Important Dates to Remember!

May 1^st, 2004  

Please join us for our general membership meeting and Workers’ Rights update and training on May 1^st, from 9-11 a.m. at the Catholic Multicultural Center, 1862 Beld Street. Learn about organizing campaigns initiated by low-wage workers, the basics of workers’ rights, and hear updates about the Lands’ End Campaign, the District Attorney’s non-prosecution of unpaid wages, and Fair Wage initiative.

Translation to and from Spanish will be provided.

July 1, 2004      

Labor in the Pulpits Speaker Training on public speaking 5:30 to 8:00 pm in the ICWJ offices, 2300 South Park Street, Suite #6.

The ICWJ produces the ICWJ On-line Newsletter. The newsletter will offer regular updates on the worker justice efforts of ICWJ and its partners in the labor and religious communities. Learn more about the Interfaith Coalition for Worker Justice by visiting http://www.worker@workerjutice.org.

Please share this newsletter with others. Join our e-mail list by contacting ICWJ Director Sarah Shatz, by calling 608-255-0376 or worker@workerjustice.org.

ICWJ Update

A Word from the Director:

Welcome to our first "online" addition of the quarterly ICWJ newsletter. It will also be available in hard-copy for those of us who do not use email! We welcome feedback regarding this format, as we are diversifying the way we communicate with our members. It has been an exciting quarter for the ICWJ, we have hired two new staff members. David Alvarado, who will coordinate volunteers and management of the Workers’ Rights Center, and Geri Gerard as bookkeeper and data base manager. Welcome to both David and Geri!

As ICWJ Director, I will be working on the broader goals of the ICWJ which are:

• Actively involve a diverse group of faith and labor institutions in the struggles of low-wage workers and organized labor.
• Become financially self-sufficient and increase the financial viability of the organization.
• Support the Workers’ Rights Center and Low-Wage Worker Organizing

Throughout the year, we will be asking ICWJ members to get involved in the various campaigns we are working on, ranging from Lands’ End and the theme of Corporate Responsibility to becoming speakers for our annual Labor in the Pulpits program. As we continue to build our base, we need to work on strengthening our allies in the faith and labor communities to spread the word about the importance of workers’ rights, especially in this election year. Please consider becoming a volunteer for one of these campaigns and put your values into action!

Claudio Selva, Op-Ed

(Original Version in Spanish Follows)

Lands’ End negotiating with Union Factory…

After a 3-year long struggle by apparel workers in El Salvador, they finally had a union, or so they thought. After being asked to bargain a contract, the Taiwanese company simply closed the factory leaving 900 workers without jobs.

Now, there is hope that Lands’ End will contract with Just Garments, the first union factory in El Salvador that grew out of that struggle.

Dodgeville-based Lands End, under scrutiny for the conditions under which its apparel is produced in El Salvador, has lost a number of valuable contracts with universities including UW-Madison over the last few months. Now, the company may be on the verge of establishing a new standard and a model for others to follow.

Students, faith groups and other labor supporters locally are closely watching negotiations between Lands¹ End and a new apparel workers¹ union in El Salvador, the STIT (Sindacato de Trabajadores de Industrias Textiles). The effort, being aided by the Interfaith Coalition for Worker Justice of South Central Wisconsin and nationally by the Workers Rights Consortium and the Fair Labor Association, two organizations that oversee collegiate licensing agreements, could result in a path breaking victory for workers rights in Central America.

Clergy and labor leaders heard a first-hand account of three long years of struggle by El Salvadoran apparel workers at the annual Clergy/Labor Luncheon hosted by the Interfaith Coalition for Worker Justice, January 28, at the Lake Edge Lutheran Church.
Maria Deysi Hernandez told how she rose at 3 a.m. to prepare breakfast for her three children before traveling by bus two-and-a-half hours to work at Tainan, a Taiwanese-owned garment factory. She earned 64¢ an hour and if she arrived one minute late, her pay was docked. Deysi later told students on the UW campus how her pregnant coworkers were forced to work standing up and that Tainan regularly asked clinics to give pregnant women drugs that cause miscarriage.

In 2000, after Deysi and her coworkers discovered they were being cheated out of overtime pay, they decided to form a union. After organizing for well over a year, they had finally signed up a majority of factory workers. But after winning a government-sponsored union election in 2001, Tainan¹s owner simply moved production elsewhere, closed the factory and left 900 workers without jobs.

Adding Insult to Injury

Union supporters soon discovered that they were being blacklisted from other jobs in the free trade zone, after being routinely denied employment at another factory, Primo, that produces for Lands¹ End. Such practices, they later learned, violate a code of conduct that Lands¹ End requires for contractors producing its apparel overseas.

Undaunted, the union gained the support of the student anti-sweatshop movement, the AFL-CIO and other international labor rights organizations. Together they mobilized support in the form of strikes by other Tainan apparel workers in Taiwan, the Dominican Republic and Indonesia. Ultimately, they pressured the Taiwanese company to return factory equipment and open a new unionized factory, Just Garments, in April of last year. But they still needed contracts with major name brands like Lands¹ End for the factory to become viable.

Shortly after Deysi¹s visit, the UW-Madison dropped its contract authorizing Lands¹ End to produce licensed apparel bearing the school¹s logo, because of the company¹s complicity with the unionbusting Primo operation. At the urging of student anti-sweatshop activists, other schools including Northwestern, Duke and Georgetown have also cut contracts with Lands¹ End in recent months.

In response, Lands¹ End offered a commitment requiring the Primo factory to allow union supporters to reapply for jobs. However, union backers say they do not trust Primo and that concession alone was ³too little, too late.² With support from the Workers Rights Consortium and the Fair Labor Association, students and the workers¹ union are now pushing Lands¹ End to source apparel from the new Just Garments, the first factory in El Salvador with both a democratic union and collective bargaining agreement.

The ICWJ is in communication with Lands’ End and the union, STIT. We will continue to inform you of the negotiations.

Action Item:

Contact Lands’ End and let them know you are pleased they are in negotiations with Just Garments, and hopefull to see a new standard set for international Workers’ Rights.

Help the ICWJ plan a conference for January 2005 on Corporate Social Responsibility using Lands’ End as a case study, as well as local examples of businesses who prioritize and value workers’ rights.

Recently, ICWJ volunteers met with Immigration Attorney Glorily Lopez regarding immigration reform. The following are some highlights of her workshop, taken from the American Immigrant Lawyers Association.

Comprehensive Immigration Reform: Our current immigration system needs reform. It meets neither our security nor our economic needs, nor does it adequately reunify close family members of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents. The status quo also encourages illegality. Good reform will contribute to our national security, respond to worker shortages that remain a critical issue because of demographic, economic and education trends, and reunify families. Such reforms need to be comprehensive and include: an earned adjustment for people who are living here, working and contributing to the U.S.; a future flow visa program that would allow essential workers to enter the U.S. safely, legally, and expeditiously; and backlog reductions in family-based immigration and decreased delays in business-based immigration. S. 2010, introduced by Senators Hagel (R-NE) and Daschle (D-SD) is the only initiative introduced to date that includes all three components. While AILA has concerns about some of the bill’s provisions, it is a giant step forward in creating an immigration system that works. Proposals that seek to enforce an unworkable system contribute to current problems and do not offer the solution provided by comprehensive immigration reform.

DREAM Act /Student Adjustment Act (S. 1545/ H.R. 1684): Children in the U.S. each year are prevented from pursuing their dreams of going to college because they have no legal status. Despite the fact that many of these children have grown up in the U.S., have attended local schools, and have demonstrated a sustained commitment to learn English and succeed in our educational system, our immigration laws provide no avenue for these students to become legal. Many of these children were brought to the U.S. by their parents at an age at which they were too young to understand the legality of their arrival, let alone take action to rectify this decision. Bipartisan legislation introduced in the 108th Congress, S. 1545 and H.R. 1684, would allow immigrant students who have grown up in this country, graduated from high school, and have no criminal record, to go to college and legalize their immigration status.

The Agricultural Job Opportunity, Benefits, and Security Act (S. 1645/H.R. 3142): The shortage of legal, documented agricultural workers in the U.S. has reached crisis proportions, with estimates of 50% to more than 70% of the 1.6 million agricultural workers being undocumented foreign nationals. These individuals work grueling jobs to put food on our table and yet they remain unable to assert the most basic rights and protections. The bipartisan Agricultural Job Opportunity, Benefits, and Security (AgJobs) Act of 2003 (S. 1645/H.R. 3142) would streamline the H-2A guest worker program to make it more practical, secure and fair, and adjust the status of eligible farm workers. The bill thus recognizes that immigration reform must include both a legal means by which employers can hire foreign workers in the absence of available U.S. workers and a means to legitimize the status of those immigrants already present in the U.S. who have been supporting our economy with their labor.

ICWJ Workers’ Rights Center

Immigrant workers are an everyday reality in Dane county and the City of Madison. Most of us came with little knowledge of what is and what is not supposed to happen in a workplace. For those whose immigration status is ambiguous, commonsense seems to dictate that it is better to keep quiet and acquiesce to whatever happens at work. Therefore, while alarming, it is not surprising to hear that immigrant workers in our community have worked for several years making less than the legal minimum, for example. Or that employers will fire workers assuming that they are undocumented just because they are latin@ or foreign born.

What is surprising, and no less alarming, is how many non-immigrants are unaware of basic workers rights. Or how much they are willing to accept substandard working conditions for the sake of keeping a job.

But what if one day you decide that, being pregnant, you shouldn’t be working in unsafe conditions? Do you have any alternatives to quitting? What if one day you have a permanently incapacitating accident at work? Is the company supposed to pay? Where can you go?

Since November of 2002, the Workers’ Rights Center (WRC) has helped workers find answers to problems at work. While center users are overwhelmingly immigrant workers, it remains a resource for all workers. Through the WRC, workers also become connected to larger efforts to improve the situation of low-wage workers. A good case in point is the current drive to increase the minimum wage in the City of Madison, in which the WRC has played an important role.

The truth is that labor abuse is an everyday reality in Dane County and the City of Madison. In February of 2004, the WRC was processing 60 open cases. 23 people came into the WRC seeking support to resolve problems at work – a rate of almost one per day.

Talking about the workload brings me to talk about the most valuable part of the WRC. It is a volunteer-run effort. Twenty volunteer worker advocates put in 90 hours of work in February to deal with cases, answer phones, get workers involved and so on. Volunteers make the Workers’ Rights Center work.

Which then brings me to an inevitable pitch. The ICWJ/WRC always need more people involved. Not only because of a moral sense of justice and supporting those who are worse off, but also because it is in our interest to stop the workplace situation from continuing to erode. All of us work, have worked or will work, as well as our children. What kind of a workplace they will find depends largely of what we do.