Update on Indian Guest Workers' Hunger Strike and Birthday Wishes to Paul Konar

We never fail to be impressed by the bravery of these workers.

This past Wednesday Paul Konar (pictured above, center), a welder who has worked all over India and in the Middle East since the 1970s, celebrated his 54th birthday.

Today he also celebrated day 18 of his hunger strike. Although he has given up all food for two and a half weeks, Paul has not given up hope. He is confident that his Satyagraha (non-violent civil disobedience) will help these workers achieve victory in their struggle to remain in this country until the Department of Justice hears the charges of human trafficking against Signal International.

His example and that of his fellow workers and organizers is one from which we could all learn a lot. Their bravery has also garnered support in Congress, with Dennis Kucinich sponsoring a letter to the Department of Justice demanding that the workers be granted continued presence.

In the past few days we've been blessed to be able to spend a lot of time with Paul and other workers as Sameer has been helping out the New Orleans Worker Center for Racial Justice with the organizing efforts. He also has a new article on the campaign over at Foreign Policy in Focus.

Victory for Immokalee Workers

Sometimes it seems as though we're always on the defensive. From trying to stop walls being built in Palestine and Texas to trying to ensure that the Bush administration's captives in Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere have access to some dignity and justice, it's a long and hard struggle just to ensure that communities around the world still have the rights that they've already won.

That's why the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and their string of victories is so encouraging. For the uninitiated, the CIW represents farmworkers in Immokalee, Florida. The mostly immigrant workers have been picking tomatoes for years for a pittance - about $10-12,000 per year.

This wage is by and large set by the fast food companies that who hire the pickers. In 2005, the CIW launched a boycott of Taco Bell demanding that they pay one penny per pound more for tomatoes picked, an increase of over 70% in the workers' wages. Eventually, and in order to avoid the bad publicity that the boycott was generating, Taco Bell agreed to the demands. After Taco Bell, the CIW went after McDonalds, and in this case, McDonalds was so afraid of bad press that they acceded to the demands before the boycott was even in full swing. Just yesterday, the CIW was successful in their campaign against a third company, Burger King.

Congratulations to all who were a part of this struggle! And while life's challenges continue for us all, please take a moment to toast this victory (and any others you can think of) with the celebratory beverage of your choice.

Here's more on the struggle of the Immokalee Workers...

Dignity, Human Rights and the Guest Worker programs

Guest worker programs in the United States have long been a tactic to exploit cheap immigrants labor and undermine working class wages. But sometimes they go a step further and resemble share cropping and even slavery.

In the case of Signal International, a subcontractor for U.S. defense giant Northrop Grumman, it is not difficult to see the connection between guest worker programs and outright slavery. Indian workers were promised good jobs, the ability to bring their families over and even green cards in exchange for $20,000 in cash upfront. After coughing up their life savings, these workers were kept in labor camps in terrible working conditions and told that they'd be sent back when their visas expired. They were under constant threat of deportation, sometimes even being told that if they didn't get a specific job done in time, they would be deported.

Instead of allowing themselves to be intimidated, the workers filed a case with the Department of Justice accusing the company of human trafficking. The DoJ, in its infinite wisdom, has ruled that it can only hear the case after the claimants have been deported!!!

These workers have shown unbelievable courage and strength in their fight for dignity. Today they went on hunger strike to demand that Congress pass legislation to ensure that they are not deported until their case is heard. The kickoff event took place in front of the White House and lots of folks came out to express their solidarity, including civil rights leader Lennox Yearwood.

Please check out the New Orleans Worker Center webpage for more background and updates and sign this petition to express your solidarity. And if you are in DC, try to come by and see the workers to express your solidarity (be sure to check the website first as they will be in different places over the next few weeks).

May Day, Migration, and Lou Dobbs fans

As was mentioned in the last post, CNN featured a brief clip of me on the Lou Dobbs show on May 1. The show itself (I didn't watch it but I looked at the transcript) was predictably inane drivel about how "them immigrants" are coming over here to take our jobs. It even had special reference to May 1 as "law day", a term coined during the cold war and then invoked by Ronald Reagan just after he announced that he would not be respecting international law. The show was so silly, I was content to leave it alone, though I made a mental note to think twice before agreeing to be interviewed by CNN again...

Well that was that until I came across this while looking for media hits on the events.

You know what sameer dossani you and your illegal friends and family can go back to whatever country you hail from and demand your rights there! Go back to wherever you came from and see what this kind of behavior will get you.

Not one to shy away from fighting words, I began what I hope was a fairly reasoned debate with folks who should be at least in class solidarity with their working class Latino sisters and brothers. Well, ok I was a bit snarky, but the thought of being confronted by the "minute man" character that I play in our play "The Pit", was equal parts hilarious and nauseating. (And h/t to my brother Zain for joining the fray.)

Some of the realizations I came to from that discussion:

1) Any talk about the root causes of migration is met with bewildered anger. Accusations about being off topic flew when talking about economic and political strife in Global South countries (and the U.S. role in that strife). For my part, I find talk about the root causes of immigration so obvious, that I 've been unable to write much about it since I did this article for FPIF.

2) The history of May Day is something hardly any folks in the U.S. know, especially working class folks. It's such an important story of solidarity, of demanding better working conditions, of uniting between different segments of the workers, that this is really a shame. If one of the contributions of the immigrants rights movement is to help U.S. workers remember their own holiday, that would be amazing.

3) The right has done an amazing job instilling a culture of isolation and xenophobia on folks who should be worried about the Bush administration's record when it comes to the rule of law. Not sure how we're going to build a movement for meaningful peace and justice as long as people still watch Faux news and Dobbs...

For those who want to see my unpublished responses to the Lou Dobbs thread, I'll post them in the comments section.

May Day pics from Pickets at RNC and DNC

These are our pics from the May Day events here in DC. Hats off to DC Jobs with Justice and others who did a great job making the cut-outs and organizing the events. Media was out in full force, and we'll be on the lookout for any hits. Sameer did have a short quote on CNN, but we won't post to that here. For those with the stomach, you can look for transcripts of Lou Dobb's show.

More photos are in the feed on the right hand side of this page or on our public picasa site.

May Day, Mandela & We Are All Terrorists

May first is celebrated all over the world as labor day except in the United States. This may be seem like another aspect of U.S. parochialism (like the fact that we still buy milk in gallons and measure distance in miles) except for one thing: the events behind May Day took place here in the United States. In 1886, immigrant workers all over the country were demanding better working conditions. Their chief demand was that the workday be shortened to eight hours. On May 3, police fired into a crowd of demonstrators in Chicago killing four and wounding many more. The following day, as police were harassing the stragglers at a meeting called to figure out a response to the police violence, an unknown demonstrator threw a bomb at the police line, killing one. The police fired into the crowd (gathered at Haymarket Square) and another worker was killed. Though the police could never determine who threw the bomb, five prominent labor activists were sentenced to death and four of them were hanged for the crime. Soon after, global outrage at the actions of the U.S. government inspired the celebration of May Day, a day of global solidarity with U.S. workers.

This story came into my head today as I read about Nelson Mandela being on a list of terrorists and possibly denied entry to the United States. Mandela, of course was a terrorist according to FW De Klerk and the administrators of apartheid before him, and according to Ronald Reagan who backed the apartheid regime to the hilt. But within a few years of Mandela being branded an un-reformable terrorist, he became the celebrated first Black South African head of state.

Without Mandela and the movement for which he was a spokesperson South Africa would still be an apartheid state. Without the workers who were murdered by the U.S. state in 1886 and their struggle, who knows if we would have eight hour days, weekends, let alone basic education and healthcare? Whatever gains working class and colonized people have made over the centuries have been made by those whom the state brands as terrorists.