FIRED FOR THE CRIME OF WORKING
By David Bacon
In These Times, April 2011
http://www.inthesetimes.org/article/7073/fired_for_the_crime_of_working
The words "Mexico" and "Mexican" can hardly be found on the
website of the country's largest chain of Mexican fast food
restaurants, Chipotle. Yet almost everyone working in almost every
location is Mexican, or at least Latino.
Mexican workers are often an invisible but indispensable
workforce. They clean office buildings at night, pick fruit and
vegetables miles from most urban Americans, and cut up cows and pigs
in giant anonymous factories hidden away in Midwest small towns. But
Chipotle's effort to make its workers invisible is deliberate, not an
accident of time or geography.
Three months ago the chain that made its fortune selling
Mexican food made by Mexican workers fired hundreds of them
throughout Minnesota. Their crime was that they worked, but had no
immigration papers. That put them in the crosshairs of the Obama
administration's key immigration enforcement program.
One was Alejandro Juarez, who spent five years at the Calhoun
Lake Chipotle in Minneapolis. Juarez came here nine years ago,
leaving two daughters and a wife at home in Mexico. Once he arrived,
he could never risk going back, not even once, to see them grow up.
Crossing back over the border to return to work would have cost more
than $2500, a prohibitive expense for a fast food worker. Over the
years Juarez learned how to fix stoves, grills, refrigerators and hot
tables, for which he was paid $9.42/hour. He worked hard, sent money
home, put his girls through school, and knew their voices only from
the telephone.
In the restaurant, he says, you couldn't think about that
because the company had a rule that you had to smile all the time.
"People would come to work leaving sick kids at home, not able to get
enough hours to pay the rent, and then had to smile for fear of
losing their job," he recalls. "It was humiliating."
Last December he and coworkers all over the state were called
in by managers. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of the
Department of Homeland Security, had audited the company records,
they said, and told Chipotle to fire them. So managers told them not
to come back the following day.
Firings hundreds, even thousands of workers is the
administration's primary strategy for enforcing immigration law in
the workplace. Since 1986, federal law has required employers to
verify the immigration status of workers. Job applicants fill out an
I-9 form and provide identification showing they are citizens or are
immigrants authorized to work in the U.S. In effect, this provision
of the law, called employer sanctions, makes it a federal crime for
an undocumented immigrant to hold a job.
For over 20 years the federal government has used various
methods to enforce the law. Under President George W. Bush,
black-clad immigration agents holding submachine guns charged into
meatpacking plants and rounded up workers for deportation. Bush
proposed a regulation that would have required all employers to fire
all workers whose Social Security numbers didn't match the SSA
database, presumably because they were undocumented. That regulation
was challenged by unions and enjoined in Federal court.
President Barack Obama and DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano
have said they favor a "softer" strategy. Instead of Bush's "all
employers at once" approach, ICE now audits the records of employers
one by one. Social Security numbers, once intended to benefit
workers by tracking contributions for retirement and disability
benefits, have become the tool for identifying and firing the
undocumented.
President Obama says sanctions enforcement targets employers
"who are using illegal workers in order to drive down wages-and
oftentimes mistreat those workers." An ICE Worksite Enforcement
Advisory claims "unscrupulous employers are likely to pay illegal
workers substandard wages or force them to endure intolerable working
conditions." Curing intolerable conditions by firing workers who
endure them doesn't help the workers or change the conditions,
however.
Over the last two years, thousands of workers have been
fired. In Minneapolis, Seattle and San Francisco over 1800 janitors,
members of SEIU union locals, have lost their jobs. In 2009 over
2000 young women at the sewing machines of American Apparel were
fired in Los Angeles. No one, except perhaps ICE, knows exactly how
many how many more workers have been terminated, but ICE director
John Morton last year said ICE had audited over 2900 companies.
One might think that the current and previous
administrations, bent on using this brutal tactic to force
undocumented immigrants to leave the country, would also address the
reasons why people cross the border to begin with. The North
American Free Trade Agreement, for instance, allowed huge U.S.
corporations from Archer Daniels Midland to Smithfield to flood
Mexico with subsidized corn and meat, making it impossible for
farmers to compete and survive. Six million Mexicans have come to
the U.S. as a result, since the treaty took effect.
"NAFTA and the effects of globalization create great
migration pressures on Mexicans," says Bill Ong Hing, a law professor
who investigated meatpacking raids for the United Food and Commercial
Workers. "Utilizing employer sanctions to address Mexican migration
causes misery for workers, but does not reduce displacement and the
flow of people."
Yet despite campaign promises, the administration has no
intention of renegotiating that agreement, and plans to ask Congress
this year to ratify new ones with South Korea and Colombia. Last
fall William Daley, who shepherded NAFTA through Congress for
President Bill Clinton, was appointed Obama's chief of staff. Jeffrey
Immelt, CEO of General Electric, became his top economic advisor on
jobs. Immelt's predecessor at GE, Jack Welch, famously declared that
the corporation's future lay in Mexico. He meant that GE saw Mexico,
not as a market, but as a reserve of labor at wages a fraction of
those in its US factories.
The proliferation of starvation-wage jobs didn't keep people
in Mexico. Instead it forced them to come north looking for work.
Chipotle was only one of thousands of U.S. employers who saw that
gold mine.
Those displaced workers coming north couldn't get visas,
however, and therefore no Social Security cards or "work
authorization." Hungry migrants invented or borrowed numbers, gave
them to Chipotle and thousands of other employers, and went to work
for the lowest wages in the U.S. economy. Despite the
administration's claim that it's penalizing those low-wage employers,
the companies audited by ICE get immunity from penalties if they
cooperate in firing their workers. The only ones punished are
workers themselves.
The administration has no intention of stopping migration.
With its emphasis on free trade, it couldn't even if it wanted to.
And if somehow it could force millions of undocumented workers to
leave, the economic consequences would be disastrous, as the basic
workforce would disappear in many industries.
Bush's Secretary of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff,
explained this apparent contradiction in policy by saying the purpose
of enforcement was to "close the back door and open the front door."
The intent of that policy became clear when ICE agents did an I-9
audit last year at Gebbers Farms, an apple grower in remote eastern
Washington. At ICE's insistence, Gebbers fired 500 workers, some of
whom had worked at the ranch for years. In the tiny town of Brewster
(population 2100) 90% of the school students were Mexican.
After the firings, Gebbers applied for 1200 H2-A visas,
allowing it to bring workers from other countries (including 300 from
Jamaica) to pick its crops. The visa is tied to work, and these
"guest workers" have to leave once the work is done.
Enforcement didn't do away with immigrant labor, but allowed
an employer to bring workers under conditions called "Close to
Slavery" in a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The use of
these programs is expanding. All the comprehensive immigration
reform bills in Congress over the last five years have tied
enforcement to these labor supply schemes.
"We have to look at the whole picture," urges Renee Saucedo,
former director of San Francisco's day labor program. "So long as we
have trade agreements like NAFTA that create poverty in countries
like Mexico, people will continue to come here, no matter how many
walls we build. Instead of turning people into guest workers while
firing and even jailing those who don't have papers, we need to help
people get legal status and repeal the laws that make work a crime."
Saucedo and a group of unions and immigrant rights
organizations around the country have proposed an alternative
immigration policy based on human and labor rights, called the
Dignity Campaign, that would also change U.S. trade policy.
In Minneapolis, SEIU Local 26 has helped workers caught in
the audits to organize marches and demonstrations. When the Chipotle
workers were fired, the union cooperated with the Center for Workers
United in Struggle, a local workers' center, and the Minnesota
Immigrant Rights Action Committee to fight for back wages and
vacation pay. Supporters were even arrested in civil disobedience at
a Chipotle restaurant.
The terminated Chipotle workers have also demanded that the
company support immigration reform. Chipotle might actually like
proposals that would give it access to guest worker programs,
enforced with the threat of employer sanctions and firings. But
after getting fired themselves, that's undoubtedly not what its
workers have in mind.
For more articles and images, see http://dbacon.igc.org
See also Illegal People -- How Globalization Creates Migration and
Criminalizes Immigrants (Beacon Press, 2008)
Recipient: C.L.R. James Award, best book of 2007-2008
http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2002
See also the photodocumentary on indigenous migration to the US
Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006)
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4575
See also The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border
(University of California, 2004)
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9989.html
--
__________________________________
David Bacon, Photographs and Stories
http://dbacon.igc.org
__________________________________
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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