“I Felt Like I Was a Slave”: Immigration, ICE Raids, and Child Labor

After Iowa Raid, Immigrants Fuel Labor Inquiries

By JULIA PRESTON

Published: July 27, 2008 in New York Times

Gilda O., left, says she worked the night shift at the Agriprocessors plant, even though she is only 16.

Elmer L., right, and an older brother were arrested in a May raid at the plant, in Postville, Iowa.

POSTVILLE, Iowa — When federal immigration agents raided the kosher meatpacking plant here in May and rounded up 389 illegal immigrants, they found more than 20 under-age workers, some as young as 13.

Now those young immigrants have begun to tell investigators about their jobs. Some said they worked shifts of 12 hours or more, wielding razor-edged knives and saws to slice freshly killed beef. Some worked through the night, sometimes six nights a week.

One, a Guatemalan named Elmer L. who said he was 16 when he started working on the plant’s killing floors, said he worked 17-hour shifts, six days a week. In an affidavit, he said he was constantly tired and did not have time to do anything but work and sleep. “I was very sad,” he said, “and I felt like I was a slave.”

At first, labor officials said the raid had disrupted federal and state investigations already under way at Agriprocessors Inc., the nation’s largest kosher plant. The raid has drawn criticism for what some see as harsh tactics against the immigrants, with little action taken against their employers.

But in the aftermath of the arrests, labor investigators have reaped a bounty of new evidence from the testimony of illegal immigrants, teenagers and adults, who were caught in the raid. In formal declarations, immigrants have described pervasive labor violations at the plant, testimony that could result in criminal charges for Agriprocessors executives, labor law experts said.

Out of work and facing deportation proceedings, many of the immigrants say they now have nothing to lose in speaking up about the conditions in the plant. They have told investigators that they were routinely put to work without safety training and were forced to work long shifts without overtime or rest time. Under-age workers said their bosses knew how young they were.

Because of the dangers of the work, it is illegal in Iowa for a company to employ anyone under 18 on the floor of a meatpacking plant.

In a statement, Agriprocessors said it did not employ workers under 18, and would fire any under-age worker found to have presented false documents to obtain work.

To investigate the child labor accusations, the federal Labor Department has joined with the Iowa Division of Labor Services in cooperation with the state attorney general’s office, officials for the three agencies said.

Sonia Parras Konrad, an immigration lawyer in private practice in Des Moines, is representing many of the young workers. She said she had so far identified 27 workers under 18 who were employed in the packing areas of the plant, most of them illegal immigrants from Guatemala, including some who were not arrested in the raid.

“Some of these boys don’t even shave,” Ms. Parras Konrad said. “They’re goofy. They’re teenagers.”

At a meeting here Saturday, three members of the House Hispanic Caucus — including its chairman, Representative Luis V. Gutierrez, Democrat of Illinois — heard seven immigrant minors describe working in the Agriprocessors plant.

Iowa labor officials said they rarely encounter child labor cases even though the state has many meatpacking plants.

“We don’t normally have many under-age folks working in our state,” said Gail Sheridan-Lucht, a lawyer for the state labor department, who said she could not comment specifically on the Agriprocessors investigation.

Other investigations are also under way. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is examining accusations of sexual harassment of women at the plant. Lawyers for the immigrants are preparing a suit under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act for wage and hour violations.

Federal justice and immigration officials, speaking on Thursday at a hearing in Washington of the House Judiciary immigration subcommittee, said their investigations were continuing. A federal grand jury in Cedar Rapids is hearing evidence.

While federal prosecutors are primarily focusing on immigration charges, they may also be looking into labor violations. Search warrant documents filed in court before the raid, which was May 12, cited a report by an anonymous immigrant who was sent to work in the plant by immigration authorities as an undercover informant. The immigrant saw “a rabbi who was calling employees derogatory names and throwing meat at employees.” Jewish managers oversee the slaughtering and processing of meat at Agriprocessors to ensure kosher standards.

In another episode, the informant said a floor supervisor had blindfolded an immigrant with duct tape. “The floor supervisor then took one of the meat hooks and hit the Guatemalan with it,” the informant said, adding that the blow did not cause “serious injuries.”

So far, 297 illegal immigrants from the May raid have been convicted of document fraud and other criminal charges, and most were sentenced to five months in prison, after which they will be deported.

A spokesman for Agriprocessors, Menachem Lubinsky, said the company could not comment on an active investigation.

“The company has two objectives in mind: to restore its production to meet the demands of the kosher food market and to be in full compliance with all local, state and federal laws,” Mr. Lubinsky said. Reports of labor violations at the plant “remain allegations only, that no agency has charged the company with,” he said.

The Agriprocessors kosher plant here has been owned and operated since 1987 by Aaron Rubashkin and his family. His son Sholom was the plant’s top manager until he was removed by his father in May after the raid. The plant’s products are distributed across the country under brands including Aaron’s Best and Aaron’s Choice.

Most of the young immigrants were hired at Agriprocessors after they presented false Social Security cards or other documents saying they were older than they were.

But in an interview here, Elmer L. said he had told floor supervisors that he was under 18. He asked that his last name not be published on advice of his lawyer, Ms. Parras Konrad, because he is a minor in deportation proceedings.

“They asked me how old I was,” Elmer L. said. “They could see that sometimes I could not keep up with the work.”

Elmer L. said that he regularly worked 17 hours a day at the plant and was paid $7.25 an hour. He said he was not paid overtime consistently.

“My work was very hard, because they didn’t give me my breaks, and I wasn’t getting very much sleep,” he said. “They told us they were going to call immigration if we complained.”

Elmer L. said that he was clearing cow innards from the slaughter floor last Aug. 26 when a supervisor he described as a rabbi began yelling at him, then kicked him from behind. The blow caused a freshly-sharpened knife to fly up and cut his elbow.

He was sent to a hospital where doctors closed the laceration with eight stitches. But he said that when he returned, his elbow still stinging, to ask for some time off, his supervisor ordered him back to work.

The next day, as he was lifting a cow’s tongue, the stitches ruptured, Elmer L. said, and the wound bled again. He said he was given a bandage at the plant and sent back to work. The incident is confirmed in a worker’s injury report filed on Aug. 31, 2007, by Agriprocessors with the Iowa labor department.

Gilda O., a Guatemalan who said she was 16, said she worked the night shift plucking chickens. She said she was working to help her parents pay off debts.

Another Guatemalan, Joel R., who gave his age as 15, said he dropped out of school in Postville after the eighth grade and took a job at Agriprocessors because his mother became ill. He said he worked from 5.30 p.m. to 6.30 a.m. in a section called “quality control,” a job he described as relatively easy that he got because he speaks English.

But he said he and other workers were under constant pressure from supervisors. “They yell at us when we don’t hurry up, when we don’t work fast enough for them,” said Joel R. He and Gilda O. did not want their last names published because they are illegal immigrants and they were not arrested in the raid.

Most of the young immigrants have been released from detention but remain in deportation proceedings. Ms. Parras Konrad said she will ask immigration authorities to grant them special four-year temporary visas, known as U visas, which are offered to immigrants who assist in law enforcement investigations. Iowa labor officials are considering supporting some of those requests, Ms. Sheridan-Lucht said.

Agriprocessors executives said they had begun an overhaul of hiring and labor practices, starting with hiring a compliance officer, James G. Martin, a former United States attorney in Missouri. In an interview, Mr. Martin said the company had contracted with an outside firm, the Jacobson Staffing Company, to handle its hiring, and new safety officers, including one former federal work safety inspector.

Mark Lauritsen, a vice president for the International Food and Commercial Workers Union, which has tried to organize the plant, said he remained skeptical. “They are the poster child for how a rogue company can exploit a broken immigration system,” Mr. Lauritsen said.

Tags: ImmigrantRights, Labor

¡La Luta Continua!

Farmworkers Beat Burger King, But Face Resistance From Growers

– Tiffany Ten Eyck (this post is taken from the latest issue of Labor Notes)

Photo: Isaac Silver

In the David and Goliath match-up between the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the fast food industry, the little guy has tripped up the giant again. Bowing to an intense corporate campaign, Burger King signed an agreement in late May that conceded all of the farmworker organization’s demands. But a backlash from the growers that supply Burger King has at least temporarily halted the deal’s implementation.

It’s the third time in three years the CIW could claim victory against a behemoth corporation. After a four-year boycott of Taco Bell and pressure on its parent company, Yum! Brands, the CIW convinced the company in 2005 to meet all of its demands: a penny more per pound paid to Immokalee workers who pick tomatoes bought by the company, an enforceable code of conduct for growers and the industry, and an assurance that the CIW would have the ability to monitor and audit the penny pass-down.

According to the CIW, the extra penny would spike the rate paid for each 32-pound bucket picked, from an average of 45 cents to 77 cents. At the current rate, workers have to pick two-and-a-half tons of tomatoes each day to earn minimum wage.

Last April, just a year into their campaign against McDonald’s, CIW announced that it had also yielded to the farmworkers’ demands. Soon after, the rest of Yum!’s brands—A&W, Long John Silvers, KFC, and Pizza Hut—followed suit.

Burger King took just more than a year to crack. One of the toughest opponents the farmworkers have faced, BK fell after a tumultuous campaign that included a surveillance scandal and continued pressure from consumers. Burger King agreed to the same conditions as McDonald’s and Taco Bell, and more. The agreement includes an extra half-cent going directly to growers to cover the payroll and administrative costs that enacting the agreement would entail.

RESISTANCE FROM GROWERS

Even with the good news, CIW activists say there’s still much work to be done. Recent moves by the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange (FTGE), which represents most Florida growers, have made it harder to transfer the corporations’ commitments—and pennies—down to the fields in Florida.

In the early years of the CIW’s history, farmworkers would target growers in the fields of south and central Florida, where wages were essentially unchanged since 1978. Growers said they simply could not afford to do anything about farmworker wages or conditions—they were being squeezed by purchasing conglomerates run by corporate buyers. The organization’s strategy of targeting the top of the supply chain, the mega-purchasers themselves, was born of these experiences.

Now, even with an ever-larger group of corporate buyers exerting pressure, the growers are still dragging their feet. After the April 2007 agreement with McDonald’s—which was to be put in place at the start of the growing season that fall—the growers took measures to prevent the money from reaching farmworkers’ pockets.

The FTGE told its members that if they passed down the corporations’ pennies, it would charge them a $100,000 fine per worker, per paycheck. FTGE Vice President Reggie Brown called the CIW’s agreements “illegal and un-American.”

Growers conceded, and the FTGE succeeded in stopping the penny pass-through that had been in place since the CIW won the Taco Bell boycott in 2005.

According to CIW staffer Julia Perkins, all three corporate entities have agreed to funnel the pennies into an escrow account until growers get back on board, an outcome the CIW says companies have committed to helping bring about.

“As the news of the agreement [with Burger King] came out, Brown said that the FTGE was not going to be implementing the fine,” said Perkins.

Brown’s reason for the change of heart? The media had been paying too much attention to his extreme fines, in the light of the CIW’s campaigns.

“We need to reach a tipping point,” said Perkins. “The more buyers that we have that are telling their growers: ‘lock in this agreement and work with us to improve the conditions for workers in your supply chain and you’ll have our business’…the more growers will want to participate.”

A SCANDAL ROYALE

The CIW is used to pushback from their corporate targets, but when they began investigating mysterious phone calls and erroneous and threatening postings online, they were surprised when all leads pointed directly to Burger King headquarters (see Labor Notes May 2008).

Burger King was implicated in the hiring of a surveillance firm which posed as students to infiltrate an ally, the Student/Farmworker Alliance (SFA). Then, the CIW began to trace the origin of threatening posts that appeared whenever an article or video about the coalition was posted online.

Organizers and journalists eventually found the source—Burger King Vice President Steve Grover, the executive targeted by the CIW. The company fired both Grover and media spokesperson Keva Silversmith, who was implicated in leaking an internal memo to the growers’ association.

Under mounting pressure from the media and CIW supporters as a result of the scandal, Burger King gave in to the CIW’s demands just weeks later.

“It was a question of using all of Burger King’s missteps and outrageous behavior against them,” said Marc Rodrigues, an SFA organizer.

WINNING PLAYBOOK

The now-frequent question faced by CIW and its allies is, “How do you do it?”

“Having a strong network of allies that are committed and diverse and go at your target at different angles has helped the CIW win,” explained Rodrigues. “We’ve had students protesting at restaurants, faith communities organizing churches to send letters to the company, and we’ve been targeting private equity owners.”

Rodrigues and Perkins agree that the research they do to understand the strengths and weaknesses of their targets has been important. When organizers realized that Burger King is partially owned by private equity firms like Goldman Sachs and Texas Pacific Group—which has a history of making deals with pressure groups to stem bad press—organizers began linking their targets.

CIW corresponded with board members from the owning firms, and in 2007 started a march at the Miami offices of Goldman Sachs that ended at Burger King.

CIW organizers also say that their high-profile media presence has been crucial. It was a key element in bringing support from several U.S. senators in this campaign.

Organizers say they don’t need a big PR firm to make a splash. “We’ve succeeded in focusing on the strong point this campaign has: the daily work of a farmworker and what that entails,” Rodrigues said.

What has also helped the CIW succeed is a long-term vision for industry-wide changes in agriculture. As early as 2005, CIW reached out to all the major buyers of Florida tomatoes, a rogues gallery of corporate titans that includes Wal-Mart, Whole Foods, Subway, and Chipotle, informing them of the poor wages and working conditions of tomato pickers in their supply chains.

“We’re spending the summer figuring out what the next steps of the campaign are going to be,” Perkins said. “All the retail buyers of Florida tomatoes have been made aware of the situation. No one can feign ignorance.”

“I Charge the White Man” … Immigrant’s Death Exposes Tensions

That powerful video clip should indicate to ya what I’ve been feeling lately. A good friend of mine recently made an entry in his blog about the criminalization of immigrants in this “land of the free, home of the brave.” Sparking his thoughts was a recent story in the New York Times of Juana Villegas, an undocumented Mexicana in Nashville, who was 9-months pregnant and who had been arrested in Nashville and subsequently forced to give birth chained to her hospital bed. The story is outrageous, but what interests me most is not so much the specifics of the case (in my view, the injustice of Villegas’ situation is self-evident), but instead a comment posted to his entry. Here is a portion of this knuckle-head’s response:

“It’s no wonder Americans are beginning to associate the word “Latino” with illegal invader! It’s people like you that are turning American citizens against all Latinos and causing the so called hatred of Latinos, no matter whether they are legal, ilegal…. Your defence of this criminal illegal alien is doing nothing but adding to the anger of more Americans against all Latinos.”

So-called hatred? Criminal illegal alien?

Okay, aside from his ignorance of the actual law (i.e. that violation of immigration law is not equivalent to a felony crime warranting restraint), it is frightening just how mainstream racist, anti-immigrant sentiment has become. The sanctity of our nation’s laws is only a pretext, a cover, in which people can now spout their racist venom in this so-called post-civil rights era (I’m sure some of his/her best friends are non-white, right?)

But laws are only man-made creations. They do not drop from the heavens, nor are they like the laws of science. Laws are inherently social, and in this country, they have historically reinforced white supremacy…sometimes dealing with race explicitly (the Greaser Act, the Chinese Exclusion Act, Plessy v. Ferguson, etc.) and at other times implicitly (like, say, Bill Clinton’s recent “end-welfare-as-we-know-it” disaster called the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act). The real question, therefore, is not merely the matter of a violation of laws, but instead what values underlie our society and are expressed in our law? After all, when one thinks about it, if it was only about respecting the sanctity of laws, the Civil Rights Movement in the Deep South would have been much different.

So its not about law; its about race, about power. Its about how this country is changing. They often use the highly-charged term “invasion” to describe these dynamics. They even believe that mainstream, reform-oriented organizations like the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) are somehow separatist organizations seeking to reclaim Aztlan (the US Southwest). In response, many Latina/o politicians and pundits make an effort to dispel such notions. And, indeed, NCLR is nothing of the sort. But, ya know what, we are taking over, and I welcome it. These changes, no matter how much they attempt to stop it, are going to continue. Their lily-white ideas about who or what this country is are dead. And it goes well-beyond salsa outselling ketchup.

So it isn’t about the facts (any junior high student, with access to the web, could have told you the NCLR wasn’t radical or separatist), or…as I mentioned above, about the law. It is straight-up about white supremacy and real hatred of Brown folk. [well, hatred for them/us as human beings, that is, not as the nameless, "things" that are there to pick their fruit, serve as nannies for their children, etc.]

Is it a democracy when a woman is chained for what amounts to a civil offense? Is it a democracy when, as reported recently in the Fresno Bee, a Mexican truck-driver can be arbitrarily pulled over, and when his English just doesn’t seem good enough to the Alabama police officer (well-known as they are for their racial progressiveness), he can be fined upwards of $500? As Chicano historian Rudy Acuna wrote a number of years ago in relation to Los Angeles: it increasingly seems like its better to be “anything but Mexican.”

And now this following story from Pennsylvania:

Immigrant’s death exposes tensions

Mexican Worker Beaten By Teen

Michael Rubinkam, ASSOCIATED PRESS

SHENANDOAH, Pa. | Luis Ramirez came to the United States from Mexico six years ago to look for work, landing in this town in Pennsylvania’s coal region. Here, he found steady employment, fathered two children and, his fiancee said, occasionally endured harassment by white residents.

Now he is headed back to Mexico in a coffin.

The 25-year-old illegal immigrant was beaten over the weekend after an argument with a group of youths, including at least some players on the town’s beloved high school football team, police said. And despite witness reports that the attackers yelled ethnic slurs, authorities say the beating wasn’t racially motivated.

Hate crime or not, the killing has exposed long-simmering tensions in Shenandoah, a blue-collar town of 5,000 about 80 miles northwest of Philadelphia that has a growing number of Hispanic residents drawn by jobs in factories and farm fields.

An investigation continues, and no charges have yet been filed, but police say as many as six teens were involved in the fight, which ended with Mr. Ramirez in convulsions and foaming at the mouth. He died early Monday of head injuries.

Crystal Dillman, the victim’s 24-year-old fiancee, who is white and grew up here, said Mr. Ramirez was often called derogatory names, including “dirty Mexican,” and told to return to his homeland.

“People in this town are very racist toward Hispanic people. They think right away if you’re Mexican, you’re illegal, and you’re no good,” said Ms. Dillman, who has two young children by Mr. Ramirez and a 3-year-old who thought of him as her father.

On Ms. Dillman’s fireplace mantel hangs a medallion of Jesus that Mr. Ramirez was wearing the night he was beaten. Mr. Ramirez had an imprint of the medallion on his chest, marking where an assailant stomped on him, she said.

Police Chief Matthew Nestor acknowledged there have been problems as the community – the birthplace of big band musicians Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey and home of Mrs. T’s Pierogies – has tried to adjust to an influx of Hispanics, who now comprise as much as 10 percent of the population.

Teenagers have sprayed racially tinged graffiti and yelled racial slurs at the newcomers, he said.

“Things are definitely not the way they used to be even 10 years ago. Things have changed here radically,” Chief Nestor said. “Some people could adapt to the changes and some just have a difficult time doing it. … Yeah, there is tension at times. You can’t deny that.”

Police are interviewing suspects and witnesses. Preliminarily, though, they have determined that Mr. Ramirez, who worked in a factory and picked strawberries and cherries, got into an argument with a group of youths that escalated into a fight in which he was badly outnumbered.

“From what we understand right now, it wasn’t racially motivated,” Chief Nestor said. “This looks like a street fight that went wrong.”

Retired Philadelphia Police Officer Eileen Burke, who lives on the street where the fight occurred, told the Associated Press she heard a youth scream at one of Mr. Ramirez’s friends after the beating to tell his Mexican friends to get out of Shenandoah, “or you’re going to be laying next to him.”

Shenandoah Valley High School Principal Phillip Andras said he knew little about the purported involvement of any football players. A call by the AP to the athletic director was referred back to the principal.

But the players’ possible involvement has added to interest in the case. Football, along with the town’s many block parties and festivals, is a major attraction. Home games typically draw thousands of fans.

Arielle Garcia and her husband, who were with Mr. Ramirez when he was beaten late Saturday, said they had dropped their friend off at a park but returned when he called to say he had gotten into a fight.

She saw someone kick Mr. Ramirez in the head, she said, and “that’s when he started shaking and foaming out of the mouth.”

Despite the witness statements, Borough Manager Joseph Palubinsky said he doesn’t believe Mr. Ramirez’s ethnicity was what prompted the fight: “I have reason to know the kids who were involved, the families who were involved, and I’ve never known them to harbor this type of feeling.”

So let me get this straight: the guy is actually saying that there is no way these boys could have been involved in such an atrocity because, hey, after all, I know them and they come from “good” families?!! [for an interview describing more] As a historian of sixties social movements, I can’t help but cringe at the parallel to the many arguments that authorities in the segregationist South gave to dismiss crimes against African Americans. Many of those involved in those horrific lynchings were, indeed, church-going folk that supported the local high school football team.

So what do we do? For starters, its well past time to be upset, its time to be outraged and organized. And, coming full circle, in light of all these recent developments, I believe its time we took another serious listen to this man:

…and to the powerful ideas he articulates below: part of the lesson being that we not allow the struggle of immigrants and Latinos/as in this country to be defined narrowly within a domestic framework, or as only a matter of civil/legal rights, but as Malcolm indicates here, the burning issue of race in “America” is much larger and deeper, it is global and a fundamental matter of human rights. And lastly, oppressed groups need to develop a real  and meaningful and lasting solidarity.

c/s

French Immigrants On Strike … The Global South Strikes Back

It’s often easy to forget that the struggles right before our face are not quite as local as we think they are.  The situation confronting immigrants here in Califas, for instance, while having its own unique form, exists in many other places across the globe.

Earlier this summer, the European Union (EU) passed a set of draconian, anti-immigrant laws, prompting Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to comment to gathered members of the South American trade bloc, Mercosur, that the EU was seemingly choosing the same “barbaric” immigration policies as the US…and in a show of solidarity, even suggested that perhaps economic retaliation, of some sort, might even be necessary.  ¡Chingao! … sitting on such a vast supply of oil, and with the US economy spiraling deeper into crisis as it is, I can’t but help to imagine (or is that daydream) if Chavez’s threat was also extended to the US.  In short, respect the dignity of Latina/o immigrants, cease the degradation of immigrant labor, or face the consequences!  Forget about issues of morality or any other such thing (after all, as Malcolm X argued, this country has proven itself fundamentally immoral from the very beginning), do you think this country would finally then realize its historic dependence on not only foreign oil but also immigrant labor?!?!

Sadly, the truth is more than likely not; it would probably only push this country towards some form of fascism all that much quicker…on the foreign policy front, that is, an expansion of imperialist policies toward Venezuela (more than likely, heightened armed aggression in the name of national security) and, on the domestic front, ever-more militarization of immigration policy.

Fascism?!  I can hear it already…isn’t that just more of that over-heated, conspiratorial-laced, leftist rhetoric?  I actually don’t think so; in fact, when you really begin to consider the current mix of our military interventions abroad, the expanding prison-industrial complex here at home, the evisceration of civil liberties under the pretext of a War on Terror, the “immigrant-as-enemy” discourse permeating both policy makers and the popular culture, the destruction of social democratic programs from another era that had served as a safety net (which, it should be said, arose as a direct response to the Great Depression and the two general ideological directions in which the world was turning to address the crisis: that is, to the Left or, like Germany and Italy, to the Right), one can’t help but believe we have to seriously consider the possibilities….especially as the economic crisis deepens.

Recently, the Italian government of right-wing Silvio Berlusconi proposed the fingerprinting of the entire Roma (Gypsy) population, echoing policies of Europe during World World II.  In fact, I gotta mention here that the Porrajmos, as the Holocaust is known in the Romani language,claimed roughly 1 million Gypsy lives in a pre-war population that had been somewhere around 2 million.  That’s right, one-half! of the entire European Gypsy population exterminated during the war, yet when one reads about the genocide of World War II, this Holocaust is made all but invisible.   Perhaps one shouldn’t be surprised; after all, just this past weekend outside Naples, two young Roma girls drowned, and with their bodies in full view, Italian sun-bathers continued their business of enjoying the afternoon and sunbathing.  Is not this story but an extreme reflection of the same dynamics underneath the story in my last post: that is, some lives are just simply not considered valuable. 

But while there are tremendous forces arrayed to keep those outside the formal body politic silenced, to maintain their invisible status, and thereby to preserve the status quo, they continue…as they always have…to refuse and resist.  The following is a recent story I came across regarding the immigrant rights movement in France (who, under right-wing President Nicolas Sarkozy, has spearheaded the wave of xenophobia inside the EU) and what strategies they, as largely migrants from Africa, have employed to assert their dignity.

We would do well to listen, to learn from them, to take leadership from those that are most often neglected, and to recognize…as I believe Chavez did in his statement…that whether we are in San Pancho or Fresno, Chichicastenango  or Caracas, Naples or in the banlieues of Paris, we’re all connected.  And that no matter what language we speak…Spanish or Vietnamese (a la Montoya’s art above), Spanglish or Romani, English or French, a deep knowledge of one another, and a profound solidarity with one another in the face of racial capitalism is absolutely necessary.  It might just save us from a very, very dark future.

“They work here, they live here, they stay here!”  French immigrants strike for the right to work—and win.

By Marie Kennedy and Chris Tilly

France has an estimated half-million undocumented immigrants (8% of
the population, compared to 4% in the United States), including many
from France’s former colonies in Africa. The sans-papiers
(literally, “without papers”), as the French call them, lead a shadowy
existence, much like their U.S. counterparts. And as U.S. immigrants
did in 2006 with rousing mass demonstrations, the French undocumented
have recently taken a dramatic step out of the shadows. But the sans-papiers did it in a particularly French way: hundreds of them occupied their workplaces.

Bakay, Omar, and Issac, three cleaners for the Quick restaurant
chain who are sitting in to demand working papers. Photo credit: Marie
Kennedy.

Snowballing strike

The snowflake that led to this snowball of sit-in strikes was a
November immigration law, sponsored by the arch-conservative government
of President Nicolas Sarkozy, that cracked down on family reunification
and ramped up expulsions of unauthorized immigrants. The law also added
a pro-business provision permitting migration, and even
“regularization” of undocumented workers, in occupations facing labor
shortages. The French government followed up with a January notice to
businesses in labor-starved sectors, opening the door for employers to
apply to local authorities for work permits for workers with false
papers whom they had “in good faith.” hired. However, for low-level
jobs, this provision was limited to migrants from new European Union
member countries. Africans could only qualify if they were working in
highly skilled occupations such as science or engineering—but not
surprisingly, most Africans in France are concentrated in low-wage
service sector jobs.

At that point, African sans-papiers took matters into
their own hands. On February 13, Fodie Konté of Mali and eight
co-workers at the Grande Armée restaurant in Paris occupied their
workplace to demand papers. All nine were members of the Confédération
Générale du Travail (CGT), France’s largest union federation, and the
CGT backed them up. In less than a week, Parisian officials agreed to
regularize seven of the nine, with Konté the first to get his papers.

The CGT and Droits Devant!! (Rights Ahead!!), an immigrant
rights advocacy group, saw an opportunity and gave the snowball a push.
They escorted Konté and his co-workers to meetings and rallies with
other undocumented CGT workers, where they declared, “We’ve started it,
it’s up to you to follow.” Small groups began to do just that. Then on
April 15, fifteen new workplaces in Paris and the surrounding region
sprouted red CGT flags as several hundred “irregular” workers held
sit-ins. At France’s Labor Day parade on May 1st, a contingent of
several thousand undocumented, most from West African countries such as
Mali, Senegal, and Ivory Coast, were the stars.

But local governments were slow to move on their demands, so with only
70 workers regularized one month into the sit-ins, another 200 sans-papiers
upped the ante on May 20 by taking over twenty more job sites. Still
others have joined the strike since. As of early July, 400 former
strikers have received papers (typically one-year permits), and the CGT
estimates that 600 are still sitting tight at 41 workplaces.

Restaurants, with their visible locations on main boulevards,
are the highest profile strike sites. But strikers are also camping out
at businesses in construction, cleaning, security, personal services,
and landscaping. Though the movement reportedly includes North
Africans, Eastern Europeans, and even Filipinos, its public presence
has consisted almost entirely of sub-Saharan Africans, a stunning
indication of the degree of racial segregation in immigrant jobs.
Strikers are overwhelmingly men, though the female employees of a
contract cleaning business, Ma Net, made a splash when they joined the
strike on May 26, and groups representing domestics and other women
workers began to demonstrate around the same time.

Organization of sans-papiers at a May 22 general strike march organized by the CGT. Banner calls for “regularization for all.” Photo credit: Marie Kennedy

“To go around freely…”

The sans-papiers came to France by different means. Some
overstayed student or tourist visas. Others paid as much as 7,500 euros
($12,000) to a trafficker to travel to the North African coast,
clandestinely cross by boat to Spain, and then find their way to
France. Strike leader Konté arrived in Paris, his target, two long
years after leaving Mali. A set of false papers for 200 euros, and he
was ready to look for work.

But opportunities for the undocumented are, for the most part, limited
to jobs with the worst pay and working conditions. The French minimum
wage is 8.71 euros an hour (almost $13), but strikers tell of working
for 3 euros or even less. “With papers, I would get 1,000 euros a
month,” Issac, a Malian cleaner for the Quick restaurant chain who has
been in France eleven years, told Dollars & Sense.
“Without papers, I get 300.” Even so, he and many others send half
their pay home to families who depend on them. Through paycheck
withholding, the sans-papiers pay taxes and contribute to the
French health care and retirement funds. But “if I get sick, I don’t
have any right to reimbursement,” said Camara, a dishwasher from Mali.
He told L’Humanité, the French Communist Party newspaper, how
much he wished “to go around freely.” “In the evening I don’t go out,”
he said. “When I leave home in the morning, I don’t even know if I will
get home that night. I avoid some subway stations” that are closely
monitored by the police.

When asked how he would reply to the claim that the undocumented are
taking jobs from French workers, Issac replied simply, “We are French
workers—just without any rights. Yes, we’re citizens, because France
owned all of black Africa!”

“They work here, they live here, they stay here!” Strike poster in
the window of the occupied Bistro Romain restaurant on the Champs
Élysées in Paris. Photo credit: Marie Kennedy.

Business allies

The surprise allies in this guerrilla struggle for the right to work
are many of the employers. When workers seized the Samsic contract
cleaning agency in the Paris suburb of Massy, owner Mehdi Daïri first
called the police. When they told him there was nothing they could do,
he pragmatically decided to apply for permits for his 300-plus
employees. “It’s in everybody’s best interest,” he told Le Monde,
the French daily newspaper. “Their action is legitimate. They’ve been
here for years, working, contributing to the social security system,
paying taxes, and we’re satisfied with their work.” He even has his
office staff make coffee for the strikers every morning.

Though some businesses have taken a harder line against the strikers,
the major business associations have called for massive regularization
of their workforces. According to L’Humanité,
André Dauguin, president of the hotel operators association, is
demanding that 50,000 to100,000 undocumented workers be given papers.
Didier Chenet, president of another association of restaurant and hotel
enterprises, declared that with 20,000 jobs going unfilled in these
sectors, the sans-papiers “are not taking jobs away from other workers.”

For the CGT, busy with defensive battles against labor “reforms” such
as cutbacks in public employees’ pensions, the strike wave represents a
step in a new direction. The core of the CGT remains white, native-born
French workers. As recently as the 1980s, the Communist Party, to which
the CGT was then closely linked, took some controversial anti-immigrant
stands. Raymond Chauveau, the general secretary of the CGT’s Massy
local, acknowledged to Le Monde that some union members still have trouble understanding why the
organization has taken up this issue. But he added, “Today, these
people are recognized for what they are: workers. They are developing
class consciousness. Our role as a union is to show that these people
are not outside the world of work.” While some immigrant rights groups
are critical of the CGT for suddenly stepping into the leadership of a
fight other groups had been pursuing for years, it is hard to deny the
importance of the labor organization’s clout.

Half empty or half full?

With only 400 of 1,400 applications for work permits granted
four months into the struggle, the CGT is publicly voicing its
impatience at the national government’s insistence that local
authorities make each decision on a case-by-case basis rather than
offering broader guidelines. But Chauveau said he is proud that they
have compelled the government to accept regularization of Africans in
low-end jobs, broadening the opening beyond the intent of the 2007 law.
And on its website, the CGT boasted that the sans-papiers
“have compelled the government to take its first steps back, when that
had seemed impossible since the [May 2007] election of Nicolas
Sarkozy.” Perhaps even more important for the long term is that class
consciousness Chauveau mentioned. This is “a struggle that has changed
my life,” stated Mamadou Dembia Thiam of Senegal, a security guard who
won his work authorization in June. “Before the struggle, I was really
very timid. I’ve changed!” Changes like that seem likely to bring a new
burst of energy to the struggling French labor movement.

Marie Kennedy is professor emerita of Community
Planning at the University of Massachusetts Boston and visiting
professor of Urban Planning at UCLA. Chris Tilly is director of the
Institute for Research on Labor and Employment and professor of Urban
Planning at UCLA . In addition, Kennedy is a board member of Grassroots
International, and Tilly is a Dollars & Sense Associate.

http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2008/0708kennedytilly.html

Vivan Los Mojados!!

Okay, so this is my first blog entry and I’m truthfully still trying to figure out how to utilize this technology effectively.

How better to introduce “El Grito” though than with some musica from Los Tigres del Norte ?!? Ajua!!

Over the past few months here in Califas there have been a rash of heat-related deaths, underscoring the continuing struggle of farmworkers that is largely, and criminally, beneath the radar for most people in this country. While many complain about the rising cost of produce in their local supermarket, they remain unaware (perhaps willingly?) of another, deeper, human cost.

And I suppose, by way of introduction, that would really speak to what I see as the spirit of “El Grito”: that is, just as their is another way to think about that produce sitting in your fridge … that there’s more there than mere commodities or that we are somehow just consumers … there are a whole series of relationships and stories and injustices and struggles just beneath the surface, “El Grito” is gonna seek to share these realities and strive to look and think about them in new and radical ways.

Pero don’t be expectin’ any objectivity! I mean, I ain’t telling no lies or claimin’ easy victories (a la Brother Cabral), but I am unabashedly on the side of the gente!! So like folk used to say back in the day: All Power to the People!!

Check out this website below… and stay thirsty, my friend:

Stories on the Border

h/t Immigration Prof

A group of filmmakers recently took a trip along the U.S/Mexico border collecting stories to create a series of short films documenting life on both sides of the border.

The videos are available borderstories.org

The stories are geographically organized (from Brownsville to Tijuana). We crisscrossed the border the entire way. We went into people’s backyards and asked them how the border is affecting them. We wanted to humanize the issue. Our notion is that by traversing the entire border and sharing voices and then presenting them in one place, people can begin to see how dynamic and complex the region is. The mainstream media is driven by pundit analysis. This is an opportunity to see where there’s some common ground or empathy for the other side.They all have resonance, and each story is different. I do think what we did in Arizona was incredibly fascinating. In Arizona, we did five stories: two on the Mexico side, and three on the U.S. side. We talked to the founder of (Humane Borders). The organization was able to solicit funding from (Pima County) based on a cost-benefit analysis; they found that it was cheaper to provide water (for immigrants) than to remove their dead bodies. We juxtaposed that with a story about the Border Patrol. They were both American viewpoints about the same subject, and yet they’re totally different. The Arizona stories capture how politicized the border is. [Tucson Weekly]