While others in Los Angeles celebrated Thanksgiving by eating too much, three women and two men in the San Fernando Valley marked the occasion by not eating at all. Housed in a motor home and three vans parked near the intersection of Paxton Street and San Fernando Road in Pacoima, these factory workers are going hungry to protest their sudden dismissal by the Price Pfister plant that looms over their makeshift planton. Workers are angry over some 300 layoffs at the plant which have been going on since January of this year. The job losses are a product of the company's decision to shift ever more production to a plant just south of the U.S. border.
More layoffs are a virtual certainty.
By Thanksgiving, hunger striker Emilio Servin was in his second week without solid food. But on October 10 they called in about 30 of us, and told us there just wasn't any more work. And no severance. Some of us had spent our lives in that plant. If Servin doesn't find another job soon, he fears he'll lose the house he bought four years ago.