From Illinois to Asia, Caterpillar stands with the oppressors of the world.
Heavy equipment giant Caterpillar Inc. settled its most recent racial discrimination case this May after a federal investigation found systematic refusal to hire at least 60 qualified Black job seekers at the Decatur, Illinois plant between 2018 and 2020. The corporation, which holds $481 million in U.S. government contracts, agreed to pay $800,000 in back wages to the affected workers.
The company’s history is littered with a pattern of systematic inhumanity. In a 2015, workers from the Aurora, Illinois facility sued the company over anti-Black harassment and discrimination, including white workers making racist “jokes” that referenced lynchings and Planet of the Apes, management punishing Black employees for mistakes made by other workers, and standard working equipment (desks, phones, and computers) denied to the only Black new employee of the quality inspection office. Black workers had brought their complaints to the company, which simply ignored them or targeted them further with retaliation.
A decade earlier, in 2003, two cases were brought to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) over racial and sexual harassment at Joliet and Aurora facilities. Racist aggression specifically included white workers and supervisors whistling at Black workers, as one would whistle at a dog. The company refused to take action when made aware of this behavior. When it came to the “constant” sexual harassment, both verbal and physical, Caterpillar not only refused to discipline the aggressors but retaliated by firing women who exposed hostilities.
Two years later, Caterpillar was sued again, this time for their participation in a particularly heinous act of racism, namely, the 2003 murder of Rachel Corrie and several Palestinians during the ethnic cleansing of Rafah. The murderers were “israeli” colonizers, the murder weapon Caterpillar’s D9 armored bulldozer — gifted by the U.S. government to its attack dogs in the Levant.
This was only one act of imperial violence using the tools built by this billion dollar company. A 2020 report published by Shoal Collective documented proven use of CAT equipment by the zionist occupation during the previous year, including, but not limited to: all 61 invasions of the Gaza strip, 41 demolitions of Palestinian homes, 3 demolitions of water systems, ecocide of at least 3,000 native trees, construction of 8 occupation roadblocks, and at least 2 instances in which the colonial regime destroyed the entire village of Al-Araqib. By February, 2020, the occupation had completely razed the Bedouin village of Al-Araqib a total of 173 times, genocidal destruction no doubt made possible only with the possession of CAT’s 65 ton beast. This is all, of course, only a limited snapshot of the corporation’s complicity in over 75 years of ongoing imperialist genocide.
But the U.S. Empire’s zionist hellspawn is only the inheritor of this cruel tool. The armored ‘dozer first saw use on the other side of the Asian continent, operated by the U.S. troops themselves to destroy Vietnam’s forests and facilitate the infamously bloody invasion. Like today, the military and its corporate contractors weren’t the least bit phased by mass condemnation of their brutality; brutality, life, and dignity, in the logic of capital, do not warrant a second of consideration in the race towards profit.
Whether it’s destruction of life and land abroad or degradation and abuse of workers at home, Caterpillar’s corporate ethic is a mirror of imperialism. Not satisfied with squeezing the sweat and coin of the people within the U.S., CAT, like other cogs in the monopoly system, hungrily digs its claws into the throats of our kin around the world. That is to say, the mistreatment and vile destruction wrought by one corporation is not an anomaly, it’s the rule. It’s only with clear eyed recognition of our shared enemy that the working and oppressed masses can uproot these poisonous weeds.
