bourgeois, and the lonely and helpless Filipino worker is steered down there to be shorn of his money whenever he has any left. Lack of social equality for the Filipino worker and racial barriers of all sorts help to keep him in control and make him an easier victim. Even places of recreation for American sailors often bar out the Filipino seamen and drive him into the traps set by American and Filipino resort owners.

Must Have Club House

One of the first things to be done is, that the Filipino Anti-Imperialist League should establish a club house where the Filipino workers can meet, out of the grip of those who prey on them.

The Filipino Anti -Imperialist League, of New York, appeals to all loyal supporters as well as sympathizers to the movement to co-operate with us in our coming affair to be held at Lenruth Hall, 157 Waverly Avenue, Brooklyn, Saturday, March 11, at 8 p.m., to raise funds.

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924. National and City (New York and environs) editions exist

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