Will Public Workers and Immigrants March Together on May Day?
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In this cross-post from “In These Times,” photojournalist and author David Bacon says immigrant workers and public service workers have a lot in common this May Day.
One sign carried in almost every May Day march of the last few years says it all: “We are Workers, not Criminals!” Often it was held in the calloused hands of men and women who looked as though they’d just come from work in a factory, cleaning an office building, or picking grapes.
The sign stated an obvious truth. Millions of people have come to the United States to work, not to break its laws. Some have come with visas, and others without them. But they are all contributors to the society they’ve found here.
This year, those marchers will be joined by the public service workers we saw in the Wisconsin state capitol in Madison, whose message was the same: we all work, we all contribute to our communities and we all have the right to a job, a union and a decent life. Past May Day protests have responded to a wave of draconian proposals to criminalize immigration status, and work itself, for undocumented people. The defenders of these proposals have used a brutal logic: if people cannot legally work, they will leave.
Vote for LabourStart’s Photo of the Year
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Stuart Elliott, senior correspondent for the international labor news and campaign site LabourStart, reports on the site’s 2010 Labor Photo of the Year contest.
It’s time to vote for the LabourStart 2010 Labor Photo of the Year. This year’s finalists dramatically illustrate the struggles of workers around the globe. The contest recognizes the talents of worker-photographers around the world, and at the same time encourages them to tell the stories of our struggles in photos.
Click here to cast your vote for the Photo of the Year. The voting ends at midnight GMT (7 p.m. EST) Dec. 31. You can vote only once.
Hotel Workers’ Faces Show Pride, Determination to Win Justice
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Photojournalist David Bacon has captured the pride and determination in the faces of hotel workers at the downtown Hilton in San Francisco who have spent the past few weeks in a dawn to dusk picket line.
The workers, who chant to guests, “Don’t check in, check out!” are demanding that the hotel’s owners negotiate a new contract with their union, UNITEHERE! Local 2.
San Francisco’s largest hotels are demanding cuts in health and retirement benefits and increased workloads.
A typical San Francisco hotel worker earns $30,000 per year.
These are their faces—all races and ages, together on the picket line.
LabourStart’s Photo of the Year: Child Labor in Bangladesh
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Subscribers to the global online labor news service LabourStart selected K.M. Asad’s striking photo of a Bangladeshi boy working in a shipbuilding plant as the Labor Photo of the Year. These factories employ young boys as apprentices without pay for the first few years. They work in extreme conditions without safety tools or other protective gears.
The photo contest is designed to encourage and recognize the talents of worker-photographers around the world while encouraging activists to tell the stories of workers’ struggles in photos. This is the group’s second photo contest. Click here to see the 2009 finalists.
The first prize is a two-year pro account on Flickr.com. The runners-up received a one-year pro account. The finalist photos also are displayed in the art gallery on the Union Island in Second Life.
Immigration Laws, U.S. Trade Policy Hurt All Workers
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Large corporations and the lobbyists they employ in Washington are running a familiar “game” on workers in the United States, Latin America and Mexico. The object of the game is to get as much out the workers at the cheapest price. What most people don’t think about is how U.S. trade and immigration policy are both part of the game.
Photojournalist David Bacon, author of Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants, who spoke at the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C., last night, says our flawed trade policies “enforce poverty in other countries.”
Bacon says so-called free trade exacerbates poverty and inequality in our trading partners, spurring migration flows. One example he cites is the way the North American Free Trade Agreement opened the Mexican corn market to cheaply produced U.S. corn, making it impossible for Mexican farmers to “get a price for their corn that would pay for the cost of growing it.”
