AFL-CIO Joins Re-enactment of 1965 Selma to Montgomery March
The AFL-CIO is joining with civil rights, community and labor partners in the re-enactment of the historic 1965 Selma to Montgomery, Ala., civil rights march that will focus attention on new attacks on voting rights, immigrants, workers’ rights and education.
Speaking, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., this morning, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker told reporters:
The onslaught of coordinated attacks on workers’ rights, voting rights, public education and immigration reform is an affront to our democracy. During the difficult economic times that so many of our communities are facing, we would much rather see our state legislators spending their time focusing on job creation…as opposed to deconstructing our fundamental rights.
The five-day march will begin on Sunday March 4 in Selma in remembrance of 1965’s “Bloody Sunday” when more than 600 marchers calling for enactment of the Voting Rights Act were met by hundreds of local and state police with billy clubs and tear gas. Read the rest of this entry »
State Dept. Cracks Down on Abuse of Foreign Students by Hershey and Others
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In response to protests by foreign students exploited in a factory subcontracted by the Hershey Company and advocacy by the AFL-CIO and our allies, this week the U.S. State Department announced that it will make major revisions to a guest-worker and cultural exchange visa program and barred participation by a major player in the program, the Council for Educational Travel, USA (CETUSA).
Harika Duygu Ozer, one of the students involved in the protest, told the New York Times:
I hope this sends a clear message to other recruiters like CETUSA, that we will not be your captive workers.
As we reported last summer, students recruited for a cultural exchange program found themselves instead all but indentured to a factory in Palmyra, Penn., where they were made to perform dangerous work loading Hershey products with no safety protection for less than the minimum wage. In addition, the students stayed in housing provided by the Hershey contractor, for which it overcharged. Rents were deducted from the students’ pay. Read the rest of this entry »
Arkansas Ag Firm Agrees to $1.5 Million in Back Wages for Guest Workers
An Arkansas agriculture company has agreed to pay $1.5 million in back wages to 1,500 guest workers in a settlement with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The group filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of the workers in 2007.
Jim Knoepp, the lead SPLC attorney on the case, says:
This settlement sends an important message that guest workers have rights. Companies treating guest workers as disposable labor should take notice. They will be held accountable.
The guest workers—in the country under the federal H-2A agricultural guest worker program—harvested and packed tomatoes for Candy Brand in Bradley County, Ark., from 2003 to 2007. The 2007 lawsuit alleged that the company failed to pay its guest workers federally mandated minimum wages and failed to pay overtime wages for work in its packing sheds.
To cover travel expenses and applications for visas, Candy Brand’s workers paid up to $500 simply to work for the company during eight-week harvests. The SPLC lawsuit alleged the company refused to reimburse workers for the travel, visa and other fees they paid to obtain the jobs—a problem commonly faced by guest workers.
AFL-CIO, National Immigration Forum Call for Immediate Suspension of Secure Communities in Alabama
This from Brenda Loya in AFL-CIO Media Affairs.
The AFL-CIO and the National Immigration Forum (NIF) sent a joint letter yesterday to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano stressing the urgent need to change the Secure Communities program.
The Secure Communities program, implemented a few years ago by Homeland Security, was created to empower local law enforcement agencies to report undocumented immigrants with criminal records to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. But rather than making America’s communities safer, a recent investigation by the Justice Department confirmed the program has in many instances led to racial profiling.
AFL-CIO Report Spotlights Devastating Impact of Alabama’s Anti-Immigrant Law
This summer, Alabama passed one of the harshest anti-immigrant bills (HB 56) in the nation and the parallels between that law and the old South’s Jim Crow laws are “all too real,” says William Lucy, president of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU).
Lucy was part of an AFL-CIO-sponsored delegation of prominent African American labor leaders who traveled to Alabama last month to see firsthand the law’s devastating impacts on immigrant workers and their families. Today, the delegation released its report on its findings. The leaders, who have for years been deeply engaged in the struggle for human and civil rights—some for decades—write that they were shocked by what they found.
None of us expected to witness the humanitarian crisis we experienced—a crisis that hearkens Alabama back to the bleakest days of the state’s racial history. The parallels to Jim Crow were all too real, and the prejudice we heard about felt all too familiar.
The report sheds new light on the crisis Alabama immigrant families are facing as a Read the rest of this entry »
Texas DREAMER’s Suicide Linked to Fears of Deportation
Joaquin Luna, an 18-year-old Texas DREAM Act student, recently took his life, and his family told KGBT News in Harlingen, Texas, that the young man left behind letters saying he was worried about his immigration status and the failure of Congress to pass the DREAM Act.
The DREAM Act is a common-sense immigration bill for students like Joaquin who were brought to the United States at a young age. It would give conditional legal status and eventual citizenship to undocumented students who meet a series of stringent criteria. The House passed the DREAM Act last December, but Republicans sidelined the bill in the Senate.
In a statement released today, Texas AFL-CIO President Becky Moeller says Read the rest of this entry »
Fear of Anti-Immigration Law Leaves Empty Classrooms, Idle Farms
More from Alabama, where a delegation of African American labor and civil rights leaders is investigating the state’s recently passed anti-immigrant law. Follow the delegation here.
A grade school child is there one day and gone the next. Dependable laborers don’t show up to pick crops on a farm.
“It’s incredible,” said local AFT President Vi Parramore.
I have teachers tell me that kids are disappearing overnight. Not unenrolling and leaving. Just all of a sudden gone, just gone! Crops are rotting in the fields!
Parramore shared what she knew at a roundtable at the Beloved Community United Church of Christ in Birmingham, Ala. The roundtable was part of a tour by national African American labor and civil rights leaders to help shed a light on one of the harshest immigration laws in the country and how it invokes inhumanity reminiscent of the Jim Crow South. The delegation has investigated firsthand the impact of Alabama’s H.B. 56 on the lives of Latino working families.
Early in the day, the group toured a trailer park. Later, they met with small business owners. Alabama’s punitive anti-immigration law has cast a chill over the state’s Latino population. According to news reports, the new law says that police must report to federal authorities anyone they detain if they have a “reasonable suspicion” the person may be in the country illegally.
Voices from Immigrant Alabama: Scared Workers, Conflicted Families
More from Alabama, where a delegation of African American labor and civil rights leaders is investigating the state’s recently passed anti-immigrant law. Follow the delegation here.
DREAMer activist Victor Palafox took a delegation of national labor leaders and community and faith activists on a tour of a trailer park in Pelham, Ala., about 15 minutes from Birmingham, to give them a taste of how Alabama’s H.B. 56, which is one of the most punishing anti-immigrant state laws in America, hurts typical working people.
“My name is Pedro,” said one young man who spoke to the delegation in a community center in the park.
I don’t speak English very well because I’ve spent my time working. I work for a cleaning company. Ever since the law, my employer has used derogatory language and threatened not to pay me. I can’t leave. I have to work to feed my family.
People were nervous to come forward to talk to the delegation for fear that the news coverage Read the rest of this entry »
Alabama Deli Owner, Businesses Stand Strong for Immigrant Rights
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More from Alabama, where a delegation of African American labor and civil rights leaders is investigating the state’s recently passed anti-immigrant law. Follow the delegation here.
Alabama’s new anti-immigrant law instantly intimidated the nine Latino employees of Max’s Delicatessen, owned by Steve Dubrinsky, who says:
They are good solid people, and I don’t like how they feel right now.
Dubrinsky also quickly adds:
They’re all here legally.
His qualifying statement has become obligatory for everyone in Alabama these days who mentions an employee, friend or family member who’s Latino.
Dubrinsky wants that to change. Today, he hosted a group of local business owners to meet with African American union and civil rights leaders from as far away as Michigan and Washington, D.C., to enable owners to talk about Read the rest of this entry »
[#CrisisAL] Welcome to Alabama
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This is a cross-post from This Week in Blackness.
Visiting Alabama was something I already had in my mind. In fact, I have this whole elaborate plan on how I will teach my children about the history of being Black in America with trips across the country to cities that are historically linked to our experience. Birmingham, Ala., is one of them.
I don’t believe I can effectively convey the impact of the civil rights experience without bringing them to the place where the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth organized, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. penned “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” where four little girls lost their lives with an act of domestic terrorism or the amazing leadership of women like Diane Nash and Lola Hendricks was displayed.
But I don’t have any children yet, and I am not here for a civil rights tour. Instead, I am here because the state of Alabama has enacted legislation that unjustly targets Latino families and subjects them to harassment, employer abuse and other violations of their basic human dignity.
