Author: David Bacon
Date: May 2012
Source:

SAN FRANCISCO AND OAKLAND, CA – Among the many different events celebrating May Day in San Francisco and Oakland were the occupation of an intersection in San Francisco’s financial district, and an immigrant rights march through East Oakland.  Participants in Occupy San Francisco, groups in the Progressive Workers Coalition and Jobs with Justice, several unions and other immigrant rights organizations took over the intersection of Market and Montgomery Streets to make speeches, put on street theater and protest the power of the wealthy 1%.  In Oakland, immigrant community organizations and immigrant rights groups in Sin Fronteras organized a loud contingent in a May Day march through East Oakland.  Sin Fronteras has organized the Oakland May Day march every year since the big immigrant rights marches of 2006.  This year several unions and participants in Occupy Oakland joined them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Author: David Bacon
Date: April 2012
Source: The Nation, web edition

http://www.thenation.com/article/167465/how-mississippis-blackbrown-strategy-beat-souths-anti-immigrant-wave

In early April, an anti-immigrant bill like those that swept through legislatures in Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina was stopped cold in Mississippi. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Tea Party Republicans were confident they’d roll over any opposition. They’d brought Kris Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State who co-authored Arizona’s SB 1070, into Jackson, to push for the Mississippi bill. He was seen huddled with the state representative from Brookhaven, Becky Currie, who introduced it.  The American Legislative Exchange Council, which designs and introduces similar bills into legislatures across the country, had its agents on the scene.

Their timing seemed unbeatable. Last November Republicans took control of the state House of Representatives for the first time since Reconstruction. Mississippi was one of the last Southern states in which Democrats controlled the legislature, and the turnover was a final triumph for Reagan and Nixon’s Southern Strategy. And the Republicans who took power weren’t just any Republicans. Haley Barbour, now ironically considered a “moderate Republican,” had stepped down as governor. Voters replaced him with an anti-immigrant successor, Phil Bryant, whose venom toward the foreign-born rivals Lou Dobbs.

Yet the seemingly inevitable didn’t happen.

Instead, from the opening of the legislative session just after New Years, the state’s Legislative Black Caucus fought a dogged rearguard war in the House. Over the last decade the caucus acquired a hard-won expertise on immigration, defeating over two hundred anti-immigrant measures. After New Year’s, though, they lost the crucial committee chairmanships that made it possible for them to kill those earlier bills. But they did not lose their voice.

“We forced a great debate in the House, until 1:30 in the morning,” says state Representative Jim Evans, caucus leader and AFL-CIO staff member in Mississippi. “When you have a prolonged debate like that, it shows the widespread concern and disagreement. People began to see the ugliness in this measure.”

Like all of Kobach’s and ALEC’s bills, HB 488 stated its intent in its first section: “to make attrition through enforcement the public policy of all state agencies and local governments.” In other words, to make life so difficult and unpleasant for undocumented people that they’d leave the state. And to that end, it said people without papers wouldn’t be able to get as much as a bicycle license or library card, and that schools had to inform on the immigration status of their students. It mandated that police verify the immigration status of anyone they arrest, an open invitation to racial profiling.

“The night HB 488 came to the floor, many black legislators spoke against it,” reports Bill Chandler, director of the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance, “including some who’d never spoken out on immigration before. One objected to the use of the term ‘illegal alien’ in its language, while others said it justified breaking up families and ethnic cleansing.” Even many white legislators were inspired to speak against it.

Nevertheless, the bill was rammed through the House. Then it reached the Senate, controlled by Republicans for some years, and presided over by a more moderate Republican, Lieutenant Governor Tate Reeves. Reeves could see the widespread opposition to the bill, even among employers, and was less in lock step with the Tea Party’s anti-immigrant agenda than other Republicans. Although Democrats had just lost all their committee chairmanships in the house, Reeves appointed a rural Democrat to chair one of the Senate’s two judiciary committees. He then sent that bill to that committee, chaired by Hob Bryan. And Bryan killed it.

On the surface, it appears that fissures inside the Republican Party facilitated the bill’s defeat. But they were not that defeat’s cause. As the debate and maneuvering played out in the capitol building, its halls were filled with angry protests, while noisy demonstrations went on for days until the bill’s final hour. That grassroots upsurge produced political alliances that cut deeply into the bill’s support, including calls for rejection by the state’s sheriffs’ and county supervisors associations, the Mississippi Economic Council (its chamber of commerce), and employer groups from farms to poultry packers.

That upsurge was not spontaneous, nor the last minute product of emergency mobilizations. “We wouldn’t have had a chance against this without twelve years of organizing work,” Evans explains. “We worked on the conscience of people night and day, and built coalition after coalition. Over time, people have come around. The way people think about immigration in Mississippi today is nothing like the way they thought when we started.” 

Evans, Chandler, attorney Patricia Ice, Father Jerry Tobin, activist Kathy Sykes, union organizer Frank Curiel and other veterans of Mississippi’s social movements came together at the end of the 1990s not to stop a bill twelve years later but to build political power. Their vehicle was the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance, and a partnership with the Legislative Black Caucus and other coalitions fighting on most of the progressive issues facing the state.

Their strategy has been based on the state’s changing demographics. Over the last two decades, the percentage of African-Americans in Mississippi’s population has been rising. Black families driven from jobs by factory closings and unemployment in the north have been moving back south, reversing the movement of the decades of the Great Migration. Today at least 37 percent of Mississippi’s people are African-Americans, the highest percentage of any state in the country.

Then, starting with the boom in casino construction in the early 1990s, immigrants from Mexico and Central America, displaced by NAFTA and CAFTA, began migrating into the state as well. Poultry plants, farms and factories hired them. Guest workers were brought to work in Gulf Coast reconstruction and shipyards. “Today we have established Latino communities,” Chandler explains. “The children of the first immigrants are now arriving at voting age.”

In MIRA’s political calculation, blacks and immigrants, plus unions, are the potential pillars of a powerful political coalition. HB 488′s intent to drive immigrants from Mississippi is an effort to make that coalition impossible.

MIRA is not just focused on defeating bad bills, however. It built a grassroots base by fighting immigration raids at the Howard Industries plant in Laurel in 2008, and in other worksites as well. Its activist staff helped families survive sweeps in apartment houses and trailer parks. They brought together black workers suspicious of the Latino influx, and immigrant families worried about settling in a hostile community. Political unity, based in neighborhoods, protects both groups, they said.

For unions organizing poultry plants, factories and casinos MIRA became a resource helping to win over immigrant workers. It brought labor violation cases against Gulf employers in the wake of Katrina. Yet despite being on opposing sides, employers and MIRA recognized they had a mutual interest in fighting HB 488. Both opposed workplace immigration raids and enforcement, which are based on the same “attrition through enforcement” idea. Since 1986 US immigration law has forbidden undocumented people from working by making it illegal for employers to hire them. Called “employer sanctions,” the enforcement of this law (part of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986), especially under the Bush and Obama administrations, has caused the firing of thousands of workers.

Yet over the last decade, Congressional proposals for comprehensive immigration reform have called for strengthening sanctions, and increasing raids and firings. “That’s why we didn’t support those bills,” Chandler says. “They violate the human rights of working people to feed their families. For employers, that opposition was a meeting point. They didn’t like workplace enforcement either. All their associations claimed they didn’t hire undocumented workers, but we all know who’s working in the plants. We want people to stay as much as the employers do. Forcing people from their jobs forces them to leave-an ethnic cleansing tactic.” During the protests Ice, Sykes and others underlined the point by handing legislators sweet potatoes with labels saying, “I was picked by immigrant workers who together contribute $82 million to the state’s economy.”

MIRA, however, also fought guest worker programs used by Mississippi casinos and shipyards to recruit workers with few labor rights. “When it came to HB 488 employers were tactical allies,” Chandler cautions. Unions, on the other hand, are members of the MIRA coalition. While MIRA and employers saw a mutual interest in opposing the bill, MIRA helps unions when they try to organize the workers of those same employers, and helps workers defend themselves when employers violate their rights. MIRA, in fact, was started by activists like Chandler, Evans and Curiel, who all have a long history of labor activity in Mississippi. When HB 488 hit, busses brought in members of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1529 from poultry plants in Scott County, Laborers from Laurel, Retail, Wholesale union members from Carthage. Black catfish workers from Indianola, and electrical union members from Crystal Spring. The black labor mobilization was largely organized by new pro-immigrant leadership of the state chapter of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, the AFL-CIO constituency group for black union members.

Catholic congregations, Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Evangelical Lutherans, Muslims and Jews also brought people to protest HB 488, as did the Mississippi Human Services Coalition – a result of a long history working on immigrant issues. And groups around MIRA and the Black Caucus not only fought that bill, but others introduced by Tea Party Republicans as well. One would ban abortions if a fetal heartbeat is detected. Another promotes charter schools. A third would restrict access to workers compensation benefits, while another would strip civil service protection from state employees.

Dr. Ivory Phillips, a MIRA director and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Jackson Public Schools, explains that charter school proposals, voter ID bills and anti-immigrant measures are all linked. “Because white supremacists fear losing their status as the dominant group in this country, there is a war against brown people today, just as there has long been a war against black people,” he says. “In all three cases-charter schools, ‘immigration reform’ and voter ID-what we are witnessing is an anti-democratic surge, a rise in overt racism, and a refusal to provide opportunities to all.”

Tea Party supporters also saw these issues linked together. In the wake of the charter school debate during the same period the immigration bill was defeated, a crowd gathered around Representative Reecy Dickson, a leading Black Caucus member, in which she was shoved and called racist epithets.

“Because of our history we had a relationship with our allies,” Chandler concludes. “We need political alliances that mean something in the long term – permanent alliances, and a strategy for winning political power. That includes targeted voter registration that focuses on specific towns, neighborhoods and precincts.” Despite the national importance of stopping the Southern march of the anti-immigrant bills, however, the resources for the effort were almost all local. MIRA emptied its bank account fighting HB 488. Additional money came mostly from local units of organizations like the UAW, UNITE HERE and the Muslim Association. “The resources of the national immigrant rights movement should prioritize preventing bills from passing as much as fighting them after the fact,” Chandler warns.

On the surface, the fight in Jackson was a defensive battle waged in the wake of the Republican legislative takeover of the legislature. And the Tea Party still threatens to bring HB 488 back until it passes. Yet Evans, who also chairs MIRA’s board, believes that time is on the side of social change. “These Republicans still have tricks up their sleeves,” he cautions. “We’re worried about redistricting, and a Texas-style stacking of the deck. But in the end, we still believe our same strategy will build power in Mississippi. We don’t see last November as a defeat but as the last stand of the Confederacy.”

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Author: David Bacon
Date: April 2012
Source: Labornote website

http://labornotes.org/blogs/2012/04/common-ground-kill-floor-organizing-smithfield

Keith Ludlum and Terry Slaughter are two slaughterhouse workers who helped organize the union at the Smithfield Foods plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina.  Here they tell the story of the way African American, white and Mexican immigrant workers were able to find common ground in that campaign, and how the company used immigration enforcement to try to defeat them.  The original interviews have been edited into narrative form by David Bacon.

Keith Ludlum:

When I was 22 I heard about this new hog plant, and went and applied.  They put me in the livestock department, right in the belly of the beast.  It was a real shock — seeing how workers were treated.  I saw hogs fall on people, and then the supervisors doing everything to get the hog back on the line.  They were more concerned with the hogs then with the people.  A dead animal was more valuable than a live human being.

 

 

Keith Ludlum is president of UFCW Local 1208.

Most people working there were African American.  I never thought of myself as better than anyone.  My dad came from poor rural North Carolina.  He taught me, we’re all the same.  Treat people how you want to be treated.  Work hard and you’ll be rewarded for hard work.  I had no idea what unions were.   Like most people in the south, most of my ideas about unions came from the companies I worked for, which were very anti-union.

Then an older African American guy, a humble spirit, broke his leg.  The next day when I came in he was in the break room with his leg in a cast on crutches.  He said they told him that if he didn’t come in to work he’d be fired.  The supervisor wouldn’t even let him park near the place where he worked in the plant — those places were just for management.  That’s when I knew I wouldn’t keep working under those conditions.  One of the ladies invited to a union meeting in Lumberton and I went.

 

 

Nilsa Morales was injured and then terminated at the Smithfield pork plant in Tar Heel.

I knew what they were doing to people was wrong.  And the only fix that I could see was the union. So I took union cards into the plant.  I thought the law would protect me, and if I lost my job, it wasn’t the end of the world.  I was naive.  Now that I ‘m older I know corporations don’t care about the law, but I was young.  I thought, Americans believe in the law and everyone has to obey it.

After three weeks I had most of livestock signed up.  But other workers told me the supervisors were watching me.  Then they started writing me up.  Finally they called me in.  They had the regional guy in charge of all the farms, the livestock manager, and the assistant plant superintendent all in there to fire me.  The livestock manager knew what he was doing was wrong.  He couldn’t even look at me.  I looked up at him and said, “You can’t hold it against someone for trying to make things better.”   They walked me out, and when we got to the lobby there were two deputies standing there to escort me to my car.

I said to myself, “You picked the wrong m__________r.”  And that started a 12-year fight.  That was 1994. 

Terry Slaughter:

I was born in Georgia, but we moved to New York City when I was ten.  My wife’s family was from North Carolina, and after we got married she decided to move down here.  I didn’t want to leave the city life, but finally I decided it was time to grow up.

 

 

Terry Slaughter is secretary-treasurer of UFCW Local 1208.

When I came down here, it was the first time I had a regular job, where I was paid by the hour.  Before, I was never paid on the books. At first I worked at a Black and Decker factory on the line.  In 2002, after three years, I came to Smithfield.  It was a whole new world.

I started in the livestock department, taking animals off the truck.  I was scared of the hogs the first week.  I called them pigs.  They told me, they’re not pigs.  That’s a city name.  The plant was killing 32,000 hogs a day.  In eight years there was never a day they didn’t have hogs. 

If a hog gets crippled or falls, someone has to pick it up. They weigh 400 pounds. You have to push it into a barrel, and if you’re a man, they say, you do it by yourself.  With all the walking and carrying hogs, I lost 75 pounds the first year I was there. 

 

 

Lorenzo Reed, a worker at the Smithfield pork plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina, in the parking lot in Dillon, South Carolina, where workers wait for vans to take them to their jobs. It takes hours to get there.

At first I liked it.  Then in 2005 reality set in.  I started seeing the way management was treating the employees. Hogs would run over a worker and managers would move the person to the side so they could keep the animals moving.  The hogs were more important than the people. But what could I do?  One person alone couldn’t do anything.

In July 2006 I heard people start talking about forming a union.  That was what I was waiting for.  I knew about unions in New York.  Some were skeptics and some were scared.  But I thought, if we don’t stand for something, we won’t count for anything.

One morning, it was almost 100 degrees outside.  Keith and a couple of others went to get water from the cooler, but it was hot and had ants in it.  We said, “We’re not going to work if we don’t have clean and cold water.”  So 25 of us got some chairs and we sat in the middle of the barn.  We crossed our arms and said, “We’re not going to do anything until we get what we deserve.”  For eight hours we did nothing.

 

 

Vanessa McCloud, a worker at the Smithfield pork plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina. On the wall behind her are portraits of Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X.

The supervisors started to go crazy.  When livestock stops, the rest of the plant does too since it doesn’t have any more hogs on the line.  The hog trucks were lined up at the gate, and the animals were dying from heat in the trucks.  When they started losing money and realized we weren’t going back to work, supervisors tried to run the hogs themselves.  But they couldn’t do it.  They’d never done that work before.

I thought for sure we were going to get fired.  But they realized they weren’t going to be able to produce if we weren’t working.  The very next day we got clean and cold water.  That’s when I knew we had a chance.  From there it snowballed.

Keith Ludlum

I won at the labor board, and all the appeals later in court.  Finally they reinstated me in 2006.  By then the whole community knew what was happening.  By the time I came back there were only a few people in livestock who remembered me.  I wore a Justice at Smithfield shirt when I went back in, and even had my company ID photo taken with the shirt on.

The first day I started asking people to sign cards.  Some people thought I had the plague, but other people were really excited.  I always let the company throw the first punch, but I always hit them harder, and workers saw that.  You can’t show any kind of weakness or make any mistakes.  So we slowly built a core group in livestock.  That department controls the whole plant.  Terry and some of the others joined.  They started believing, and we started doing actions in the plant.

 

 

Julio Vargas led a walkout among Smithfield’s subcontracted cleaning workers for higher wages and safer working conditions.  He was later fired.

By then there were a lot of immigrants in the plant.  After Smithfield ran through the workforce around here, you started seeing a lot more immigrants working in the plant.  The company thought the undocumented would work cheap, work hard, and they wouldn’t complain.   It happened very quickly, and there wasn’t an established community here before.  Someone made a personal effort to get the workforce here.  The company had to make that happen.

I went back in July of 2006, and the walkout over the firings happened in November 2006.  At first African Americans and others viewed the firings as just a Latino problem, but during the walkout I tried to explain that it was a worker problem.  People are just trying to earn a living and raise a family.  The company took advantage of them, and then made them pay the price. 

 

 

Rose Marie Rodriguez was injured on the job at the Smithfield pork plant in Tar Heel, and then fired.

They’d fired 50 or 70 people, and they said more were coming.  People were panicked.  They knew they were going to be next.  Were they going to wait, or do something about it?  That’s when they said, “Let’s shut them down.”  It was really empowering to see all those workers stand up together.  We just took over the parking lot.  We had total control.  When you’ve got enough people, nothing can stop you.

We were trying to buy some time for people, and the company agreed to extend the time by two months.  It was the best we could do, but it did show people we can change the way the company makes a decision.

 

 

A Smithfield worker studies English in a class organized by the United Food and Commercial Workers.

The next February ICE hit this area again, and Eduardo and I followed them around with cameras.  With cameras on them, ICE would handle going into people’s houses differently.  You could tell they were mad at us, and kept trying to push us back.  They surrounded one trailer, and turned off the power to try to smoke the people out.  It was a hundred and some degrees, and the air conditioning was cut off.  There were children in there.

But you could see that staying just wasn’t worth it to people, and they were going to move on.  They didn’t know if they were going to be arrested, or how their family might be split up.

Terry Slaughter

If you’re a good worker, they should let you work.  Granted, you’re supposed to be documented.  We know that.  But this was a tactic by Smithfield at the time when we were trying to get the union in.   That was a dirty low blow.  If you were undocumented, the company knew.  They knew who they were hiring.

They wanted people to believe that the union had called ICE on the people, so we’d lose the Latino vote.  I would say a vast majority of the Latino workers were a yes vote for the union.  But people were scared if they were undocumented.  If I was undocumented, I wouldn’t want to be out in front either.

There were more Native Americans and African Americans coming into the workforce at that time.  I don’t think the change in the workforce made a big difference by the time of the election.  The union won because it was time.

 

 

A Smithfield worker signs a union card in the parking lot in Dillon, South Carolina, where workers wait for vans to take them to their jobs.

Keith Ludlum

I think there had to have been cooperation [between ICE and the company].  The company wants someone they can exploit – the dream employee.  You were supposed to come to work, take whatever they paid you and however they treated you, and if you didn’t keep your mouth shut you should go back home.  It was a perfect employee for a corporation, other than a slave.

But I’m sure the company saw these people were getting organized.  The workforce in the shadows was uniting, expecting rights, expecting to be part of the community.  That’s not what the company wanted.  It wasn’t going to be a workforce anymore that would be quiet and obedient.

 

 

Everildo Lopez, a worker who was injured at the Smithfield pork plant in Tar Heel, and then fired.

For a while relationships between Latinos and African Americans were strained.  Some African Americans thought Latinos were taking jobs they could do, and keeping the wages down.  But three was also a sense of envy after Latino workers walked out over the firings, and showed their power.  Many started saying, we need to do something, and started demanding the MLK holiday.  The following year Smithfield named MLK an official holiday for the whole company.  People started building bridges, standing together.

Everyone saw the power of that unity in the walkout.  But it was something people did out of necessity.  Afterwards, they had to start getting ready to leave.  It would have been different if we’d been able to stop the terminations permanently.  That would have made a difference.  Once people started leaving, it broke up those core groups that made things happen.  The damage had been done to the immigrant population, and the undocumented started leaving, getting away from the hotspot.  You can’t blame them.  Who wants to get arrested, with your kids waiting to be picked up?  Immigrants have that extra fear.  We all have to worry about being fired.  They have to worry also about being arrested, separated from their families and deported. 

 

 

Carolina and her sister stay at the house of Everildo Lopez, an injured Smithfield worker.

The company terminated me again in 2007.  They wanted me out of there.  So I worked for the union on the campaign here. After we won the election in 2008 we always wanted the union here to be run by workers from the plant.  It’s got to be people who live here, not just someone for whom it’s a job.  I’ve been a member of the local since it was chartered in 2009, so I ran for President after the first contract had been negotiated.

The union has been able to improve the wages, even though we’ve been in the worst recession since the depression.  Thirty people who were fired unjustly are back on the job with back pay.  To me that’s enough — firing is like a death.  People in this country are two paychecks away from being homeless.  The company can’t fire people for getting hurt the way they did before, and we can time the lines and slow them down.

When the union made the agreement with the company for the election, they had to agree that I couldn’t go anywhere near the plant.  I couldn’t even be on the grass on the roadway outside.  Now I’m the local president.

Terry Slaughter

Relations between Latinos and African Americans today are great.   When you look at the culture in the plant today, everyone’s together.  Supervisors can’t yell at you – no more.  They can’t downgrade you – no more.  It used to be that if you said anything you got fired – no more.

Between all the shop stewards and elected officers, there’s over a hundred of us.  When we speak, plus the five thousand people who work there, you hear a roar.  When it’s a few of us together, we’re a force.  But when it’s all of us together, we’re a union.

 

 

Ronnie Simmons, a worker and leader of the union organizing effort at the Smithfield pork plant in Tar Heel.  Today she’s a member of the executive board of UFCW Local 1208.

 

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Support for this series and also the analysis presented in The Nation article of January 4, 2012, How US Policies Fueled Mexico’s Great Migration, came from The Investigative Fund, a project of The Nation Institute

http://www.thenation.com/article/165438/how-us-policies-fueled-mexicos-great-migration

EMPLOYMENT changes of so-called trailing spouses are often hampered by high unemployment rates, work permit difficulties, other expats on the market and personal selectivity.According to a 2011 report on Global Relocation Trends by Brookfield Global Relocation Services, 60 percent of the trailing spouses of expats abroad on assignment were employed before the couple moved to another country, but only 15 percent worked after arrival.

YOU KNOW that when I hate you, it is because I love you to a point of passion that unhinges my soul,” said Parisian salon owner Julie de Lespinasse, in the 1700s.

LEARNING a new language is hard, but mastering physical innuendo may be harder.In the YouTube video “Body Language Mistakes People Make”, author Carol Kinsey Goman pinpoints five major interpretation errors people make.

Two hundred immigrant workers, their wives, husbands, children, and hundreds of supporters marched through downtown Berkeley February 17, protesting their firing from Pacific Steel Castings.  The company is one of the city’s biggest employers, and the largest steel foundry west of the Mississippi River.  Starting at City Hall, they walked for an hour past stores and homes, as bystanders often applauded.  Teachers and students at a Montessori school along the route even came out to the sidewalk to urge them on.

At a rally before the march started, fired worker Jesus Prado told the assembled crowd, “I worked for Pacific Steel for seven years.  We’ve organized this March for Dignity because we want to stop the way they’re stepping on us, and treating us like criminals. We came here to work, not to break any laws.”

“Many of us are buying homes, or have lived in our homes for years,” added another fired worker, Ana Castaño. “We have children in the schools. We pay taxes and contribute to our community. What is happening to us is not just, and hurts our families.  All we did was work.  That shouldn’t be treated like it’s a crime.”
Berkeley City Councilmember Jesse Arreguin agreed.  “We’re here today to send a message to the Obama administration that the I-9 raids have to stop,” he told the crowd.

Two hundred fourteen workers were fired in December and January, as a result of a so-called silent raid, in which the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arm of the Department of Homeland Security inspected the company’s records to find workers who don’t have legal immigration status.  ICE then demanded that the company fire them.

For the past year these workers have held meetings in union halls and churches, distributed food to families hungry because they can no longer work, and spoken to elected officials.  The march was the culmination of months of debate in which they weighed the consequences of making their firings public, and therefore their immigration status as well.  “We know Berkeley is a sanctuary city,” one worker explained.  “This is about the safest place we can think of to have this march.  What happened to us was unjust, and we feel we have to protest, if not for ourselves, then for others who face the same injustice.”

In fact, tens of thousands have been fired in recent years because of their immigration status.  Thousands of janitors lost jobs in Minneapolis, San Francisco, and San Diego.  Two thousand sewing machine operators were fired in Los Angeles.  Many more workers across the country have been caught in this wave of terminations.

Since the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, employers have been prohibited from hiring undocumented workers, and those workers themselves have been forbidden to hold jobs.  To keep track, for a quarter century all workers in the U.S. have had to declare their immigration status on I-9 forms when they get hired.  Now the Obama administration has made the inspection of those forms, and the firing of workers whose status it questions, a centerpiece of its immigration enforcement strategy.

Throughout the march, chants and shouts condemned the administration.  Activists in the crowd pointed out that President Obama is attacking the communities of immigrants and people of color who were his strongest supporters in his 2008 presidential election campaign.  At the time, Obama promised he would adopt a more humane approach toward immigration enforcement than his predecessor, who became notorious for factory raids and mass deportations.  Candidate Obama said he’d work to reform immigration law so that immigrants could enjoy greater rights.  Once in office, however, the administration not only continued President Bush’s policy of enforcing immigration law in the workplace, but it vastly expanded I-9 audits and firings.

ICE began its audit of the I-9 forms of workers at Pacific Steel last February.  In March, the workers and their union, Molders Union Local 164B, struck the plant for a week, to turn back company demands in contract negotiations that would have had them pay more for their health coverage.  According to legal charges filed later by the union, the ICE audit should have stopped at that point, since the agency’s own internal rules call for it to avoid enforcement actions during labor disputes.

The audit, however, continued.  At the same time, throughout the following spring and summer, city councils in Berkeley, Oakland and Alameda passed resolutions calling on ICE to abandon it, to allow the workers to continue working and the company to function normally.  Similar resolutions and letters poured into the office of DHS Secretary [and former Arizona Governor] Janet Napolitano from unions, labor councils, community and immigrant rights organizations, and local elected officials.

Nevertheless, in November ICE sent Pacific Steel a letter listing the names of the 214 individuals it insisted lacked visas, according to its database.  If the workers could not provide other valid documents, ICE demanded that the company fire them.

About half the workers live in nearby Richmond and San Pablo.  Richmond Mayor Gayle McLaughlin condemned the firings and accused ICE of undermining the city’s already-devastated economy in the middle of a recession.  “Their firing is a violation of their human rights,” she said at a local food drive for the workers. “When they say that these raids are targeting criminals, it’s not true. People who are just trying to make a living are being targeted big time.”

Councilman Arreguin, one of the first elected officials to support the workers last year, added, “The company and the workers pay taxes that support local schools and services.  We could lose money we desperately need in these challenging economic times.  The workers’ paychecks inject hundreds of thousands of dollars into our local economy every month that support other businesses and families.  All this is placed in jeopardy by the audit.  It is not necessary to enforce immigration law in a way that is so destructive to workers, their families, their employer, and our entire community.”

Some other public officials, however, attacked the idea that local communities should defend the workers, and said the workers were “stealing jobs,” despite the fact that many of those fired had worked over a decade in the foundry. Arreguin responded, “An immigration audit leading to the firing of these workers will not create a single job.  Instead, it will force them into the underground economy where illegal wages and conditions are prevalent.  It will not improve wages and conditions in the foundry.  There is already a union contract in place that guarantees healthcare, pensions, and wages that can support families.”

On the day of the march, the company and union released a joint statement, in which Pacific Steel declared, “These terminations were not only devastating to the workers and their families, but also to the workforce at PSC. The company is proud to have a workforce of extraordinary longevity and skill. Many PSC employees have worked here for decades, earning generous wages and benefits for their hard work and dedication to the company … [We] implore the protestors to direct their attention to the Department of Homeland Security and federal policy makers.”

The union also criticized “the broken and unfair laws used by the government to disrupt and destroy the lives of many of our friends and colleagues.”

The rallies that began and ended the march made the human cost of the firings plain.  Metzli Blanco Castaño, the daughter of Ana Castaño and David Herrera, both fired Pacific Steel workers, told supporters of her concern for her own future.  “I’ve lived in the Bay Area my entire life and now I might not be able to stay,” she said.  Like many others, her parents have exhausted their savings, and their home is now in foreclosure.

One of the justifications made by Obama administration officials for the audits is that if undocumented immigrants cannot work or find other jobs, they’ll be forced to leave the country in a process euphemistically called “self-deportation.”  Yet among the 214 workers and their families, hardly anyone plans to return to Mexico.  “We came because there was no work for us in Mexico and we couldn’t survive,” said David Herrera, Metzli’s father.  “That hasn’t changed.  There’s nothing to return to.”

Bill Ong Hing, law professor at the University of San Francisco, says the lack of jobs in Mexico is a consequence of free trade and structural adjustment policies designed to benefit large corporations.  He calls the administration’s justification divorced from reality.  “Employer sanctions [the section of immigration law that prohibits undocumented people from working] have not reduced undocumented migration at all.  They’ve failed because NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement] and globalization create great migration pressure.   Trying to discourage workers from coming by arresting them for working without authorization, or trying to prevent them from finding work, is doomed to fail in the face of such economic pressure.  To reduce it, we need to change our trade and economic policies so that they don’t produce poverty in countries like Mexico.”
Reverend Deborah Lee of the Interfaith Coalition for Immigrant Rights called this kind of enforcement a violation of the workers’ basic human rights, “These families have done nothing wrong,” she said. “They’re being punished for working, which is what people in our community are supposed to do. We will not let this happen in silence, nor allow these workers to be treated as though they are invisible.”

As hundreds of people filled Second Street, a block away from the foundry where they’d put in their years of labor, the fired workers were certainly not invisible any longer.