UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS STAND UP TO CHIPOTLE
By David Bacon
The Nation, web edition, February 15, 2011
http://www.thenation.com/article/158513/undocumented-immigrants-stand-chipotle
Last month six hundred workers at the Chipotle fast food
chain were fired in Minnesota.
Their crime? Working.
In the last two years, thousands of others have been fired
for the same offense - 2000 young women at Los Angeles sewing
machines, 500 apple pickers in eastern Washington, hundreds of
janitors in Minnesota and California, and many, many more. They're
all victims of the administration's "softer" immigration enforcement
strategy.
Its logic is brutal: Make it impossible for 12 million
undocumented people in the U.S. to earn a living - to buy food, pay
rent, or send money home to their children. Then they'll deport
themselves. When their families hear they can't get jobs in the
U.S., they won't join those already here.
This inhuman logic convinced Congress to pass the Immigration
Reform and Control Act in 1986. For 25 years employers have had to
verify workers' immigration status, and cannot legally employ people
without papers. The real impact, though, is on workers. It's become
a crime to hold a job.
The justification has always been the same. Undocumented
immigrants will go home if they can't work. But no one has. Over
those 25 years NAFTA and CAFTA, and pro-corporate market reforms in
Mexico and other developing countries, profoundly deepened the
poverty driving people from their homes. More people came than ever
before.
Among them were those six hundred mostly-Mexican workers, who
got minimum-wage jobs serving Mexican food at Chipotle. Many of them
worked years for the company. Then the Department of Homeland
Security audited Chipotle's personnel records, found incorrect Social
Security numbers, and in December sent the company a list of workers
it had to fire.
Alejandro Juarez, who worked at the Calhoun Lake restaurant
in Minneapolis, says his manager told him not to bother coming back
the next day. He'd spent five years cleaning and fixing the stoves,
grills and refrigerators, for $9.42/hour. "The company used us," he
says, "and when it didn't serve them anymore, they threw us away like
trash."
John Morton, head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE) says it plans many more mass firings. The ICE website says it
targets employers "who are using illegal workers to drive down wages
... [those] likely to pay illegal workers substandard wages or force
them to endure intolerable working conditions."
At Chipotle, however, as in every other sanctions target, ICE
never improved conditions. Wages remain the same. In fact, although
Morton boasts ICE collected $7 million in employer fines during 2,740
audits, those who cooperated in firing workers were given immunity.
The only people penalized were workers.
Fortunately, in Minneapolis, workers first found the Center
for Workers United in Struggle, a local workers' center. With its
help, they made an alliance with the city's janitors' union, Service
Employees Local 26. The local union had already been hit by audits
that led to the firing of hundreds of its members, including
stewards, officers and core activists. Janitors had marched in the
streets, while the union tried to help them survive. Together,
Chipotle workers and building cleaners picketed the restaurants,
where several supporters were arrested in protest.
As these firings spread, many other unions will face the same
situation. Some, like the janitors' locals in Minneapolis and San
Francisco, have looked for ways to fight. Their first concern has
been survival, and they've sought time extensions, back wages and
vacation already owed, and severance.
In Minneapolis the workers also demand that Chipotle support
immigration reform. That puts the human rights of immigrants
squarely in the center of the table.
Congress' comprehensive immigration reform proposals of the
last five years would not have stopped these firings - in fact, most
bills would have increased them. But though Congress is moving
rightwards, many immigrant rights groups and unions are moving left.
They demand reforms that would reinforce the human and labor rights
of people like the janitors and Chipotle workers. One proposal, the
Dignity Campaign, calls for legal status for the undocumented, for
repealing employer sanctions, and for ending trade policies that lead
to forced migration.
That reflects the position unions adopted at the AFL-CIO
convention in 1999. They argued then that immigrant workers had to
be able to organize in order to improve Chipotle-level wages and
conditions. Making work a crime made organizing harder, while
pitting workers against each other during times of high unemployment.
San Francisco's hotel union later won a decision invalidating firings
for bad Social Security numbers. Unions even got a court injunction
against Bush's regulation mandating such terminations.
After 1999, however, some unions supported the CIR bills
because they promised limited legalization, even at the price of more
workplace enforcement. And most recently, the AFL-CIO's Building and
Construction Trades Department called for stepped-up sanctions
enforcement without legalization.
Unions will have to choose whether to defend workers or not.
There is no doubt that thousands more will be fired, even in an
economy with double-digit unemployment. And these firings are
indispensable to an enforcement regime that last year produced
395,000 deportations, and 345,000 people in detention. Rumors in
Washington now whisper that if there's too much protest, ICE will go
back to the Bush-style raids.
But the janitors and Chipotle workers have shown the country
a crucial fact. Even without papers, they've been willing to stand
up. "We have to make our rights count for something," Juarez says.
"We're not criminals. We have to say what we think, and let the
company and government see we're united."
Now it's up to unions and immigrant rights organizations to
stand up with them, to demand, not just that the firings and
deportations stop, but that a real immigration reform guarantee basic
human and labor rights.
--
__________________________________
David Bacon, Photographs and Stories
http://dbacon.igc.org
__________________________________
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