CHICAGO — On the Mauser Packaging Solutions plant floor, laborers do the dirty work of reconditioning steel containers used to transport chemicals. The workers blast residue off the “dirties,” clean them and repaint them to be used again. As they work, the chemicals in the air irritate their eyes.

But for the last 12 weeks, the workers, many of whom are Latino immigrants, haven’t been cleaning or painting anything inside the facility at the end of a quiet residential street in Little Village. Instead they have been outside the plant picketing, demanding the company provide them with safer workplace conditions — and protect them from federal immigration enforcement raids.

More than 100 workers, members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 705, have struck through the summer’s heat and storms for their demands. And this Labor Day, as Chicago braces for the possibility of a federal immigration crackdown this week, they are still out on the line.

The workers have won support from powerful Democratic allies, including Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, U.S. Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García and Vermont’s Sen. Bernie Sanders. But so far, they say, Oak Brook-based Mauser hasn’t met their demands.

Workers unanimously rejected the company’s last, best and final contract offer to the union last month, according to the Teamsters. Their contract expired at the end of April, and they walked off the job in June over allegations of unfair labor practices on the part of the company.

“Mauser Packaging Solutions is aware of the concerns raised by members of Teamsters Local 705,” Kimberly Braam, a spokesperson for the company, wrote in an email in response to a detailed list of questions from the Tribune. “We are committed to negotiating a fair and sustainable collective agreement with employees.”

On the strike line last week, workers told the Tribune their main concerns aren’t financial. They work through unbearably hot conditions inside the plant in the summer, they say. The ventilation is poor. They aren’t always given sufficient uniforms, they say, meaning they are sometimes forced to work around the chemicals in their own clothes and take them home to wash with their families’ laundry.

The Mauser plant, worker José Manuel Ruiz said, is like a “prison.”

“Because they’re watching everything we do — where you go, what you did, why you’re there, if you went to the bathroom, even how long you were in there,” he said in Spanish.

Like Ruiz, 58, most of the Mauser workers are Latino, and many of them are immigrants. Some live near the plant in Little Village, a neighborhood that has been gripped by the fear of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown since early this year.

One of the main sticking points in the negotiations is over immigration protections.

The workers want Mauser to agree to not to allow U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers onto its property unless the officials have a signed judicial warrant. The company has refused to agree to that stipulation, said Nico Coronado, Local 705’s chief negotiator. He said Mauser had offered language that would give workers more time to address inconsistencies between their Social Security and I-9 employment eligibility verification documents.

“We don’t understand why they don’t want to put this language in, because we’re their workers,” said Arturo Landa, a maintenance mechanic in the shop and a member of the union’s bargaining committee. “We’re the ones who make them money.”

The parties also have not agreed on wages. The company’s final offer to the union included raises of 3.5% in the contract’s first year and 3% raises in each of the two subsequent years, according to Coronado. The union has asked for 6% raises in the first year followed by 4% raises in the following years, he said.

Since the union rejected the company’s final offer, the parties have met in one bargaining session, where they made no progress toward a deal, Coronado said. The union is open to negotiating with the company, he said.

The strike has dragged on significantly longer than most: In recent years, fewer than 10% of strikes in the U.S. have lasted a month or more, according to data from the Labor Action Tracker, a project of Cornell and the University of Illinois’ labor relations schools. Strikes tend to last longer in the manufacturing industry, but only a third of them last a month or more.

Landa, 45, lives in Little Village, where he came almost two decades ago by way of Veracruz, Mexico. Like many of the workers, he supports his family on his Mauser wages.

Landa has permission to work legally in the United States, he said. But legal status doesn’t protect workers from fear. Workers see stories in the news about people who are detained by immigration officials even though their documents are in order, he said.

The Trump administration has intensified immigration enforcement at workplaces in a departure from the policies of President Joe Biden, who scaled back large-scale raids in favor of investigating and auditing employees. Under Trump, immigration officials have picked up farmworkers, delivery drivers and meatpackers — and even some U.S. citizens.

Though the full economic impact of Trump’s immigration crackdown remains to be seen, some employers have reported to the Tribune difficulties in maintaining production levels without undocumented workers. Others have expressed concern that pushing back on enforcement tactics could make them targets for further scrutiny or audits.

‘They just see us like pack animals’

Ruiz started working at the plant not long after he came to Little Village from Guanajuato, Mexico, as a teenager in the mid-1980s. He told the Tribune that after decades of work there — most spent working before Mauser was the owner — he makes just over $22 an hour.

The Millard Avenue plant was operated previously by a company called Meyer Steel Drum, which was acquired in 2016 by Industrial Container Services, according to Mauser’s website.

Mauser Packaging Solutions was formed in 2018 by the merger of four companies: ICS, Mauser Group, BWAY and the National Container Group. At the time, Mauser said the companies had a consolidated revenue of $4 billion.

When Mauser — which says it has more than 11,000 employees around the world — came into the plant, company representatives told the workers they would be a part of a big family, Ruiz recalled. But he said that hasn’t been his experience.

“They’re only worried about lining their pockets with money,” he said. “They just see us like pack animals.”

At Mauser, most of the workers who are not Latino are Black. They told the Tribune they see the fight for immigration protections as their fight, too.

“They my brothers,” said Jeffery Bell, a laborer at the plant. Bell, 61, works power-washing chemical-stained steel drums, making about $20 an hour. He’d never belonged to a union before he started working at Mauser two years ago. “If this was a different situation, the shoe was on the other foot, I feel they would speak up for me,” Bell said.

The strike comes as the Teamsters’ general president, Sean O’Brien, has drawn criticism from many in the labor movement and within the ranks of his own union for cozying up with Trump and other Republicans.

After years of mostly supporting Democrats, the Teamsters’ political action committee has started giving money to Republican congressional candidates, including Reps. Darin LaHood and Mike Bost of Illinois, according to Politico. And O’Brien himself drew criticism earlier this year when he referred to immigrants as “illegal aliens” in a podcast interview with Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley.

“I think the biggest problem is people are trying to protect illegal aliens that come over here and commit crimes,” O’Brien said at the time.

Kara Deniz, a spokesperson for the Teamsters international union, said the union “can simultaneously support legal pathways to U.S. citizenship and make sure our local affiliates are fighting for any and all provisions that our members prioritize during contract negotiations.”

“Local 705 members have identified their priorities and we will fight to secure them,” she wrote in an email.

“I think one thing that Sean O’Brien and I can agree with is that whenever we’re going to the table and advocating on behalf of workers, we’re going to be fighting for a fair and just contract,” Coronado said. “In terms of any statements he’s made in the past, I don’t have anything to add to that.”

The Teamsters were one of the only major labor unions not to endorse Biden — viewed by many observers as the most pro-labor president in recent history — and later Vice President Kamala Harris during their respective presidential campaigns last year.

The international union declined to endorse a candidate for president, a move viewed by many within the labor movement— and the Trump campaign itself — as a tacit endorsement of Trump. When it declined to make an endorsement, the union released polling data that showed nearly 60% of its members supported the union backing Trump over Harris.

Shortly thereafter, a significant number of local Teamsters organizations, including the Illinois Teamsters, broke with the international to endorse Harris.

“We experienced four years under Donald Trump,” the Illinois Teamsters’ director of government affairs, Pasquale Gianni, told the Tribune at the time. “Dealing with the (National Labor Relations Board), for example, proved to be incredibly difficult under his anti-union appointees and policies.”

The NLRB, the independent agency responsible for protecting the rights of American workers to organize and form unions, has found its enforcement powers significantly weakened since earlier this year, when Trump fired board member Gwynne Wilcox in an unprecedented move that left the board without a quorum.

Since Trump took office, his administration has also moved to strip federal workers of their union rights and roll back a wide range of workplace protections in what it describes as the president’s “commitment to restore American prosperity through deregulation.”

This summer, Trump’s labor department announced a massive deregulation campaign, saying it had plans to roll back more than 60 workplace regulations, from rules that establish minimum wage for home health care workers to protections for migrant farm workers.

Coronado said the union is fighting for the future in Little Village.

“You have an administration in the federal government that’s coming after workers, but also coming after immigrants,” Coronado said.

“If you want to see what the front-line battle looks like when we’re fighting against those anti-worker, anti-immigrant policies, you just have to come down to 3201 South Millard Avenue in Chicago, Illinois.”

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