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[4 Articles on Migrant Workers & Rights – in MD, Florida, & Texas -- Counts as 1 rdg. for papers and notes] Plight of migrant crab pickers detailedBy Nicole GaudianoDaily Times (Salisbury) 15, 2010WASHINGTON -- Migrants working in Maryland's crab industry often must pay fees to the people who recruit them in their native Mexico, an arrangement that keeps the workers in a state of "effective indenture," according to a report released Wednesday.Such fees are barred by regulations governing the guestworker visa program. But the crab companies that hire the recruiters often avoid any consequences, says the report by the International Human Rights Clinic at American University's Washington College of Law and the nonprofit Centro de los Derechos del Migrante Inc.The report, called "Picked Apart," points to "fundamental flaws" with the temporary guestworker visa program at a time when expanding such visas has become a key component of immigration reform proposals."It is not that employers relying on this program are just a bunch of bad-apple employers," said Mary Bauer, legal director for the Southern Poverty Law Center. "It is that the very structure of this program lends itself to abuse in recruitment, in wages, in housing and in this industry with rampant gender discrimination and sexual harassment."The report examines the experiences of 40 women who have worked in Maryland's crab industry.Most dealt with a local recruiter to obtain a visa, and all said they paid a recruiting fee. Many took out loans to pay the fees. In some cases, the recruiter also served as the lender, charging monthly interest up to 15 percent, according to the report.The visa program ties the women to the job for which they were recruited and doesn't allow them to work elsewhere, giving them little time to leave the country if they lose their job. That arrangement puts them in a compromised position and leaves them reluctant to speak out about working conditions or other issues, the authors conclude.The report also cites crowded and remote housing conditions -- often on Hooper's Island -- as well as low wages, erratic work schedules and paycheck deductions.Migrant workers typically earn $2-$2.25 per pound of crabmeat picked. The $2 rate would require handling more than 200 crabs daily to earn the federal minimum wage of $7.25 during a 40-hour workweek, according to the report.Of the 40 women, only seven reported receiving formal training. Some reported that when they or their workers cut themselves with a crab-picking knife, the cuts sometimes became infected with a potentially lethal seaborne bacterium that caused blisters or lesions.Margarita Gallegos, 56, of Mexico picked crabs for three years as a migrant worker to support her seven children after her husband was killed. She said she paid about $1,000 in visa and recruiting fees, only to endure discrimination, skin infections and a constant fear she would be sent back to Mexico if she didn't produce enough.Gallegos, speaking through an interpreter at a news conference with the report's authors on Wednesday, said she worries about her three children, who are in the U.S. on guest worker visas."We are people like you," she said through tears. "We have a heart that feels. We ask as a favor that those workers that keep coming, please give them better treatment."Among the report's recommendations:? Better enforcement of rules regulating recruiting practices.? Sanctions against employers who use recruiters charging improper fees.? Reforming guestworker visas so workers aren't tied to one employer, an arrangement that invites abusive working conditions.? Extending Maryland's minimum wage and overtime protections to migrant workers, providing bilingual occupational health and safety training, and deploying health care workers to the Eastern Shore to assess workers' injuries. Rigged, Forced into Debt, Worked Past Exhaustion, Left with NothingBrett MurphyJune 16, 2017USA Today?A yearlong investigation by the USA TODAY Network found that port trucking companies in southern California have spent the past decade forcing drivers to finance their own trucks by taking on debt they could not afford. Companies then used that debt as leverage to extract forced labor and trap drivers in jobs that left them destitute.??Los Angeles — Samuel Talavera Jr. did everything his bosses asked.Most days, the trucker would drive more than 16 hours straight hauling LG dishwashers and Kumho tires to warehouses around Los Angeles, on their way to retail stores nationwide.He rarely went home to his family. At night, he crawled into the back of his cab and slept in the company parking lot.For all of that, he took home as little as 67 cents a week.Then, in October 2013, the truck he leased from his employer, QTS, broke down.When Talavera could not afford repairs, the company fired him and seized the truck -- along with $78,000 he had paid towards owning it.Talavera was a modern-day indentured servant. And there are hundreds, likely thousands more, still on the road, hauling containers for trucking companies that move goods for America’s most beloved retailers, from Costco to Target to Home Depot.These port truckers -- many of them poor immigrants who speak little English -- are responsible for moving almost half of the nation’s container imports out of Los Angeles’ ports. They don't deliver goods to stores. Instead they drive them short distances to warehouses and rail yards, one small step on their journey to a store near you.A yearlong investigation by the USA TODAY Network found that port trucking companies in southern California have spent the past decade forcing drivers to finance their own trucks by taking on debt they could not afford. Companies then used that debt as leverage to extract forced labor and trap drivers in jobs that left them destitute.If a driver quit, the company seized his truck and kept everything he had paid towards owning it.If drivers missed payments, or if they got sick or became too exhausted to go on, their companies fired them and kept everything. Then they turned around and leased the trucks to someone else.Drivers who manage to hang on to their jobs sometimes end up owing money to their employers – essentially working for free. Reporters identified seven different companies that have told their employees they owe money at week’s end.The USA TODAY Network pieced together accounts from more than 300 drivers, listened to hundreds of hours of sworn labor dispute testimony and reviewed contracts that have never been seen by the public.Using the contracts, submitted as evidence in labor complaints, and shipping manifests, reporters matched the trucking companies with the most labor violations to dozens of retail brands, including Target, Hewlett-Packard, Home Depot, Hasbro, J.Crew, UPS, Goodyear, Costco, Ralph Lauren and more.Among the findings:Trucking companies force drivers to work against their will – up to 20 hours a day – by threatening to take their trucks and keep the money they paid toward buying them. Bosses create a culture of fear by firing drivers, suspending them without pay or reassigning them the lowest-paying routes.To keep drivers working, managers at a few companies have physically barred them from going home. More than once, Marvin Figueroa returned from a full day’s work to find the gate to the parking lot locked and a manager ordering drivers back to work. “That was how they forced me to continue working,” he testified in a 2015 labor case. Truckers at two other companies have made similar claims.Employers charge not just for truck leases but for a host of other expenses, including hundreds of dollars a month for insurance and diesel fuel. Some charge truckers a parking fee to use the company lot. One company, Fargo Trucking, charged $2 per week for the office toilet paper and other supplies.Drivers at many companies say they had no choice but to break federal safety laws that limit truckers to 11 hours on the road each day. Drivers at Pacific 9 Transportation testified that their managers dispatched truckers up to 20 hours a day, then wouldn’t pay them until drivers falsified inspection reports that track hours. Hundreds of California port truckers have gotten into accidents, leading to more than 20 fatalities from 2013 to 2015, according to the USA TODAY Network's analysis of federal crash and port trade data.Many drivers thought they were paying into their truck like a mortgage. Instead, when they lost their job, they discovered they also lost their truck, along with everything they’d paid toward it. Eddy Gonzalez took seven days off to care for his dying mother and then bury her. When he came back, his company fired him and kept the truck. For two years, Ho Lee was charged more than $1,600 a month for a truck lease. When he got ill and missed a week of work, he lost the truck and everything he’d paid.Retailers could refuse to allow companies with labor violations to truck their goods. Instead they’ve let shipping and logistics contractors hire the lowest bidder, while lobbying on behalf of trucking companies in Sacramento and Washington D.C. Walmart, Target and dozens of other Fortune 500 companies have paid lobbyists up to $12.6 million to fight bills that would have held companies liable or given drivers a minimum wage and other protections that most U.S. workers already enjoy.This isn’t a case of a few bad trucking companies accused of mistreating a handful of workers.Since 2010, at least 1,150 port truck drivers have filed claims in civil court or with the California Department of Industrial Relations’ enforcement arm, known as the labor commission.Judges have sided with drivers in more than 97% of the cases heard, ruling time after time that port truckers in California can’t legally be classified as independent contractors. Instead, they are employees who, by law, must be paid minimum wage and can’t be charged for the equipment they use at work….[Dunn cut some for space reasons] “I don’t know of anything even remotely like this,” said Stanford Law School Professor William Gould, former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board and one of the nation’s top labor experts.“You’re working to get yourself out of the debt. You just don’t see anything like that.”… [Cut rest for space reasons]?In Florida Tomato Fields, a Penny Buys ProgressBy STEVEN GREENHOUSENew York Times 24, 2014IMMOKALEE, Fla. — Not long ago, Angelina Velasquez trudged to a parking lot at 5 each morning so a crew leader’s bus could drop her at the tomato fields by 6. She often waited there, unpaid — while the dew dried — until 10 a.m., when the workers were told to clock in and start picking.Back then, crew leaders often hectored and screamed at the workers, pushing them to fill their 32-pound buckets ever faster in this area known as the nation’s tomato capital. For decades, the fields here have had a reputation for horrid conditions. Many migrant workers picked without rest breaks, even in 95-degree heat. Some women complained that crew leaders groped them or demanded sex in exchange for steady jobs.But those abusive practices have all but disappeared, said Ms. Velasquez, an immigrant from Mexico. She and many labor experts credit a tenacious group of tomato workers, who in recent years forged partnerships with giant restaurant companies like McDonald’s and Yum Brands (owner of Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and KFC) to improve conditions in the fields.By enlisting the might of major restaurant chains and retailers — including Walmart, which signed on this year — the Coalition of Immokalee Workers has pressured growers that produce 90 percent of Florida’s tomatoes to increase wages for their 30,000 workers and follow strict standards that mandate rest breaks and forbid sexual harassment and verbal abuse.The incentive for growers to comply with what’s called the Fair Food Program is economically stark: The big companies have pledged to buy only from growers who follow the new standards, paying them an extra penny a pound, which goes to the pickers. The companies have also pledged to drop any suppliers that violate the standards.So far, the agreements between retailers and growers are limited to Florida’s tomato fields, which in itself is no small feat considering that the state produces 90 percent of the country’s winter tomatoes.But gaining the heft and reach of Walmart — which sells 20 percent of the nation’s fresh tomatoes year-round — may prove far more influential. To the applause of farmworkers’ advocates, the retailer has agreed to extend the program’s standards and monitoring to its tomato suppliers in Georgia, South Carolina and Virginia and elsewhere on the Eastern Seaboard. Walmart officials say they also hope to apply the standards to apple orchards in Michigan and Washington and strawberry fields in many states.Workers harvest tomatoes in a field owned by Pacific Tomato Growers, a partner in the Fair Food Program.Credit Richard Perry/The New York Times “This is the best workplace-monitoring program I’ve seen in the U.S.,” said Janice R. Fine, a labor relations professor at Rutgers. “It can certainly be a model for agriculture across the U.S. If anybody is going to lead the way and teach people how it’s done, it’s them.”Since the program’s inception, its system of inspections and decisions issued by a former judge has resulted in suspensions for several growers, including one that failed to adopt a payroll system to ensure pickers were paid for all the time they worked.But progress is far from complete. Immokalee, 30 miles inland from several wealthy gulf resorts, is a town of taco joints and backyard chicken coops where many farmworkers still live in rotting shacks or dilapidated, rat-infested trailers. A series of prosecutions has highlighted modern-day slavery in the area — one 2008 case involved traffickers convicted of beating workers, stealing their wages and locking them in trucks.“When I first visited Immokalee, I heard appalling stories of abuse and modern slavery,” said Susan L. Marquis, dean of the Pardee RAND Graduate School, a public policy institution in Santa Monica, Calif. “But now the tomato fields in Immokalee are probably the best working environment in American agriculture. In the past three years, they’ve gone from being the worst to the best.”Amassing all these company partnerships took time. The workers’ coalition organized a four-year boycott of Taco Bell to get its parent company, Yum Brands, to agree in 2005 to pay an extra penny a pound for tomatoes, helping increase workers’ wages. In 2007 the coalition sponsored a march to Burger King’s headquarters in Miami, pushing that company to join the effort. Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Chipotle and Subway have also signed on.Perhaps the coalition’s biggest success is luring Walmart, which joined the program in January without a fight. Walmart officials said they were looking for ethically sourced produce as well as a steady supply of tomatoes. The giant company’s decision coincides with its major inroads into organic foods and fresh fruits and vegetables.“We try to sell safe, affordable, sustainable sources of food — that’s the only way we will be able to grow the way we want in the future,” said Jack L. Sinclair, executive vice president of Walmart’s grocery division. “These guys have a pretty good set of standards in place that we think will allow our growers to get a consistent level of labor.” He told of Arizona growers whose tomatoes had rotted in the fields because of a lack of pickers.The Fair Food Program’s standards go far beyond what state or federal law requires, mandating shade tents so that workers who request a rest break can escape the hot Florida sun. Remedying a practice that Ms. Velasquez abhorred, growers must clock in workers as soon as they are bused to the fields.Every farm must have a health and safety committee with workers’ representatives, and there is a 24-hour hotline that workers can call, with a Spanish-speaking investigator.Under the program, tomato pickers may receive an extra $60 to $80 a week because of the penny-a-pound premium. That means a 20 to 35 percent weekly pay increase for these workers, who average about $8.75 an hour. The extra penny a pound means that participating companies together pay an additional $4 million a year for tomatoes.“We see ourselves as a standard-setting organization,” said Greg Asbed, co-founder of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers… [Dunn cut some for length]Beau McHan, Pacific’s harvest manager, said, “We’re trying to run a business and make a profit, yet everyone wants to know they’re changing the world for the better.”Joining, he acknowledged, has cost Pacific hundreds of thousands of dollars — $5,000 a year for shade tents and $50,000 for an improved drinking-water system as well as the money to pay workers for waiting time that was once off the clock. A former New York State judge, Laura Safer Espinoza, oversees the inspection apparatus, which interviews thousands of workers, audits payrolls and conducts in-depth interviews with farm managers. There are lengthy trainings for crew leaders, and six of them were fired after her team investigated allegations of verbal abuse and sexual harassment.“Supervisors have gotten the message, and we’re seeing far fewer allegations of harassment than three years ago,” she said.The Workers Defense Project, a Union in SpiritBy STEVEN GREENHOUSENew York TimesPublished: August 10, 2013 … The Workers Defense Project [in Austin, Texas], founded in 2002, has emerged as one of the nation’s most creative organizations for immigrant workers. Its focus is the Texas construction industry, which employs more than 600,000 workers, about half of whom, several studies suggest, are unauthorized immigrants. Immigrant workers, especially those who are undocumented, are especially vulnerable to abuse by contractors. Each year, the Workers Defense Project, which has 2,000 dues-paying members, receives about 500 complaints from workers who say they were cheated out of overtime or denied a water break in Texas’ scorching summer heat or stuck with huge hospital bills for an on-the-job injury. The Workers Defense Project is one of 225 worker centers nationwide aiding many of the country’s 22 million immigrant workers. The centers have sprouted up largely because labor unions have not organized in many fields where immigrants have gravitated, like restaurants, landscaping and driving taxis. And there is another reason: many immigrants feel that unions are hostile to them. Some union members say that immigrants, who are often willing to work for lower wages, are stealing their jobs. “The Workers Defense Project is not like a union — it welcomes everyone,” said Luis Rodriguez, a Mexican immigrant who sought the group’s help after he lost a finger in a construction accident. “It is always willing to take in more people and help more people.” At a recent Workers Defense Project meeting — they are held every Tuesday night — the atmosphere was part pep rally, part educational session, part social hour. After a dinner of tacos, rice and beans, about 60 workers plotted strategy for a demonstration against the developer of a 1,000-room Marriott hotel. A skit mocking the developer drew raucous laughter. The energy and sense of solidarity were reminiscent of what America’s labor unions had many decades ago, before they started to stumble and stagnate. As worker centers go, the Workers Defense Project in Austin has racked up an unusual number of successes. It has won more than $1 million in back pay over the last decade on behalf of workers alleging violations of minimum wage and overtime laws. A report it wrote on safety problems spurred the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to investigate 900 construction sites in Texas — leading to nearly $2 million in fines. And, despite a liberal image, the group made common cause with law-abiding contractors to persuade the state’s Republican-dominated legislature to approve a law that made wage theft — an employer’s deliberate failure to pay wages due — a criminal offense. The Workers Defense Project has just 18 employees, and its executive director, Ms. Tzintzún, 31, earns just $43,000 a year. But it managed to bring mighty Apple to the negotiating table. The group extracted a promise that construction workers on Apple’s new Austin office complex would receive at least $12 an hour, not the more commonly paid $10 — as well as workers’ compensation coverage. The workers’ compensation pledge was an important victory. The construction industry in Texas has a higher fatality rate than that in most other states, but Texas is the only one that does not require building contractors to provide workers’ compensation to cover an injured worker’s hospital bills and disability benefits. “We like organizing here in Texas,” Ms. Tzintzún said. “Things can only go up because working conditions are so awful.” [Dunn cut rest for length.] ................
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