This brings us to Stuart Appelbaum’s Labor Day 2008 Op-Ed piece, online at the JTA here. It will, we hope, also appear in a number of Jewish community newpapers in the next two weeks. Stuart is the president of the Jewish Labor Committee {disclosure: where I work} and the 100,000-member Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union/UFCW. His article, “Jews, justice and the workplace,” begins simply:

In August 2006, a worker at a Rite Aid Distribution Center in Lancaster, Calif., was fired. Her name was Debbie Fontaine.

Her offense? Taking part in a campaign to organize a union. It’s an incident that may not make many of us think about our responsibilities as Jews, but this Labor Day it should.

And that brings us to this. The Jewish Labor Committee has joined in a multi-organizational effort to secure support for the Employee Free Choice Act. And you’re invited to join us! EFCA is critical Federal legislation that would help protect the rights of workers in the U.S. to organize and form unions. The law would give more workers a way to form unions and negotiate for better wages, health care and working conditions. The EFCA, when passed, would amend the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, by requiring employees to recognize a union when a majority of workers sign cards authorizing union representation [so-called card-check]. When passed, EFCA would also strengthen penalties for companies that coerce or intimidate their employees and establish binding arbitration mechanisms when employers and workers are unable to agree on a first contract.

National organizations supporting this proposed legislation range from the Jewish Council for Public Affairs to Americans for Democratic Action. Locally, the Progressive Jewish Alliance in California and Jews United for Justice in Washington DC have also been active in support of EFCA.

You’re invited to sign the Jewish Labor Committee’s petition in support of EFCA {and to get others to do so as well}. It will be presented to the new President and Congress. Just click here and fill in the form. You can find some additional information here.

Let me end with the last ‘graph of the aforementioned Op-Ed:

The Torah teaches Jews to pursue justice: “Tzedek, tzedek tirdof.” To some that means challenging the horrors of Darfur. For others it may be a call to fight for human rights in Burma. But the experience of Debbie Fontaine reminds us that some battles for justice are as close as the nearest workplace.

Great blogging, while it may be provided free of charge, requires work. As readers and writers, we should remember to honor the efforts of content providers on JVoices and throughout the Internet, print, and spoken word media.

You are a Captain of Industry, tucked safely into your
Pornographically polyester pantomimes,
Denying your provenance:
The sweet, sweat stench of earth-drenched hands.
It is their child you bear,
Milk-sour and thick in your belly, a clandestine Caliban.

Your craving to abort their essence
twitches at the corners of your eyes,
Beckoning that daring interloper, Ambition,
To penetrate between your oil-drenched thighs
To baptise you in steel and concrete
Behind the wheel, inside the cogs
Where you are laughing
Mad and empty
Like a string puppet
A death rattle
Conducting the shrill symphony of accruals and deletions
As your
Light
Goes
Out.

Indentured Servants in America
By Bob Herbert
New York Times
March 13, 2007

A must-read for anyone who favors an expansion of guest worker programs in the U.S. is a stunning new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center that details the widespread abuse of highly vulnerable, poverty-stricken workers in programs that already exist.

The report is titled ‘Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States.’ It will be formally released today at a press conference in Washington.

Workers recruited from Mexico, South America, Asia and elsewhere to work in American hotels and in such labor-intensive industries as forestry, seafood processing and construction are often ruthlessly exploited.

They are routinely cheated out of their wages, which are low to begin with. They are bound like indentured servants to the middlemen and employers who arrange their work tours in the U.S. And they are virtual hostages of the American companies that employ them.

The law does not allow these ‘guests’ to change jobs while they’re here. If a particular employer is unscrupulous, as is very often the case, the worker has little or no recourse.

One of the guest workers profiled in the report was a psychology student recruited in the Dominican Republic to work at a hotel in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The woman had taken on $4,000 in debt to cover ‘fees’ and other expenses that were required for her to get a desk job that paid $6 an hour.

But after a month, her hours were steadily reduced until she was working only 15 or 20 hours a week. That left her with barely enough money to survive, and with no way of paying off her crushing debt.

The woman and her fellow guest workers had hardly enough money for food. ‘We would just buy Chinese food because it was the cheapest,’ she said. ‘We would buy one plate a day and share it between two or three people.’ She told the authors of the report: ‘I felt like an animal without claws – defenseless. It is the same as slavery.’

Steven Greenhouse of The Times recently reported on a waiter from Indonesia who took on $6,000 in debt to become a guest worker. He arrived in North Carolina expecting to do farm work but found that there was no job for him at all.

The report focused primarily on the 120,000 foreign workers who are allowed into the U.S. each year to work on farms or at other low-skilled jobs. In most cases the guest workers take on a heavy debt load to participate in the program, anywhere from $500 to more than $10,000. Worried about the welfare of their families back home, and with the huge debt hanging over their heads, the workers are most often docile, even in the face of the most egregious treatment.

The result, said the report, is that they are ‘systematically exploited and abused.’

Some of the worst abuses occur in the forestry industry. The report said, ‘Virtually every forestry company that the Southern Poverty Law Center has encountered provides workers with pay stubs showing that they have worked substantially fewer hours than they actually worked.’

A favorite (and extremely cruel) tactic of employers is the seizure of guest workers’ identity documents, such as passports and Social Security cards. That leaves the workers incredibly vulnerable.

‘Numerous employers have refused to return these documents even when the worker simply wanted to return to his home country,’ the report said. ‘The Southern Poverty Law Center also has encountered numerous incidents where employers destroyed passports or visas in order to convert workers into undocumented status.’

Without their papers the workers live in abject fear of encountering the authorities, who will treat them as illegals. They are completely at the mercy of the employers.

President Bush has been relentless in his push to greatly expand guest worker programs as part of his effort to revise the nation’s immigration laws. To expand these programs without looking closely at the gruesome abuses already taking place would be both tragic and ridiculous.

‘This is not a situation where there are just a few bad-apple employers,’ said Mary Bauer, director of the Immigrant Justice Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has initiated a number of lawsuits on behalf of abused workers. ‘Our experience is that it’s the very structure of the program that lends itself to abuse.’