risk and reward for migrant workers

The great journalist David Bacon outlines the absurd contradictions faced by immigrant workers in the US these days.

David profiles Teresa Mina, an immigrant who first works cleaning houses, then gets a well-paying job as a janitor, and then loses her job when she complains about sexual harassment at work. http://newamericamedia.org/2010/07/one-womans-story-this-law-is-very-unj.... In order to keep her job and continue to be able to provide for her kids (whom she had practically not seen in years), Teresa would have had to ignore threats to her personal and psychological safety. In order to advocate for her own security she had to take the risk that she would lose her job. She did, and she got sent home.

These are terrible choices for anyone to have to make. Yet migrant workers make them all the time, here in the US, in Asia, in Latin America, in Europe. Anytime anyone crosses a border to find work -- which happens millions of times a year -- they take on great risk. As this clever United Farm Workers website points out (http://www.ufw.org/toj_play/TOJNEW_12_JAL.html), the risk is not balanced by much reward. The UFW challenges us to sign up for farm work, in case we are worried that immigrants are taking the jobs that we so desperately want (picking vegetables, carrying 50 pound loads, making $12,000 a year at most, traveling from place to place in search of uncertain work).

Verite advocates for Fair Hiring -- so that anyone who gets a job has access to protection. So that the circumstances of hiring (indirectly, through a labor broker) can't absolve the employer of responsibility to treat workers fairly. We particularly want to bring in sectors that have remained out of the reach of the 'corporate responsibility' mainstream, like service sectors and farm work. Verite's Help Wanted initiative will reach out to these 'non-traditional' companies aggressively this fall.

For more information go to http://www.verite.org/WellMade/