By David L. Wilson, NYC Indymedia
July 5, 2012
Originally at this now broken link:
http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2012/07/119444.html
Four Mexican guest workers came to New York the last weekend in June to hold a 24-hour hunger strike protesting labor practices by suppliers for the retail giant Wal-Mart.
About 20 supporters turned out for a small rally the morning of Saturday, June 30, in a semi-public park beside a luxury apartment building on Spruce Street, a few blocks from City Hall. The four Mexicans—who were employed at CJ’s Seafood, a Wal-Mart supplier in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, through the government’s H-2B temporary worker program—chose the site because Wal-Mart board member Michelle Burns lives there.
In theory H-2B workers enjoy full labor rights. But the
reality is different, hunger striker Ana Díaz explained at the rally as the
temperature rose past 90 degrees. Workers in the program are only authorized to
stay in the United States as long as they work for a specific employer, she
said, and CJ’s Seafood general manager Michael LeBlanc told the workers this
meant their visas were really his visas. He could take them away any time he
wanted.
So LeBlanc felt free to make the immigrants work long shifts
without overtime, sometimes from 2 am to 6 pm, sometimes for a full 24 hours.
On at least two occasions he had the doors blocked so the workers couldn’t
leave, and one supervisor threatened to hit workers with a shovel if they
didn’t get back to work fast enough after breaks. The Worker Rights Consortium,
an independent monitoring group, confirmed these and other allegations in a
June 20 report.
After one of the employees told local police about labor
abuses at the plant in May, LeBlanc called the company’s 40 guest workers
together for a meeting. He knew “good and bad people” in the United States and
in Mexico, he said, according to Díaz, and if his employees complained to the
government, he could get at them and their families wherever they went.
This threat was too much for eight of the workers. They
joined the National Guestworker Alliance, a project of the New Orleans Workers’
Center for Racial Justice, and on June 4 they did something H-2B workers rarely
dare to do—they went on strike.
--“Joe Arpaio or CJ’s Seafood”--
When told about the horrendous working conditions
undocumented immigrants face in the United States, many people ask: “Why don’t
they just get legal?” After all, we have temporary worker programs: why don’t
the immigrants come here through those?
But for immigrant workers there’s no meaningful difference
between “legal” and “illegal” work, National Guestworker Alliance lead
organizer Jacob Horwitz told the rally. Immigrants who want to work here can
come without authorization and be subjected to the harsh anti-immigrant
enforcement measures exemplified by Joe Arpaio, the publicity-seeking sheriff
of Arizona’s Maricopa County; or they can come “legally” as guest workers to
serve at the pleasure of whatever company holds their contract.
“The choice for immigrant workers is between Joe Arpaio in
Arizona and CJ’s Seafood in Louisiana,” Horwitz said.
--“It’s for All the Workers”--
Despite its size, the strike by eight guest workers has been
remarkably successful so far, partly because of the tactic of targeting
Wal-Mart.
Saket Soni, the alliance’s executive director, announced at
the rally that 145,000 people had already signed an online petition set up by
Change.org to support the workers’ demands, and some 500 people around the
world had committed to fasting for 24 hours in solidarity with the workers. But
the big news that morning was on the front page of the New York Times
business section: Wal-Mart was suspending CJ’s Seafood as a supplier.
Soni cautioned that the victory was still partial. Wal-Mart
executives had only suspended CJ’s Seafood pending an investigation of the
company’s labor practices—and had done it after the end of the season for
crawfish, the product that Wal-Mart buys from the Louisiana firm. And this was
just one abusive employer among many; alliance researchers reported that they
had found labor violations at 12 of the 18 Wal-Mart suppliers that they tracked
because they employ guest workers.
The four workers in Lower Manhattan looked tired as the
rally ended, and maybe a little intimidated by the posh neighborhood they found
themselves in, or by the prospect of fasting outdoors in the midst of a New
York heat wave. But they hadn’t lost the determination that led them and their
four colleagues to take action against their employer.
“We’re not in the struggle just for ourselves,” striker
Fernando Navarro said. “We’re here to improve conditions for all the workers.”
For more information, see the Worker Rights Consortium
report:
The National Guestworker Alliance report is at:
You can sign the Change.org petition at:
David L. Wilson is co-author, with Jane Guskin, of The
Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers [http://thepoliticsofimmigration.org/],
Monthly Review Press, July 2007. He also co-edits Weekly News Update on
the Americas, a summary of news from Latin America and the Caribbean. [http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com
No comments:
Post a Comment