Mistreatment of H-2B immigrant guest forestry workers

In late 2005 the Sacrament Bee published the best expose of occupational dangers for immigrant Hispanic labor in some time. The focus: works who despite the supposed protections of so-called H-2B forest guest worker program for agriculture were exploited in the common fashion: exposed to job risks for which they were unprepared, cheating on payroll, and generally deficient working conditions. Some 10,000 works have come to the U.S. to “plant trees across the nation and thin fire-prone woods out West as part of the Bush administration’s Healthy Forests Initiative.” The Bee reports: “A nine-month Bee investigation based on more than 150 interviews across Mexico, Guatemala and the United States and 5,000 pages of records unearthed through the Freedom of Information Act has found pineros are victims of employer exploitation, government neglect and a contracting system that insulates landowners – including the U.S. government – from responsibility.”
Confined Space has summarized the Bee’s articles. In this posting and future ones, I will excerpt extensively from it, starting with….

…in the backwoods, where pineros often lack adequate training, protective gear or medical supplies, where they sweat, struggle and suffer, the current forest guest worker program casts a shadow across its future…..Across Honduras and Guatemala, 14 guest workers lay in tombs, victims of the worst non-fire-related workplace accident in the history of U.S. forests.

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“Blood Sweat and Fear” – Meat and Poultry Plants (Human Rights Watch, 2005)

The following is the executive summary of a 185 page report issued by the Human Rights Watch in January 2005. The report is entitled Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Workers’ Rights in U.S. Meat and Poultry Plants. (The Summary is also available in Spanish: Sangre, sudor y miedo: Derechos de los trabajadores en las plantas cárnicas y avícolas de Estados Unidos.
This is probably the most referenced report on working conditions of immigrant workers in the huge meat processing industry. It is unfortunately light on injury and fatality data, but is worth looking at as it puts the problem of occupational health and safety of these workers into a broad, international context.
The Executive Summary:
Workers in American beef, pork, and poultry slaughtering and processing plants perform dangerous jobs in difficult conditions. Dispatching the nonstop tide of animals and birds arriving on plant kill floors and live hang areas is itself hazardous and exhausting labor.1 After slaughter, the carcasses hurl along evisceration and disassembly lines as workers hurriedly saw and cut them at unprecedented volume and pace.
What once were hundreds of head processed per day are now thousands; what were thousands are now tens of thousands per day. One worker described the reality of the line in her foreman’s order: “Speed, Ruth, work for speed! One cut! One cut! One cut for the skin; one cut for the meat. Get those pieces through!” Said another: “People can’t take it, always harder, harder, harder! [mas duro, mas duro, mas duro!].”
Constant fear and risk is another feature of meat and poultry labor. Meatpacking work has extraordinarily high rates of injury. Workers injured on the job may then face dismissal. Workers risk losing their jobs when they exercise their rights to organize and bargain collectively in an attempt to improve working conditions. And immigrant workers—an increasing percentage of the workforce in the industry—are particularly at risk. Language difficulties often prevent them from being aware of their rights under the law and of specific hazards in their work. Immigrant workers who are undocumented, as many are, risk deportation if they seek to organize and to improve conditions.

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House, Senate and Bush ideas on illegal immigrants compared

The NY Times published today a checklist comparison of these three points of view. You can find the president’s address in Workingimmigrants.com here.

Full Text of House Bill (H.R.4437) here
Full Text of Senate Bill (S.2611) here
Temporary Worker Program
House (passed): No such provisions. Eliminates the Diversity Visa Lottery Program.
Senate (not yet passed): Creates a temporary worker program, with a potential path to legal permanent residence for individuals currently outside the U.S. Employers seeking to hire foreign workers would first have to try to recruit an available American worker.
President in speech: Has called on Congress to pass a guest worker program for more than two years. Said that “to secure our border, we must create a temporary worker program.”
Legalization of Undocumented Immigrants
House: No such provisions.
Senate: Provides legalization criteria for three different groups. The major one, called the “Earned Legalization Program,” would provide a path to legal permanent residence for undocumented immigrants who have been here for five years and employed for three of those and who meet other requirements.
President: While rejecting “an automatic path to citizenship,” Mr. Bush said that immigrants should be given a chance to gain citizenship after they “pay a meaningful penalty for breaking the law.”
Worksite Enforcement

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Bush’s May 15 speech on illegal immigration in outline and full text

President Bush in his May 15 speech for the White House presented a five point plan – four substantive and one rhetorical – to resolve issues with illegal immigration. He did not address any other immigration issues, such as changing the quota for legal immigration
POINT ONE: Beef up border controls and handling of arrested persons. He said that by the end of his presidency the size of the Border Patrol will have doubled from 9,000 to 18,000. State and local law enforcement authorities will be given special training. He will assign 6,000 National Guardsmen, drawn apparently from border states. More detention center beds will be created.
Proper training and coordination with state and local law enforcement is a difficult undertaking. I have addressed this a bit in an analysis of a recently passed illegal immigration bill enacted by Georgia.
POINT TWO: Temporary worker program. He clearly wanted to keep this topic low profile. Out of a 2,700 word speech he devoted on paragraph, about 200 words, to this program. I have covered this topic extensively. Search under “guest worker” and “Judiciary” with my pessimistic assessment of passage potential this year.
POINT THREE: Tamper proof identification to verify legal status of workers. I have addressed the tamper proof card issue here, and – regarding driver license “Real ID”, here. Also, go here for how federal agencies do not cooperate.
POINT FOUR: A path to citizenship for illegal immigrants here already for more than a few years. “They will have to wait in line behind those who played by the rules…” The Pew Hispanic Center at one place estimated that 40% of unauthorized persons (4.4 million) as of March 2005 have been in the United States since 2000 which means that 60% (6.6 million) have been here since before 2000.
It has also made these tenure estimates: Time in the US: Five years or more: 6.7 million; Two to five years: 2.8 million; Less than two years: 1.6 million, Total: 11.1 million
POINT FIVE: a rhetorical flourish – requiring immigrants to speak English. This point sort of sailed in from nowhere.
Only 3% of unauthorized Hispanic persons say they speak English “very well.”

Continue reading Bush’s May 15 speech on illegal immigration in outline and full text

Rare use of Social Security numbers and IRS data to search for illegal immigrant workers

Liz Chandler of Knight Ridder has reported on an impasse in the federal government which has prevented the use of federal records to locate and arrest illegal immigrants. “Most immigrants simply use Social Security numbers to get work, experts say. They make up numbers, buy them on forged cards, or steal them,’ she wrote. But prosecutors cannot easily access this information, and cannot access IRS data at all. And Social Security and the IRS do not cooperate.
Excerpting from her article:
Two federal agencies are refusing to turn over a mountain of evidence that investigators could use to indict the nation’s burgeoning workforce of illegal immigrants and the firms that employ them. The IRS and the Social Security Administration routinely collect strong evidence of potential workplace crimes, including names and addresses of millions of people who are using bogus Social Security numbers, their wage records and the identities of the bosses who knowingly hire them. The two agencies don’t analyze their data to root out likely immigration fraud – and they won’t share their millions of records so that law enforcement agencies can do that, either. Privacy laws, they say, prohibit them from sharing their files with anyone, except in rare criminal investigations.

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Political pork and the tamper-proof identification card

The NY Times today ran a long story on how Homeland Security’s lagging efforts to prepare such a card have been in part controlled by a Kentucky congressman referred in his own district as Prince of Pork. Other efforts to produce a reliable card such as the Real ID program for motor vehicles are largely dead in the water. (State motor vehicle departments have a hard enough time answering their phones.) Until one is available, it is very difficult to regulate the movement of illegal immigrants. Concerned as I am about the dangers of such a card to civil liberties, I believe that a tamper proof card can be valuable in certain instances to protect the public as well as the guarantee certain rights and benefits to the carrier.
Following are excerpts from the article:
The Department of Homeland Security has invested tens of millions of dollars and countless hours of labor over the last four years on a seemingly simple task: creating a tamperproof identification card for airport, rail and maritime workers. Yet nearly two years past a planned deadline, production of the card, known as the Transportation Worker Identification Credential, has yet to begin.
Instead, the road to delivering this critical antiterrorism tool has taken detours to locations, companies and groups often linked to [13 termer] Representative Harold Rogers, a Kentucky Republican who is the powerful chairman of the House subcommittee that controls the Homeland Security budget. Work has even been set aside for a tiny start-up company in Kentucky that employs John Rogers, the congressman’s son.

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Census Bureau reports on Hispanic growth rate

I have been searching for the best media report on these findings, and Jim Quiggle sent me a copy of CNN’s. Hispanics have been and will continue to account for over a third of the country’s population increase. “The Population Resource Center cites statistics showing the average Hispanic woman will have three children in her lifetime; it’s 1.8 for non-Hispanic whites.”

It mutes the illegal-versus-legal debate,” said Linda Jacobson, director of domestic programs for the Population Reference Bureau in Washington. “We need to be more focused on how we meet the needs of children in immigrant families who are citizens.

Just look at the age demographics: “Census statistics also show that 45 percent of children under age 5 are from a racial or ethnic minority. The median age for Hispanics — the point at which half are older and half are younger — was 27.2 years in 2005. It was 30.0 years for blacks and 40.3 years for white non-Hispanics.”

Labor centers for immigrant workers

If one takes into account well staffed entities as well as simple hiring halls, there are probably up to 200 centers dedicated to supporting immigrant workers in obtaining work, learning about American labor practices, and securing their labor rights. I have been to two such centers: The Brazilian Immigrant Center in Boston, and the Watsonville Law Center in Watsonville, CA. I have also visited a makeshift center – more of a hiring hall – in Brooklyn.
Janice Fine of Rutgers University has published a book on this topic: “Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream”. Cornell U Press summarizes the book: “[She] identifies 137 worker centers in more than eighty cities, suburbs, and rural areas in thirty-one states. These centers, which attract workers in industries that are difficult to organize, have emerged as especially useful components of any program intended to assist immigrants and low-wage workers of color. Worker centers serve not only as organizing laboratories but also as places where immigrants and other low-wage workers can participate in civil society, tell their stories to the larger community, resist racism and anti-immigrant sentiment, and work to improve their political and economic standing.”
Fine defines labor centers as “community-based mediating institutions that provide support to low-wage immigrants. Part settlement house, part local civil rights organization, and part union, the centers pursue this mission through a combination of approaches.”
Pablo Alvarado of the National Day Labor Organizing Network proposed seven characteristics of a well runs center:

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Wages and economics of immigrant restaurant workers: a case study

The Washington Post profiled the Oval Room Restaurant, on Connecticut Avenue. The writers follow the economic trail of Walter Velasquez, a 40 year old Salvadorean waiter. He came to America illegally; now his eldest child, 17, aspires to become an immigration lawyer. The Post article touches on his household finances, the public’s cost of uninsured healthcare and educating children, and the economics of the restaurant industry.
“The sous-chef, a Panamanian immigrant, directed two cooks from El Salvador, one from Guatemala and one from Honduras. A Salvadoran immigrant ran the food to the tables. All the activity was monitored by the general manager, an Austrian by birth, who needs to satisfy the owner, originally from India. “We would not exist without immigrant labor,” said Ashok Bajaj, owner of the restaurant. “If the laws change, the entire economics of the restaurant industry would change, too.”

Bajaj, a New Delhi native who moved here from London in 1988, was willing to invest a million dollars here because of the availability of labor at attractive prices. His dishwashers make about $10 an hour, line cooks about $14 an hour, and sous-chefs $20 or so. About 70 percent of the restaurant’s employees were born outside the United States; overall in the Washington region, about 45 percent of food-service workers are immigrants, according to an analysis of federal data by the Pew Hispanic Center.

[The] household finances of [Walter Velasquez], a Salvadorean waiter at the Oval and his restaurant-working girlfriend] show how immigrants support the U.S. economy — but also incur costs for public services. He makes about $30,000 a year. Avila, who works fewer hours, earns about $18,000. They pay $1,300 a month in rent and pay Comcast $140 a month for cable television and high-speed Internet service. Comcast has added more than 30 foreign-language channels in the past eight years. The couple spends $150 a week on groceries, much of it at the Giant Food store on Columbia Pike, which has a large selection of ingredients that are common in Central America.

Velasquez’s [the waiter’s] family also exacts costs on the economy. He sends about $100 a month home to family in El Salvador, which does not create new economic activity here. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, in 2000, such remittances amount to $10.2 billion for Mexico and four Central American nations. If the uninsured Velasquez were to have a serious medical problem, the cost would probably be borne by the hospital that treated him. (“We just can’t be sick,” he said.) Inova Fairfax Hospital, near Velasquez’s home, provided $75 million in health care last year to people who were too poor to pay and had no insurance, many of them immigrants, said Ron Ewald, the hospital’s chief financial officer. “It can be very volatile and extremely costly,” he said.

There are local costs too. The Arlington County school system is spending $16,464 per pupil this year, or more than $32,000 for his school-age children. School spending is supported partly by state and federal governments but most significantly by property taxes, which Velasquez pays indirectly with his rent. But what the school system spends on his children’s education can also be viewed as an investment in the next generation of U.S. workers. On Thursday, as Velasquez gathered his things to head back to work, his 17-year-old daughter, Alma, described her plans. After high school, she plans to go to a community college for two years, to save money, then transfer to a four-year university. Ultimately, she wants to be an immigration lawyer. “It came to me because my parents went through so much to get here,” she said.

Pandering and posturing in Arizona about illegal immigrants.

On August 12 2005 a new Arizona law went into effect making it, according to one report, ‘a felony punishable for up to two years in prison to smuggle humans across the border. “ The primary, perhaps only, real effect of the law so far has been to provide the sheriff of Maricopa Country, Joe Arpaio, another publicity stunt. Some time ago, he instructed his deputies to ask citizens to voluntarily submit fingerprints in order to combat the supposed epidemic of identity theft. And he has ordered prisoners, male and female, to wear pink underwear. In 2004 he told jailed illegal immigrants that they had to register for the draft. This time, Arpaio interpreted the law to mean he can round up any and all illegal immigrants and charge them with trespass, conspiracy to smuggle themselves into the United States.
The legislature passed another law making in a felony to be an illegal immigrant in Arizona. The governor vetoed it, perhaps mindful of the reality that major parts of the state’s economy could grind to a halt.
According to a May 5th AP article, a posse of 100 volunteers and sheriff’s deputies will patrol the Phoenix area and arrest any illegal immigrants, the county sheriff said. The group likely will be deployed across parts of Maricopa County by the weekend, Sheriff Joe Arpaio said Wednesday. Volunteers will be drawn from the department’s 3,000-member posse, whose members are trained and are often former deputies.

“It’s important to send the message out to stay in Mexico and don’t come roaming around here hoping you’re going to get amnesty,” said Arpaio. [His] deputies have already arrested about 120 illegal immigrants using a new state smuggling law. “We’re going to arrest any illegal who violates this new law,” he said. “I’m not going to turn these people over to federal authorities so they can have a free ride back to Mexico. I’ll give them a free ride into the county jail.”

Under the law, as interpreted by the Maricopa County attorney, illegal immigrants can be arrested and prosecuted for conspiracy to smuggle themselves into the country. The law’s authors have said they intended it to be used to prosecute smugglers, not the immigrants being smuggled.

Lawyers for nearly 50 undocumented immigrants charged with conspiracy to commit human smuggling have filed motions to have the charges dismissed. A Los Angeles attorney brought into the case last week by the Mexican Consul General’s Office in Phoenix plans to file another motion claiming Maricopa County Attorney officials are violating state and federal law because it’s the federal government’s job to control illegal immigration.