Event Highlights Problematic Anti-Immigrant Rule

On October 11, Interfaith Worker Justice co-hosted an exciting event in Baltimore. Faith and labor leaders, as well as local community groups, gathered at St. Gabriel’s Catholic Church in the Baltimore area to speak out against a potentially devastating government rule that threatens the jobs of millions of workers. One hundred people participated in the event. Our co-hosts included CASA of Maryland and Change to Win.

Background
The government rule in question concerns so-called “no-match” letters and would require employers to take action that could result in mass firings. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has proposed that Social Security Administration (SSA) no-match letters, which notify employers of a discrepancy in a worker’s Social Security record, also include a notice from DHS.

The notice concerns a proposed rule, that, if enacted, would require employers to resolve a mismatch with SSA records within 90 days. If they do not do so, they must fire the employee or face stiff penalties. This is a blatant abuse of the Social Security system and a threat to the jobs of millions of workers.

Furthermore, unscrupulous employers could use the letters as a pretense to fire workers who are involved in a union organizing campaign or who are otherwise unwanted. Some may simply fire those who “appear” foreign, assuming they are undocumented. Interfaith Worker Justice strongly opposes the proposed DHS rule.

The DHS rule aims to crack down on undocumented workers, but would affect millions of documented workers and U.S. citizens as well. In fact, 70% of discrepancies in the SSA database belong to U.S. citizens. The SSA has said it is ready to mail 140,000 letters, which will affect 8 million employees.

On October 10, a federal judge in San Francisco issued a preliminary injunction against the proposed rule. Read about the ruling here and here.

The event
Following a short talk by IWJ policy analyst Liz Weiss explaining no-match letters and the importance of the injunction, we heard from Rep. Tom Hucker of the Maryland House of Delegates and Maria Welch, President of the Baltimore Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. They pointed out the flawed, slow no-match system—in which 70% of errors are related to U.S. citizens and resolution can take 6 months. Witold Skwierczynski, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees (the union that represents SSA workers), stressed the lack of resources on the part of SSA employees to deal with an influx of people responding to letters. He decried the use of civil service agents as immigration police.

We also heard from labor representatives, including the United Food and Commercial Workers, which played a moving video concerning the deplorable immigration enforcement raids at Swift company plants nationwide in December.

Sekou Siby, an organizer at Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York (ROC-NY) (a member of IWJ’s Workers’ Center Network), spoke about the potential harm SSA no-match letters would have on the restaurant industry.

Other prominent speakers included Corey Saylor, Government Relations Director of Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), who pointed out the need to have a national immigration policy that starts with treating everyone as a human being.

Panravee Vongjaroenrat of the United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR) talked about the important work her organization is doing to provide legal counseling to immigrants and their families.

Finally, Rev. Jarvis Johnson, who sits on IWJ’s board of directors, put forth a call to action. He gave an impassioned speech about the importance of bridging what is referred to as the “brown-black” divide between the Hispanic and African-American communities, and invited everyone in attendance to sign a letter to Social Security Commissioner Michael Astrue.

Following the event, 14 religious leaders visited the Social Security Administration headquarters just a few blocks away from the church. We successfully delivered a letter to a member of the Commissioner’s staff. Other delegations also visited SSA regional offices across the country to deliver similar letters.

Many religious leaders who attended the community hearing met to discuss how we can work together in defense of immigrant workers’ rights. While the lack of comprehensive immigration reform in Congress has left the U.S. without national immigration policy, this presents an opportunity to overcome what is perhaps our greatest challenge: to change the hearts and minds of Americans concerning immigration, to end the vitriolic nature of the national policy debate, and to humanize the issue. Interfaith Worker Justice and the other groups in attendance will continue to work so that people of faith come together in defense of immigrant workers’ rights.

If you want to learn more about this issue, please see our report For You Were Once a Stranger.

Rabbi Marx Documentary Online

On September 24th, IWJ celebrated the 80th birthday of its friend and past Board President Rabbi Robert J. Marx. The celebration dinner was a wonderful occasion. More than a hundred people came together to honor and celebrate Rabbi Marx and his legacy. The event helped raise over $25,000 for the Rabbi Marx Future Leaders Fund.

Among the highlights of the evening was the screening of a short documentary, A Practical Faith: Rabbi Robert Marx. Directed by Dorothee Royal-Hedinger, the film is a marvelous homage to Rabbi Marx's life-long dedication to justice. You can watch the whole thing by going here.

Our thanks go out to Dorothee Royal-Hedinger and Hassan Ali of Fresh Cut Media for their hard and swift work on this film, as they do to Rabbi Marx himself and everyone who helped put the celebration dinner together.

Contributions to the Rabbi Marx Future Leaders Fund are still very much welcome.

Powerful New Documentary on Immigrant Workers

Some of you may have seen the documentary Made in L.A., a poignant, moving chronicle of the Los Angeles Garment Worker Center’s campaign against the clothing retailer Forever 21, when it aired on PBS in early September.

But in case you missed it, you can now order the DVD. And it’s well worth doing: Made in L.A. is as powerful a documentary on immigration, labor and social change as I've ever seen.

Proceeds from sales of the DVD go to supporting a year-long outreach campaign to bring the documentary to audiences across the country.

We Need a Moral Crusade

We need a moral crusade. That’s how noted journalist and author Barbara Ehrenreich approached ending the poverty of low-wage workers in the U.S. At a recent event at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, DC, experts explained how our national policy is failing low-wage workers, leaving them in poverty and unable to afford basic necessities such as housing, food, child care, health insurance, and more. There are federal programs to help the working poor afford these and certain other essentials (dubbed “work supports”), but the system is antiquated and grossly inadequate. The speakers outlined a plan to improve and strengthen the system as part of a broad anti-poverty agenda.

Ehrenreich then asked the room, “How do we get this enacted?” Her answer was “a moral crusade”—much, she said, as the living wage movement has done by framing the issue of low wages as a moral issue. That is, it is immoral that a worker can work full time in this country and still live in poverty. Interfaith Worker Justice wholeheartedly agrees. We have been a leader in the living wage movement nationwide, through the coalition Let Justice Roll, and we will continue to use the voices and moral authority of our allies in the faith and labor communities to improve the wages, conditions, and lives of low-wage workers.

(Special thanks to Barbara Ehrenreich for her permission to use her comments on this blog.)

Sanctuary struggle in a California town

Anti-immigrant sentiment is running high in Simi Valley, California, located about 100 miles north of Los Angeles County. On Wednesday, October 3, 2007, Mayor Paul Miller sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, requesting that DHS intervene in the current dispute between the Simi Valley City Council and a local parish, the United Church of Christ (UCC Simi).

The UCC Simi is providing sanctuary to Liliana, a 29-year-old woman who has three children who are U.S. citizens, and husband who is also a U.S. citizen. Anti-immigrant organizations such as Save Our State, No More Revolution, and White Revolution led protests on September 16, 2007, outside the Simi church, threatening to have Liliana arrested and deported.

In order to maintain the peace, the city (not the church) called in police protection. Mayor Miller then ordered the Simi Church to pay the $40,000 bill for city protection, despite the fact that the church led no counter-demonstration nor engaged in any type of protest in response.

Mayor Miller has approached DHS before and will continue to seek federal action to deport Liliana and break apart her family.

Please call Mayor Paul Miller at 805-583-6700 to let him know that White Supremacist groups are at fault for the disturbance, not the church. Rev. June Goudey, minister at UCC Simi, pointed out that six days a week are very peaceful in the congregation/sanctuary. Only on the days that Save Our State, No More Revolution and White Revolution are there (outside Sunday services) is there any noise.

YouTube video of Liliana’s story

Immigration Raids Out of Control

Today’s New York Times editorial, “Stop the Raids,” brings attention to an immigrant enforcement system that terrorizes communities and families while doing nothing to increase public safety. Increasingly, agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) are undertaking mass search and seize operations at workplaces, community malls, and private homes, supposedly looking for individual gang members or people suspected of crimes. In Nassau County, Long Island, the agents came in the middle of the night, some actually wearing cowboy hats, invading homes of citizens, legal residents and immigrants with no criminal record, while pointing automatic weapons and spreading terror. ICE agents even pointed their weapons at Nassau County law enforcement officers, and public officials in Nassau vowed to stop cooperating with ICE.

Last December, ICE raided six Swift meat packing plants and arrested hundreds of workers on the day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a religious holiday of enormous significance for most Latin American immigrants. Everyone was rounded up and hundreds were detained and separated from their families in the days before Christmas. The United Food and Commercial Workers, which represents these workers, held a rally against ICE raids in Chicago in September and announced a lawsuit against ICE for trampling on individual rights in these raids. Around a dozen Swift workers testified, including several African American citizens held on suspicion of not having proper papers. All shared stories of violations and terror, including women who were body searched by male agents. One woman testified that as she came off the killing floor, she went into a room with dozens of agents pointing weapons at her, and thought the plant had been taken over by terrorists.

UAW-GM: A more holistic perspective

IWJ Executive Director Kim Bobo wrote a letter to the editor in response to a September 26 Chicago Tribune editorial titled “Striking Failure” but the newspaper chose not to publish it. (While the paper has limited space in the printed version, they post numerous letters on the “Voice of the People” page of their website.) In her letter, Kim highlighted the need to address the national health care crisis as a way to save manufacturing jobs.

They did print one letter, which stressed the problem of executive greed, noting that the UAW president’s total compensation is $158,530 while GM’s chairman and CEO rakes in an excess of $10 million.

Here, so as to salvage it from the memory hole to which it would otherwise be consigned, is the letter Kim submitted:

Today’s editorial (“Striking Failure,” September 26) on the United Auto Workers strike (now halted) against General Motors presents a one-sided and inaccurate picture. The company, not the union, is to blame for not investing in new fuel saving technology and designs that would make its cars competitive. The nation's leadership is to blame for its failure to address the national health care crisis (which makes cars more expensive to produce) and to create a plan for preserving and investing in manufacturing jobs, not the union.

The “settlement that would shift retiree health-care obligations off the company balance sheet,” which the editorial breathlessly characterizes as “groundbreaking”—even “revolutionary”—is hardly flawless. In a far more sober assessment, The Nation magazine describes GM’s plan as an effort to “discharge its benefit obligations onto a poorly funded trust vulnerable to market fluctuations that the union will have to underwrite to a significant degree.” If this sounds a lot like the Bush administration’s proposal to privatize Social Security—which fell flat on its face when it proved wildly unpopular with the public—that’s because it’s based on the same bad ideas.

Although the strike has now been called off and a tentative agreement had been reached, the issues that led to the conflict remain very much unresolved. We need companies that invest in technology and commit to finding new ways to employ U.S. workers. We need a national health program that makes American industry more competitive. And we need a plan for creating and preserving good-paying manufacturing jobs.

The readers of the Tribune’s editorial page deserve a more holistic perspective on such important issues.

Kim Bobo
Executive Director
Interfaith Worker Justice

Workers organize in Mobile

For the past couple weeks, I’ve been talking to some folks in Mobile, Alabama, about a campaign by 111 workers at a factory owned by New Era Cap Company. The workers organized a union in response to conditions they reported including low wages, forced overtime, and racial discrimination against the predominantly African American workforce. However, over the course of the organizing drive, 20 workers were fired, and the company is refusing to negotiate a just contract with the workers.

I’m amazed at the courage of these workers, who are continuing to organize despite this intimidation and harassment. Several ministers have already begun to get involved by showing up at the workers’ organizing committee meetings to offer prayers and support. I’m going down to Mobile next week to talk to other religious leaders and help organize a religious support committee. Stay tuned for updates.

Forthcoming...

On August 29th, our Executive Director, Kim Bobo, attended the annual shareholders meeting of Smithfield Foods, the largest hog processing plant in the world -- whose hugely controversial labor practices are at the target of a sustained organizing campaign. Kim has written a lively and illuminating account of the contentious meeting, which she calls "both interesting and disturbing," for the next issue of IWJ's print newsletter, Faith Works. You can sign up here to receive the newsletter and thus be sure to get Kim's report as soon as it's available.