SPRING 2025
ISSUE 02

₁ Only basic knives and trays are pressed inside Michael’s factory. The rest of the items are sourced from outside vendors, followed by basic hammering, welding, and cutting the items to the desired shape.

₂ “Taal mel,” as an idea, does not translate well into English. It intends a combination of balance, harmony, and coherence. However, in practice, the focus is on sustaining a balance in the group while building strength as a collective. The practice of building taal mel relies on continuous conversations, coordination, and reaching agreement on the steps to be taken. We see the practice differently from building unity. The latter can be broken. In taal mel, the entire practice focuses on tying us to each other for every step and action we take.

₃ ESI and PF are social security programs mandated by the Indian government to offset the informal nature of most waged work. ESI is a social insurance fund collected from 0.75% (employee) and 3.25% (employer) of a worker’s wage. The insurance also provides health-related coverage for injuries, sickness, and other health checkups in hospitals that accept ESI.
PF is built on deposits of 12% of the basic wage from employee and employer every month. Workers can withdraw partial amounts during emergencies and receive the entire amount after retirement or death.

₄ Okhla has one hospital that accepts ESI. For workers in Okhla who manage to get an ESI, this is the hospital where they go for any checkups and treatments.

The general lesson of life, applicable anywhere in the world, is that all of us should have a sip of hot tea after blowing air on it. The air cools it down and makes it possible to drink the hot tea without burning our tongues. Workers undertaking struggles in India learn to blow air on their cold yoghurt – we never know what might burn us. We have gone through many political experiences as workers fighting for our rights. This is the lesson we have learned over the years: the only thing that matters is to stick together and persist in fighting. There is tiredness, obviously! Our entire lives have become a life of struggle, and still, we keep going. Why should we even think of leaving our jobs and going somewhere else? It is our haq (हक़; true and absolute right) to have decent work and be treated well. That is the absolute truth. And we are nothing if not honest.

For over 20 years, we, the workers of Michael Aram, have been gathering in Sarita Vihar Park, Delhi, India every Sunday. The location is convenient for the 15 or so of us who still meet on our weekly day off from work in Michael’s factory. Many have come and gone. In the past, our number would be as high as 50. Some were fired, some died, retired, or simply left the job because of the horrible pay and working conditions at the factory. In all these years, union organizers, intellectuals, activists, and journalists have also come and gone. They stood in solidarity, strengthened our fight, and continued their work for other causes. Working-class struggles in India are typically led by workers and lack institutional support compared to the United States, with its more formalized big unions and legal systems. Over the last year, we have started publicizing our struggles through a Twitter account and managed to get a journalist to cover us. Now, we plan to start YouTube shorts to access other workers and spread the fight. What have we not tried in our struggle? And yet we have so little to show for it.

When does the struggle end for workers? Our experience shows that each time the struggle appears to end, there is another round. Sometimes we know we have been defeated and need to start over. Other times it seems that we have had wins, but they turn out otherwise. The latter are even more challenging to overcome.

Michael Aram is a US-based designer, internationally recognized for creating “luxurious objects to enhance the everyday.” From his branding under Michael Aram, Inc., we are told that the “artist and inveterate entrepreneur is personally behind every design,” each of which contains “a celebration of the hand – from the original drawing Michael creates at its inception, to the masterful artisans who give it life.” Well, okay, but we haven’t seen him in years. Never mind, let’s continue! Michael Aram’s products, we should believe, “enhance the everyday” because they embody a “tremendous reflection of our humanity in hand made objects.” Marketing and branding of the humane artist at its peak. The enhancement of our everyday lives and reflection of our humanity means that a gold plated “Butterfly Ginkgo Bread Basket” costs USD 235, and a “Cherry Blossom Bath Collection” with metal flowers costs USD 130. The costs are justified because the artisans, meaning us, cannot produce two identical products from metal – hammering, buffing, and polishing lead to different results that we must be “mindful” of. Michael celebrates our mindfulness as vibrancy in each product that “engages the senses and sparks both contemplation and conversation.”

Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, Amazon, and other big retailers sell Michael’s products to consumers. His showrooms in Los Angeles, New York, and Miami sell the idea of luxury design and humanity as distinct from the sweatshop regime of mass market production. In the 1990s and 2000s, conscientious people of the United States woke up to the reality of the sweatshop regime hidden behind the Nike shoes they wore and the Air Jordans they aspired to buy. Sweatshops and mass products became synonymous symbols of hyper-exploitation of labor in the Global South. A market has formed ever since for those consumers desiring commodities with a humane and artistic touch. Michael Aram, the artist, and his workers – the “artisans” – fall within this trend.

Perhaps we are wrong, however, and this is really what humanity means. Indeed, Michael’s products in households across the United States are made by us workers. The selling price of one bread basket is more than 50 percent higher than our monthly wage (we earn roughly USD 150 per month). There has been no significant increase in our wages for almost a decade, while the price of the bread basket has gone up. In those years, the designer Michael Aram has hawked humanism and reaped revenues of millions in a single year. The Pope and English royalty desire his products. He bought a house in Palm Springs and even extended the celebration of his cult by opening a warehouse promising more employment for workers in the United States. 

Metalwork is not simple; it requires an eye for detail, carries a high risk of injury, and leads to gradual deterioration of health over time. Both the everyday and luxurious household products of Michael Aram involve working with copper, nickel plating, steel, a lancer polish machine, fiberglass, acid, and other chemicals to make the items shine, even out their surfaces, and get the metal pieces bent into shape for intricate designs, while producing smoothness. Working with our hands, we go through two pairs of company-provided gloves weekly. In 2004 we won a demand for filtered facemasks. Michael, however, stopped providing these masks over a decade ago to offset the cost of our successful struggle to become permanent workers. The sweatshop factory is divided between casting, polishing, finishing, and stonework to make the products look “non-Western.” Two of us work in the stone department, and the rest of us work in the polishing or finishing department.

Such intricate designs for manufacturing unique and luxury products mean various demands on our bodies. Take the Butterfly Ginkgo Bread Basket. Made from copper, the ginkgo basket is cast in five parts composed of petals. An outside vendor supplies the petals, using a press machine on sheet metal to produce them.¹ We then weld the five parts of the petals into a basket, requiring great attention and care to get the design and symmetry right. The basket is then treated with sulfuric acid for ten minutes. Then, a worker washes the basket with water and treats it with nitric acid for two further minutes. The basket is cleaned again with water and then dipped into chrome acid. It is washed once more. The acids used to treat the metal can burn our skin, and not much can be done about the noxious fumes that give us bad headaches and affect our lungs.

After these steps, workers begin the sanding process to fill any uneven spots in the metal before polishing. The polishing work starts with a worker using a wire brush, followed by a fiberglass brush, on the welded basket. This process smooths out the surface of the metal in the basket. Following fiberglass polishing, we buff the basket using a hard cloth to shine and remove any remaining blemishes on the metal. During this process, the faces and bodies of the workers get coated with dust. This often leads to respiratory issues, as we inhale dust despite the makeshift masks we wear. In our factory, we say the more beautiful a product is, the more health-related risks there are for us.

Our production targets vary depending on the size and detail of the product – round items, whether big or small, are easier to manage. However, the more detail and edges there are, the harder it is to achieve the consistency demanded by managers. On a good day, the polishing workers can, at best, finish three big items and around ten smaller ones. The lancer polish machine has a three-phase motor and is usually operated at maximum speed, posing frequent risks to our fingers and hands. Management, however, makes it a point to shame us for our speed and insist on constantly higher productivity. The machines never change or become safer, so the increase in production directly depends on working ourselves to the bone. We even have to fight with the managers over our bathroom breaks. They time our breaks, which is downright humiliating and counted against us when we fall short of production targets. In essence, this is how all working days look at the factory. We work six days a week, from 9–5, with a 30-minute lunch break.

Copper is typically viewed as a traditional or artisanal metal while a shiny steel product appears modern. Michael’s designs aspire to both styles, and so we work with both metals. Steel is easier to manage when it is hammered, buffed, and cleaned up to eliminate any spots on its surface. It collects up and is easy to dispose of. On the other hand, copper gets chipped during polishing and leaves tiny shards in the air that we inhale and which burrow into our skin. Copper also needs more intensive acid treatment, posing several risks to our bodies – especially when the management relies upon the speed-up. Michael still does not provide us with mandated masks with filters in them, and we frequently use rags fashioned out of our older uniforms as masks because the cheap masks provided don’t even last half a shift.

The difficult labor of such metalwork and its associated risks have led to several lifelong injuries. Most of us have suffered from tuberculosis because of lack of sanitation in the factory. Tuberculosis is common within the first two years of starting work at Michael’s factory and has led to many leaving this line of work altogether. One comrade strongly believes that his high blood pressure is from metalwork. One of our comrades walks with a cane because he busted his knee in a machine accident due to intensifying rates of production. After surgery, his doctors told him that his leg will never heal completely, that the knee will periodically hurt, and that he cannot put weight on it. Yet, the management frequently assigns him tasks that require standing straight while polishing, placing more weight on his injured leg. Another comrade suffered back issues because he was forced by management to carry heavy loads of finished metal items from the factory to the truck. His back could not handle the weight. Now, he frequently has spasms at work and in daily life. These are just some examples of how workers experience Michael’s “artisanal” and “humane” production.

Our struggles suggest two lessons. First, metal remains metal: demands for better wages, benefits, etc. ultimately remain insufficient because the labor process remains hazardous. Protective gear limits the hazardous nature of work, but it doesn’t transform the process in meaningful ways for workers and their physical health. Second, in times of a rise of “ethical” and “humane” production, the labor movement needs to be vigilant of where and how production really happens. Time-intensive designer products manage their profits in the market by relying on cheaper and cheaper labor, with barely any union protections, in the Global South. This reality is far more common than is often realized.

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We are migrant workers in Delhi, India, from rural parts of neighboring states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Jharkhand. Delhi’s labor ministers identify these states as catchment areas for the migrant workers, readily and cheaply available to proliferating industries in the National Capital Region (Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida, and other such areas nearby). The nature of work in these industries is predominantly informal and non-contractual, founded on a basic disregard for labor law and relying on migrant workers from nearby rural areas who have few other options. The composition of the working class is shaped by the specific characteristics of surrounding labor catchment areas. Only two of us finished high school. Some had to start working at a young age. Learning English, which is necessary for avoiding a lifetime of factory work in India, is immensely challenging for many. This difficulty becomes another reason to leave school and join the working class ranks earlier than expected. For those of us who finished high school, our families’ financial circumstances meant that we had to take factory jobs in Delhi rather than continue our studies in the hope of better jobs. This experience of intergenerational precarity has meant relying on multiple sources for subsistence, including income from both family-owned land and waged factory work throughout the year. Like our grandfathers and fathers before us, we have never really found a way to overcome this.

For example, one of us, born in the Sant Kabir district of Uttar Pradesh in 1967, had a grandfather who was a simple farmer with little land, and his father worked in a paper mill in Kolkata, West Bengal, in the eastern part of India. Even though his parents wanted to provide him with a good education, he had to drop out just before high school because learning English became an ordeal. He began to perform badly across subjects because of his struggles with English. Without resources to resolve his educational troubles, his parents got him married and he had to start earning. He ended up coming to Delhi in search of work in 1983 at 16 years old.

Another comrade of ours who did manage to finish high school started working in a factory even before the exam results came out. Most of his immediate family members were already migrant workers living across India, from West Bengal and Gujarat to Rajasthan. Before finishing high school, he visited his uncle in Bharuch, Gujarat, during holidays and took on the same work. Working multiple jobs in different parts of India is familiar to us all. His tenure at an Italian biotech company called Tes Pharma in Gujarat lasted two months. After finishing high school, he ended up traveling to Rajasthan from his native Bihar to find work through another relative living there. He managed to find work in an aluminum anodizing factory. The management needed workers familiar with English and Hindi, for which they conducted exams. His high school education helped in this instance.

Our migration experiences, known as circular migrations, are a common working-class experience in India. Some of our family members continue to live in our home villages, and we rely on these networks for support. Crucially, the village is where we can rest and fall back on basic sustenance from farming. During COVID-19, this network played a massive role, as Michael Aram didn’t pay us for three months despite the Indian state mandating that all workers should continue to get their wages through the lockdown. Village networks also play a critical part in helping us find jobs and better opportunities. The networks might also help in understanding the unions and our rights during disputes with management, understanding which owners are less negligent, which factories may have better working conditions, and so on.

The comrade from Sant Kabir also came to Okhla, Delhi, through a relative and found work with the Indian manufacturer Oberoi Industries as a “helper.” The first work he learned was nickel plating and anodizing. The work suited him because he could earn a little more. The Delhi Polluting Industries Act (1981) required that the factories upgrade their production process or relocate outside Delhi. The existing form of production was also negatively impacting workers’ health. Management sidestepped these issues by paying the workforce over the fixed minimum wage while bribing the labor inspectors to turn a blind eye. A common tactic is to hire workers in the helper category to offset the increase in wage.

Michael Aram uses the same tactic – two comrades have been helpers for 20 years now. This position means lower pay because you are hired for a training period and, therefore, are considered unskilled. But all helpers do the same labor as other workers in the factory. After working at Oberoi Industries as a helper for two years and gaining work experience, he ended up in Punjab, Faridabad (Haryana), and Noida (Uttar Pradesh) before finally returning to Delhi in 1999. Like most of us, he joined Michael Aram’s factory because of Michael’s relative popularity amongst the workers of Okhla as this “great” and “decent” owner from America. The impression most of us had was that an American owner would be different from Indian employers, who see us as an easily disposable workforce. At the time, Michael was giving better bonuses than almost everyone else in Okhla. These vanished a year after we were hired.

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In 2002, Michael Aram ran the factory under the name of Michael Aram Export Ltd. Most of us still meeting at Sarita Vihar Park today were employed by Michael in that period and faced pressure from management to produce faster and with better quality. As we said earlier, faster work leads to lower quality and increases chances of injuries. Lower quality means being disciplined by the management and facing the threat of dismissal while compromising our health. A couple of us had experience resisting management in previous jobs, so we started meeting on Sundays to share work experiences and taal mel (तालमेल) to fight against working conditions in the factory.² Our usual tactic would be to meet with management and collectively demand they demonstrate where the production was lacking and to show how we could work faster. Our retort to them would always be that our wages were the same as before, the machines were already at their fastest, and new workers could not match our speed . . . From where do we produce more items? Increase our wage and maybe we will think about it. Our response is the same even now. Our collective front meant that conflicts with the management became commonplace, along with threats of discipline. In our meetings, we had decided that if they called one worker to meet the supervisor, all of us would go with him, and that would honestly scare them. Ever since, we have insisted on meeting with management collectively. 

Michael decided to lock us out of the factory in April 2002 due to increasing disputes over production quality and targets. But, because of the solidarity we had built over time, we could act immediately to resist management. After 25 days of negotiations, we managed to get our jobs back. We won our demands by illustrating that we were no longer easily replaceable, because of our skills and our collective front. The management knew that they always had to talk to us as a collective, that we were coordinated in our demand to fight for better work, and that none of us could be singled out or bought off. The health risks associated with the job and the acquired skill of producing intricate designs on metal also meant that we had power on our side. Michael and his management could see at that point that most workers don’t work for too long and often end up leaving in a month because of the bad working conditions. We had already decided to continue the fight for better conditions from where we were already working. Michael was also legally forced to provide benefits like Employee State Insurance (ESI) and Employee Provident Fund (PF).³ He had so far been breaking the labor laws to make more profit and exploit cheap labor.

Management looks only at profits, but metal remains metal, and intricate designs made on a mass scale require more labor. After the 25-day lock out, management continued to discipline us arbitrarily, seeking to balance the new costs of ESI and PF. After a couple quiet years, in August 2004, four workers were fired for low quality of work and for creating “trouble” in the workspace. A couple days later, Michael fired everyone else. Apparently, we had become too argumentative at work and Michael wanted to start fresh. We decided to get support from the Indian Federation of Trade Unions – a left-leaning national union in India. One of our comrades had known their main organizer since 1990, and we concluded that this union was honest and favorable to issues of workers like us. We sought resources and support from the union in our struggle against Michael. After 45 days of fighting and negotiation, the leader of the union secured an agreement to rehire us.

However, the cycle continues. In 2005, Michael and the director of the company, Francis Joseph (30 percent stake), had a dispute over profits. They shut down the factory, broke all ties, and stopped paying us our wages for around six months. Afterwards, Michael started his own factory under the name of MA Designs in another part of Okhla but refused to hire us on the terms we had already achieved. We refused to go back to work without ESI and PF. With the union’s support, we went to the labor court over the non-payment of wages. On one of the court dates, our comrade Ramdev got hit by a car. He died in the hospital while being treated, and nothing happened to the car driver. The union thought it would be best to display his dead body at the gates of the factory as a symbolic protest. We did not appreciate this tactic – we are workers and will fight our battle with principles. How can making a spectacle out of our dead comrade’s body strengthen our position? We parted ways with the union in the middle of this struggle.

At that point, we knew that we had to do something bigger. We adopted the strategy of making other workers and ordinary people aware of the exploitative nature of production in Michael’s factory. That is, we expanded the practice of taal mel. We started to demonstrate outside the factory gates and in different parts of Delhi to tell people about the state of factory work. In that same year, we contacted Sher Singh, editor of the Faridabad Workers Newspaper, a newspaper for workers carrying reports of unrest, work conditions, and strikes from different industrial areas in Delhi. We had heard a lot about him from other workers in Okhla. Through the editor, we also met Shankar Ramaswami (then a PhD Scholar from the University of Chicago), and both immensely strengthened our efforts by taking our fight to the United States, where Michael would sell the products we manufactured. Our fight could not remain limited to Delhi, and they found ways to make it transnational.

In collaboration with Sher Singh and Shankar Ramaswami, we devised a strategy of using placards and posters to display information about the conditions we experienced working at Michael Aram. Our strategy began by standing in line at one of the main entrances to Okhla, our factory’s industrial area, with an emphasis on striking up conversations with other workers on their way into work. These practices, borrowed from Sher Singh, are what we call “taal mel” – conversations, exchanges, and brainstorming with each other. We continued to do this outside the Okhla ESI hospital: exchanging, coordinating, and building political relations with doctors, staff, and other injured and sick workers.⁴ All we did was present the truth about Michael, the designer. After this, we took our placard demonstration to non-industrial public places like Kalkaji, Nehru Place, Palika Bazaar, India Gate, Boat Club, Krishi Bhawan, etc.

Delhi’s informal industrial workers don’t have much stake in the city’s public spaces because our work and our lives are invisible. We wanted to highlight how owners who brand themselves as humane hyper-exploit us. Gradually, the mainstream media started to cover these worker demonstrations across Delhi. With help from Ramaswami, the PhD Scholar from Chicago, more university professors and activists, like Medha Patkar and Arundhati Roy, also started to come out in support. All these intellectuals and activists supported us a lot and told us that no matter how much money we get, never stop the struggle. Informal workers building power on their own, coordinating, getting support from intellectuals and activists, making their voices heard, and being self-led were all aspects that drew more and more left-leaning people to our struggle. Our struggle was becoming more visible.

The TV coverage also mounted pressure on Michael by questioning him about why he wasn’t resolving the pay dispute with his workers. In response, he called goons to attack us in December 2005 at a demonstration outside Sujan Singh Park near the head office of Michael Aram in Delhi. A woman came with the goons; they beat us up and then called the cops claiming that we had harassed her. The woman turned out to be the mother of Nimisha Soni, a designer working for Michael, who had hired the goons. Ashis Nandy’s wife helped us with the cops and got us free. The woman and the goons, paid by Michael, probably had political connections because we could see the cops treating them well. During this time, through Ramaswami, students and faculty in Chicago continued our fight by demonstrating outside Michael Aram showrooms in the United States. The increasing pressure tarnished Michael’s carefully cultivated image. He was forced to settle with us in 2006 and offered to pay twice the settlement money he owed us. We told him that it was not about money. We wanted decent work and a living wage. Once he saw that we still hadn’t stopped our fight and continued to persist and struggle, he was forced to negotiate and reach a settlement with us.

After this long standoff over the terms of our work at MA Designs, we were rehired on November 25, 2006. The new contract guaranteed that we would have permanent employment until the age of 58, and it required Michael Aram to pay the minimum wage set by Delhi. There was also the promise of protective gear to make the metalwork more bearable and less hazardous. However, they decided to relocate the factory to Noida in 2007, a city that neighbors Delhi but falls under the state laws of Uttar Pradesh. Noida’s minimum wage is lower than Delhi’s and has less union presence. Its labor courts tend to side with the capitalists when resolving industrial disputes. In essence, Michael used a tactic that most owners of Okhla deploy whenever workers cause trouble. Within a couple of months, the protective masks with filters also stopped.

At first, because of our tenacity and organization, management committed in writing that our employment terms would remain the same as in Delhi. Two years went by without much trouble. But in 2009, Delhi introduced a new wage scale and increased the minimum wage level immensely. This is the moment when our struggle entered a new phase, which we are still carrying on. Michael Aram and his management stopped giving us the Delhi wage rates in 2009. Gradually and subtly, management started to put more pressure on us to speed up work and not talk to each other, while constantly taunting us. Noida’s labor institutions are not very supportive of workers, and we were no longer able to rely on the support of other workers as we had when the factory was in Okhla. Two workers who spoke out against the management were kicked out of the factory with the help of state officials and goons carrying revolvers. The goons moved inside the factories during our shifts, keeping an eye on us and reminding us of their revolvers.

Eventually, management came after us. Michael Aram fired three of our comrades in 2012 for creating unrest inside the factory. Management also accused them of intentionally failing to meet the production target when, in fact, we were working at twice the rate as in the past. Their main aim was to limit our capacity to fight by gradually picking off more militant comrades. We filed a wrongful termination case against the company. Two of the three workers settled out of court for a lump sum. But we still have one who is carrying the fight with the case, which is now in the High Court of Delhi, more than a decade later. We still carry on the fight, though, by maintaining our taal mel and always showing up as a collective whenever management picks out one of us. In a way, Michael Aram deserves to be applauded. Because of him, we were encouraged to learn the intricacies of workers’ struggles against exploitation. Our struggle shows that even basic taal mel plays a big role in expanding the horizons of a struggle in a single factory. The struggle of workers has to link up with other workers, the general public, and even consumers to put pressure on the owners. However, the bigger lesson is to not settle and relax after wins, a lesson we learned along our journey – remain prepared for more battles.

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The factory used to have 100 workers, and now it only has 30–35 workers, with the rest working through a subcontractor without any of the protections and benefits that we won. Since 2009, the management has given us neither Delhi’s minimum wage nor any substantial increase. Even the workers on temporary contracts earn more than we do now. While our wages have stagnated, other workers who didn’t organize or who got employed after the peak of our struggling days are paid extra on the 22nd of every month as reward for meeting production targets set by the management. In reality, it is a reward for workers who don’t create trouble inside the factory and a bribe, both to discourage them from organizing with us and to shame and discipline us.

The subcontracted workers can’t do much against Michael in any case, because he is not their boss. However, all the new workers constantly complain about the health and safety risks and also the tremendous physical hardship of working with metal. Even the extra reward doesn’t seem enough. As it has turned out, the material reality of metalwork and the goon-like management has meant that workers leave the job in large groups and new ones don’t want to join. All these workers participate in the politics of conversations, discussions, and brainstorming because the nature of metalwork and management pressure is such that we have a shared experience. However, other workers usually end up leaving in search of other jobs while we persist and carry on as “troublemakers” inside the factory.

In the time it took us to write this article, we noticed that the factory was possibly changing hands. A subcontractor, Manoj Nagar, previously a vendor of Michael Aram, had set up his office inside the factory in January 2024 and brought his workers on short-term contracts to manufacture items for Michael to import into the United States. These workers are employees of Manoj Nagar instead of Michael Aram. Our owners are different and our contracts are different even though we do the same work. In October, we realized that our own payslips mentioned Nagar’s name instead of Michael Aram. We have applied for information at the ESI and PF offices to determine if this change of ownership is Michael Aram’s new strategy.

Can our struggle link up with the subcontracted workers? What helps us against this latest challenge is that we learned long ago that, as informal workers, we should maintain all documentation. Disciplinary letters, contracts, payment slips, firing letters, warning letters – everything should be saved as a physical copy. These papers are essential for informal workers as proof in a legal system that does not favor us. The documentation also shows new people we meet that our fight is honest.

In a world where the appeal of “designer humanity” is gaining traction under the illusion of humane production, it is critical to remember that our struggle didn’t end even after winning the fight to become permanent. Our experience also shows that the struggle cannot remain limited to just the Indian context when the market for our products is in the United States. In fact, the more we move towards designer humanity, the more urgent it becomes for the labor movement to build alliances across countries to ensure that the struggle against exploitation succeeds. If we win our next demand to increase our wages and don’t remain vigilant, Michael Aram may simply move to another location to protect his profits. We have to be alert and prepared, build taal mel across workplaces, cities, and countries, and always continue the fight.