mohandasgandhi:

humanrightswatch:

The US must stop sexual violence against immigrant farmworkers.

Hundreds of thousands of immigrant farmworker women and girls in the United States face a high risk of sexual violence and sexual harassment in their workplaces because US authorities and employers fail to protect them adequately.

In a new 95-page report, Human Rights Watch documents rape, stalking, unwanted touching, exhibitionism, or vulgar and obscene language by supervisors, employers, and others in positions of power. Most farmworkers interviewed said they had experienced such treatment or knew others who had. And most said they had not reported these or other workplace abuses, fearing reprisals. Those who had filed sexual harassment claims or reported sexual assault to the police had done so with the encouragement and assistance of survivor advocates or attorneys in the face of difficult challenges.

Farmworkers described experiences such as the following:

• A woman in California reported that a supervisor at a lettuce company raped her and later told her that she “should remember it’s because of him that [she has] this job.”
• A woman in New York said that a supervisor, when she picked potatoes and onions, would touch women’s breasts and buttocks. If they tried to resist, he would threaten to call immigration or fire them.
• Four women who had worked together packing cauliflower in California said a supervisor would regularly expose himself and make comments like, “[That woman] needs to be fucked!” When they tried to defend one young woman whom he singled out for particular abuse, he fired all of them.

© 2011 AP Photo

This is important.

What is to be done when capital and government abandon the people? It is a question that social movements throughout Europe and the US have begun to raise with a creative political militancy unseen in decades.

These are movements characterised by their openness, breadth and, most importantly, their fundamental critique of an economic model that doesn’t serve the world’s majority. But in the face of repression and austerity measures, the question has become not only how to keep such issues on the table but how to make political change and gain ground.

To better understand this moment, we can turn to these movements’ South American predecessor: Argentina 2001, when popular protest put an end to destructive neoliberal policies and drastically changed the political terrain. A decade later, with unprecedented economic growth and President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s landslide re-election victory, it is easy to forget just how Argentina climbed out of the largest financial default in history.

Though many credit former president Néstor Kirchner with creating a new economic model that reined in a private sector run wild, it was the people whose unyielding protests during the 1990s and through the turn of the century would ultimately bring about change.

As the Argentinian historian and political activist Ezequiel Adamovsky wrote in Le Monde Diplomatique, ‘It was the constant threat of looting, targeting of politicians, of rebellion, of occupations, of roadblocks, and those assemblies that disciplined both management and local and international financial sectors, opening an unimagined space for politics.’

From a vacuum of political power and severe economic necessity grew new political formations outside traditional party politics. Hundreds of neighbourhood assemblies came together to meet people’s most basic needs and create spaces for local dialogue. Bartering clubs experimented in alternative economics, and workers of bankrupt businesses began to occupy and run enterprises on their own.

etiquette-etc:

Date: Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Time: 12:00pm - 1:15pm
Location: 1177 West Hastings, Vancouver, BC

For years, the rights of migrant agriculture workers have been abused and neglected across Canadian fields. What’s worse, employers are able to treat migrant workers as disposable thanks to the support and complicity of the workers’ own governments. In particular, the Mexican government has played a shameful role by threatening and blacklisting workers who decide to speak up or seek help.

Seeing how institutions that we trust to be impartial and do justice are, at best, slow to address these issues, on May 23, 2012 we will come together to stage a community trial. This will be a light-hearted street theater event where the case of these blacklisting activities will be presented by Raj Chouhan, acting as our community’s lawyer, who will advocate for migrant workers’ rights to be respected. The defense lawyer, Mr. Dee Plomat, will present the perspective of the Mexican Consulate. Then, a panel of three community judges -Jim Sinclair of the BC Federation of Labour, Joey Hartman of the Vancouver and Labour District Council, and Geoff Meggs, of the City of Vancouver- will help guide the dialogue with their observations and deliberations. At the end, the community will get to vote and issue its verdict.

As concerned members of the community, who are not willing to stand by while migrant workers from Mexico suffer and continue being treated as second-class members of our communities, we are sure you will come with us! Feel free to bring noise makers and signs, and be prepared to write your thoughts and leave messages to the Mexican Consulate.

What: Community Trial on the Blacklisting of Mexican Migrant Agriculture Workers by the Mexican Consulate in Vancouver
When: May 23, 2012, 12:00 PM
Where: In front of the Mexican Consulate (1177 West Hastings)

Organizers: AWA-Surrey, AWA-Abbotsford and UFCW Local 1518

Some background
Every year, thousands of migrant agriculture workers from Mexico come to work in Canadian fields under the Seasonal Agriculture Workers Program (SAWP). Their contributions to Canada’s economy are tremendous: they work for up to 15 hours a day, 7 days a week; they pay taxes, Employment Insurance, and contribute to the Canadian Pension Plan. Unfortunately, they are not treated with the dignity or respect that we think every worker in Canada is entitled to. When workers face sickness, injuries in the workplace, or abuse from employers, they are virtually alone, their own government rarely defending them.

In particular, the Mexican Consulate of Vancouver has a practice of giving the workers “workshops” when they arrive to Canada, where they tell them that if they complain about their working conditions, cause trouble to their employers, or speak to anybody other than their employers they will lose their jobs. Many workers have in fact lost their jobs and have been blacklisted because they sought help, got sick, or asked questions about their rights. In response, UFCW & the AWA sued the Mexican Consulate of Vancouver, as well as Floralia Farms & Sidhu Nurseries before the Labour Board on May 9, 2011. During the hearings, the Mexican government claimed diplomatic immunity, and is betting that this will allow them to remove themselves from the case.

UFCW & the AWA have partnered with faith-based organizations, members of the Latin American community and the community at large, academics, unions, the media, and all people of kind hearts to denounce these cynical arguments. Together, we have staged 6 events in front of the Mexican Consulate and the Labour Board, as well as marches and events in Mexico, to denounce the Mexican Consulate’s activities. From a Migrant Workers Rights’ Funeral to writing letters to Santa for the rights of migrants to be respected, to a New Year’s wish for migrant workers, the Community Trial is a continuation of this international campaign against the blacklisting of migrant agriculture workers. Please visit ufcw.ca/stoptheblacklist for more information.

nezua:

badassmexicans:

Bracero workers registering.

Foreign contract labor was banned in the US since 1885 because of its connotations with slavery. The ban, however, was lifted to implement the Bracero Program (1942-1964). This program permitted companies to contract Mexican laborers to work in the US: it established a temporary worker program. The Bracero Program essentially created a new second-class citizenry of Mexican laborers in the U.S.: they had no rights of a U.S. citizen, yet provided great benefits to our economy.

BAM

Know your nation’s history. Acknowledge your debt.

occupyallstreets:

Whistleblowing Wednesday: Children As Young As Six Harvest 25 Percent of U.S. Crops

Knowing the farmer who grows your food has become an important tenet of the modern food movement, but precious little attention is paid to the people who actually pick the crops or “process” the chickens or fillet the fish. U Roberto Romano’s poignant film, The Harvest/La Cosecha (2011), being screened across the country for Farmworker Awareness Week (March 24-29), informs us that nearly 500,000 children as young as six harvest up to 25 percent of all crops in the United States.

What’s illegal in most countries is permitted here. Child migrant labor has been documented in the 48 contiguous states. Seasonal work originates in the southernmost states in late winter where it is warm and migrates north as the weather changes. Every few weeks as families move, children leave school and friends behind. If you’ve had onions (Texas), cucumbers (Ohio or Michigan), peppers (Tennessee), grapes (California), mushrooms (Pennsylvania), beets (Minnesota), or cherries (Washington), you’ve probably eaten food harvested by children.

This isn’t a slavery issue, or an immigration issue per se. What’s remarkable is that most of the migrant child farmworkers are American citizens trying to help their families. This is a poverty issue and it gets to the heart of what we, as consumers, see as the “right price” to pay for food.

Children earn about $1,000 per year for working an average of 30 hours a week, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. When you consider that the average annual pay for a migrant family of four is $12,500-$14,500, it’s apparent why some families feel they have no choice but to bring their children into the fields with them. Half of these kids will not graduate from high school because they’re always moving around, perpetuating the cycle of poverty that caused them to be day laborers in the first place.

Read More

so much about this!

eta: i don’t wanna tag this class, rather than labour, migrant etc

Being back in food security- peasant-farm networks for the 1st time since I was a kid in a [white, australian] farmhand family, is really prompting clarity on how argrian class is it’s own type of class, distinct from - and usually the poor, browner cousin of - much of what online type class talk is about. 

And it’s at different stages in various countries to - depending whether the country is collapsing back into feudalism or hardly ever left or still has large peasant populations.

so of course it’s about migration or at least race [depending on where]. and, if not exactly the popular image of slavery, at least about families of landless peasant status working in entire economies where no one takes for granted the wealthier white nations benchmarks of class with citizen benefits & urban post-industrialized consumerism.

Marxism has such focus on definition, on being able to stage ‘war’ while ultimately remaining secure within a very industrialized, politically stable, unstated white, culturally homogenous, and family politics invisible framework. Which was never true for Marxists realities either, to be fair.

But there is a sense, to class warriors in western white societies since, that society just exists, classes are layers within it and the issue is fighting for a piece of the pie with room for only one true class champion [you don’t want to be too high, or to low, in Marx’s moral code].

Which leaves little room for the agrarian working poor who even his class warriors prefer to undervalue. Especially if they’re also migrants, especially if they’re also working as whole families not ‘male adult ideal labour subjects’.

They can’t avoid exposing the contradictions of western white Marxist type ‘class warriors’. They challenge not just class, but the single issue class warriors whole assumptions about western society just existing in the background of their class war, by simply existing themselves. They live extremely hard working poverty that’s less lumpenprole, than a limbo labour state between multiple unstable economies and unwelcoming societies.

Some people online think that just looking at this with also race politics, also rural politics, also whichever politics until you got your intersectional checklists covered - addresses this. but it doesn’t automatically.

because I see plenty people doing that, like trying to copy one of the WOC who is good at it, still using class like it can only mean the Marx kind. Then still getting angry at the person for having contractions in their argrarian experience. Or saying they get it, then minimizing how that particular farm labour childhood shapes education, status, expectations, social norms etc. - based on their experiences as urban marginal poor.

So they still do things like judging these parents with ‘the simple solution is for them to not work - any parent who would allow this is wrong’ . Which, aside from being impractical - is promoting a notion about who can be proud of their family, and their labours, which is imo hard for some kids to reconcille when they do grow up.

i wonder if this is why even the ones who have or get citizenship, then get the scholarships, have trouble with ambition.  Like lots of ethical conflict, and social anxiety about work, and the ties you’d have to make for social mobility to sustain that work.

this is rambling. as always there’s more to make sense of than i think i can articulate well.

eta2: why is it called whistleblow, who are you meant to blow the whistle on? Yourself, if you eat? I loved unionism and what ‘class war’ i was able to accomplish doing it but…bloody class warriors and not dealing with farm labour. 

(via » Faraway, So Close: ’80s L.A. Photos)

“May Day in Los Angeles, 1980” - Mark Vallen. 1980 ©.

This photograph was taken in L.A.’s MacArthur Park just moments before the Los Angeles Police Department attacked a large crowd celebrating International Workers Day. The rally had been the first significant May Day demonstration to take place in L.A. since the 1960s. On view at the Morono Kiang Gallery’s “Faraway, So Close” exhibit.

Full view of Diego Rivera’s “The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City” at the San Francisco Art Institute. Photo/Mark Vallen © (via » Diego Rivera: The Making of a Fresco)

The Australian Institute of Employment Rights (AIER), Australia’s only independent tripartite industrial relations think tank, says that the key to raising Australia’s productivity lies in changing workplace culture not reducing work place rights.

In its submission to the Federal Government’s review of the Fair Work Act, AIER debunks the myth that deregulation and “flexibility” is the source of productivity gain. “There is no research that verifies the link between lower labour standards (via deregulation) and productivity gain” says AIER Executive Director, Lisa Heap. “On the contrary this orthodox neo liberal view of productivity and the labour market has been well and truly superseded by research, including from organisations like the OECD and IMF that now accept that strong core labour rights including respect for freedom of association, collective bargaining and less disparity in access to minimum standards, is key to social cohesion and sustainable economic development”, Ms Heap said.

sometimes neo-liberals are like, you oppose our politics because you’re all lazy and just jealousthatyoucan’tbeme.

and it’s like no, i oppose your politics because i understand economics and industrial relations 101. living on these minimum wages mightn’t help my temperament, but it really is because of the economicfail.

Raise the Boats (by msnbcleanforward)

sometimes if I’m feeling down, i google rachel maddow.

then i’m kinda freaked/impressed, that in the USA, which has far worse class politics than here, even high profile leftists are talking about class war. while for some reason, even really top rank ALP are derailing into celebrity politics. wtf Oz labour ethics?

so-treu:

wickedblackwitch:

And I wasn’t even wearing the uniform. 

neither was i. and i’ve been asked this question since i was 12. -_-

Going on a tangent for call center work: every call center job I’ve had has involved regular white customer calls either;

a] assuming I’m white, will bond over their racism and derailing from their complaints about service to rants about how bad service is related to migrants.

b] assuming I’m white, will bond over their racism, and derailing from their service query to start some ‘friendly’ chat about how they had to deal with some POC today and OMG ISN’T IT TIRESOME HOW THEY SPEAK FUNNY?? chat.

I am white, but obviously not all call center staff are, and I sure don’t want to bond over that shit.

the assumption of whiteness is because i have ‘good’ enunciation, despite or because of having learning disabilities, growing up really underclass/class shamed etc. the assumption of whiteness on call lines is also because white people assume EVERYONE is white until shown otherwise.

So I get to hear this side of other whites. But POC experience that a lot more, those tone and enunciation concerns, especially if  English is their second language, or they’re also from under/working class backgrounds but denied class solidarity because of racism.

It’s repulsive how constantly white callers to help and sales lines figure that anyone with ‘good’ enunciation must be white, so they can derail a service call into a ‘fun’ racist tirade.

Some points about the conditions of those ppl. white customers feel entitled to hate on because they’re on a line.

Call centre workers get evaluated on how fast they handle calls + how much sales, survey recruitment or positive feedback they can generate per shift.

It is generally a job for people facing a lot of unemployment - and unlike other service sectors where there is a range of good or bad employers, in terms of how they treat casuals - the call center industry has boomed by intentionally exploiting the status of casual contract staff in globalized communications.

It’s an industry that relies on and normalizes; high staff turnovers, low wages, playing off insecure workers in majority world countries and western ones to see how low they can get wages vs. how high they can demand total on-call 24 hrs, 7 days a week shift flexibility in exchange for irregular work on casual contacts that get renewed as casuals in the same jobs for up to 5-10 years [after that RSI becomes a sector exit motive for most].

In a few decades of casual jobs in the industries that normalize ‘permanent casual’ contracts for service staff - it’s rare that managers will ever side with staff over racist, sexist customer abuse, or for anyone but managers favorites and the high turnover uni students to be able to reject allocated shifts even for dealing with births or deaths without being fired or warned. The gains of ‘casual’ flexibility go  100% one way, in other words. 

And if you’re POC call centre staff in a majority world country, getting tonnes of white customer calls from western countries you’ll get rants about how the work is being ‘taken by Indians’ or whatever, on top of that. As though that outsourcing wasn’t to deliver ‘competitive’ prices to them and higher profits to their company.

And if you’re white or POC call centre staff in western worlds, you will get tonnes of white customers in the same country as you assuming that because the number is in ‘their’ country, you must be as white and racist as them, so you’re a captive audience for their ‘migrants ruin everything’ tirade.

Those racist tirades cost staff, emotionally and in $ as they add extra humiliation and prejudice to already constant verbal abuse, and consume time which will lower the workers highly monitored and judged ‘performance targets’.  Staff really are captive, to direct in their ear intimate hate sometimes which they can’t afford to dummy spit and call bullshit racism.

POC staff with kids to support can’t always afford to say “fuck you” or “hey, I’m POC lady, and have better English than you as well as Spanish you ignorant hater”  and lose abusive customers like that, in those conditions.

This may seem kinda random to the OP but, white people: when you call 1800 lines and decide ‘this person speaks like me, they probably want my racist derail shit!” Or this person doesn’t speak like me, but hey they called, they ‘asked for it’.

NO! This person is AT WORK, in a really CRAP JOB and very likely to BE POC.

This person is reading to a set script, which some other probably white and higher classed person set for them in attempts to appease white consumer persons like yourself!

Even if they do fuck up, hating on the call center staff accomplishes nothing. They’re expected to cop hate so shareholders can profit from replacing quality customer service with cold calling and impersonal helplines. You may think you’re showing the company, but in reality you and the staff exploiting shareholders vs. harassed staff = BFF.

Hating on call centre staff for things they can’t control, makes you an ass. Hate with some extra racism? Hate with cheap shots about accents, English enunciation and migrants?

You’re a white supremist jerk as well as a complete general social ass. For real.

ETA: I just saw how, some white ppl. are commenting to So-Treu like: white people get that to, so get over it. Yes white people DO get ‘that’ to [gestures at above commentary] but if you’re a white person in the social niches that get it, then you probably work with POC who also get it. So you should be more - not less - aware of the specifically racist extra ways that POC ‘get it’. What’s with the defensiveness??

ETA 2: so some ppl. commenting are not white, but Latino/a. My mistake and apologies for that.

But still, awkward. There are service associations with Latino, Asian, people to, but…this isn’t in conflict with what the OP is saying, about racialized concepts of The Help. It can be said as an AS WELL AS rather than a GET OVER IT INSTEAD OF to specifically anti-Black conceptualizations of maids & service classes.   It’s def. awkward for white ppl. to coment on colourism, but tumblr has taught me …well gross stuff about not giving anyone the benefit of the doubt about anti-Blackness.

e.g. most of my POC family, friends or co-workers are Black Aboriginal, Latinas, SE Asian and/or Desi. Ppl. mistake the Black Aboriginal women for Desi or Latina often and are still racist, sexist, classist patronizing jerks to them. But there are specific changes in behaviour, including from other POC and ‘anti racist’ whites - like decreases in recognition, warmth or status and increased resistance to their social mobility - when they realize the Black Aboriginal women are Black, rather than Desi or Latina.

Not hating, but these things can be expressed without negating specifically Black experience.

nezua:

The capitalist social pyramid is black at the base and white at the top. In South Africa, until apartheid was formally abolished in 1994, this pyramid was legally sanctioned. Elsewhere, while slavery and segregation have been outlawed, the richest people are still the whitest and the poorest are the blackest.

Racism suits capitalism because it’s an important way of justifying economic discrimination. It’s no accident that wherever you find racism, someone seems to be making money from it.

Racist ideas help capitalism get away with super-exploiting racial and ethnic minorities, and all non-white people.

“Those Arabs” or “Those Asians”, we’re told, “are used to doing dirty, hard work, and they’ll be glad to get a job at all.”

Or when unemployment is on the rise, it’s always handy to blame “Asians”, or whichever ethnic group is being demonised at the time, for taking jobs away from “real” Australians.

And when governments in the rich countries impose welfare funding or wage cuts on working people, they always start by targeting the most vulnerable groups — non-Anglo migrants or indigenous people. International students are often the first to cop attacks on higher education.

Racism fosters the idea that the massive under-development and deprivation faced by the people of the Third World is “their fault”. This leads to acceptance of the idea that, while rich countries should give some aid or loans, it should be tied to the recipient government agreeing to terms favourable to the donor countries, including huge interest charges.

Without racist and nationalist ideas prevalent in the populations of imperialist countries, people would be less likely to accept as “natural” or “inevitable” the huge inequalities between the First and Third Worlds or endorse wars on Third World peoples who resist imperialist domination.

In other words, racism is a way for the capitalist class to divide ordinary people from each other, within and between countries: divide and rule.

Important.

The “Worker” issue celebrates the people who toil, as our lead essay suggests, “Behind The Seams.” Our staff writers profiled a seamstress, a pattern maker, a milliner, a cobbler, a textile designer, and a design educator, describing each person’s background and their craft. Foreign Policy Digest writer Mahanth Joishy discusses the darker side of the fashion industry in “Sweat Equity,” a piece on child sweatshop labor in South Asia that is beautifully illustrated by artist Christopher Cunetto. Peruse our program summary to see how FFP is working with Kiva around the world to provide micro-loans and opportunities to artisans in Uganda, Praguay and Peru.

If this is your thing, free digital copies on signing up to their list.

It’s not your thing, no snark. pls. Be advised that I’ve been a garment workers union rep, have RSI from necessity based garment sewing and low tolerance for the trend of snark against fashion bloggers by ‘class conscious’ aspirational working class identified [but never labourers] critics - who overly project/deflect their defensiveness about upward mobility at those still underclass people who appreciate cultural criticism.

Oh look, I’m on a tangent post! Anyone on tumblr who habitually participates in ‘call culture’ accusations of elitism, basing their judgements largely on who’s in their own personal clique, rather than engaging with people and the posted content, will inevitably be that jerk accusing the ‘oppressed’ of being ‘elitist’ while claiming to defend them sometimes. Because those ‘oppressed’ like blogging, politics and pretty pictures to. Because those ‘oppressed’ are actually the global majority, a substantial minority in western nations and overrepresented in political activism. Because it’s hard to accurately gauge personal social locations via intentionally shallow photo tumblrs.

This probably sounds defensive. But hey tumblr, the deluded feedback i got on prior fashion labour posts from people with far better education and inclusion in ALP ‘regular aussie’ middle class income, but ‘working families’ pack mentality than me.

I’m not talking about those people debating politics or defending themselves from the ample prejudice in fashion [constant cultural appropriation, body shaming etc.]. I’m talking about the level of really obnoxious, half informed, smarmy spectatorship masquerading as political commitment, from those with no real interest in fashion as labour rights, creative industries or cultural criticism.

what can i say, it feels like political blogging is in a weird dogmatic/petty stage atm.

REVOLUTIONARY WOMAN OF THE DAY: Lucy Parsons (circa 1853 – March 7, 1942) was a labor organizer, socialist, and legendary orator. Lucy was of Native American, Black, and Mexican ancestry, born in Texas as a slave. She moved to Chicago where she was a key organizer in the labor movement and also participated in revolutionary activism on behalf of political prisoners, people of color, the homeless, and women. She said, “We [women] are the slaves of slaves. We are exploited more ruthlessly than men.” We salute Lucy Parsons, known by the Chicago Police Department as “more dangerous than a thousand rioters”. Know your revolutionary women’s history.

via REVOLUTIONARY WOMAN OF THE DAY: Lucy Parsons | AF3IRM