It didn’t take long for a welder’s cellphone video of a walk-out from a central Indiana construction project reportedly caused by an allegedly racist incident to go extremely viral.
Less than three days after 30-year-old Antoine Dangerfield posted his video on YouTube on Aug. 1, it had more than 800,000 views.
Jacobin reports that Dangerfield worked for a construction contractor building a UPS hub. On Tuesday, he says that a small number of Latino workers (millwrights, welders, and conveyor installers, in his telling) working for a different contractor but in the same hub were ordered home after disobeying the orders of a white boss he calls racist.
In response, the entire group of workers — over a hundred, in Dangerfield’s estimation — walked out.
Dangerfield caught their wildcat strike on camera at the moment they walked off the job. In his video, he is positively giddy watching them shut down their massive workplace.
“They are not bullshitting!” he says as Latino workers walk off. Referring to the boss, he says, “They thought they was gonna play with these amigos, and they said, ‘aw yeah, we rise together, homie.’ And they leaving! And they not bullshitting!”
After all the workers have left, Dangerfield gives the viewer a tour of the empty hub. He’s incredulous: “Ain’t no grinding, cutting, welding — this motherfucker dead-ass quiet. The Mexicans shut this motherfucker down.”
UPS is building a $260 million hub in Plainfield.
