New Center Opens On Park St.
Immigrant workers in Madison who face poor working conditions and don't know their rights now have a place to turn, said Selva, a volunteer at the center.
"We are ready to help everybody," said Selva, who was born in Nicaragua and moved to Madison in 1999. "We are going to give the best advice to help the worker, to give them their rights. Work is the basis of wealth. We want to defend that, the right to a wealthy, regular life."
A group of clergy and immigrant rights activists opened the Workers' Rights
Center, a project of the Interfaith Coalition for Worker Justice, on Wednesday
afternoon. The center will be staffed by a team of bilingual advocates who can
give advice on labor laws, legal referrals, enforcement agencies and other ways
to defend workplace rights.
The center is located at the Villager Mall, Suite 6, 2300 S. Park St.
As Randy Brink, of AFSCME Local 171, reminded the crowd, even undocumented workers have the right to be free of discrimination and abuse. He recalled how about two dozen janitors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison lost their jobs last year after a UW employee singled out Latino-sounding names for Social Security number checks.
The workers settled with the university for about $24,000, a small sum that the workers hope to make go a long way. An upcoming payment of about $8,000 from that settlement will go toward paying the center's expenses, said Jonathan Rosenblum, an attorney for the workers. He applauded the workers' determination to put their own settlement money toward something that would benefit the community at large.
Brink said the UW incident was a good lesson in pointing out what the city needs. "We've had occasion to deal with people who didn't realize what their rights were," Brink said. "That's why we're glad this center's here."
The center's opening comes about a year after the interfaith coalition released a report detailing the problems Latino workers face, including discrimination, the lack of knowledge of labor laws, language barriers and cultural misunderstandings.
Pastor Amanda Stein at Trinity United Methodist Church said the opening reception, which attracted about 100 people, would have been even bigger if its main clientele could have gotten off work to celebrate.
"There are people in the backs of kitchens today, there are people at Oscar Mayer, there are people who are not here, who need to be here," Stein said.
The center is operated with financial assistance from the Catholic Diocese, the First Unitarian Society, the Rockefeller Foundation, United Way, and other organizations.