WHO KILLED OVERTIME PAY? - Photoessay by David Bacon

WHO KILLED OVERTIME PAY?
Photoessay by David Bacon
Series written by Marcus Baram
Published by Capital & Main, May 10-13, 2022

Who Killed Overtime Pay?
Overworked and Underpaid
https://capitalandmain.com/overworked-and-underpaid
https://www.typeinvestigations.org/investigation/2022/05/10/overworked-and-underpaid

A protest in San Francisco against then-Gov. Pete Wilson's successful efforts to diminish the amount of overtime that employers paid out. 

 
A barista at a cafe in Berkeley whips up a coffee drink in 2020. In the months after COVID-19 slammed California, most people stayed home and sheltered in place, but due to a pandemic-induced shortage of workers, Carlos often worked overtime in what authorities deemed an essential job. 

 
Most farmworkers won overtime rights in California in 2019, but those on H-2A visas, which allow migrants to come to the U.S. to work, have fewer practical labor rights because they can be fired and deported in retaliation for highlighting illegal conditions. Here, H-2A workers harvest melons for the Rancho Nuevo Harvesting Company in the San Joaquin Valley in 2021. 

 
Overtime hours are common in many fast food establishments, especially after the pandemic triggered labor shortages of workers willing to accept such low-wage jobs. Here, a worker in Arcadia, California, in 2006, makes sure customers get their sides of fries. 

 
Due to staff shortages, classroom aides - like this one sharing a math lesson at a Janesville, California, school in 2006 - often work long hours.


Who Killed Overtime Pay?
You Probably Aren't Getting Paid Overtime. Here's Why.
https://capitalandmain.com/you-probably-arent-getting-paid-overtime-heres-why
https://www.typeinvestigations.org/investigation/2022/05/12/you-probably-arent-getting-paid-overtime-heres-why/

Lydia showed her hands weathered by 22 years of cleaning rooms at a Hyatt hotel in San Francisco, where she put in many overtime hours. 

 
Seeking recognition of their union, hotel staff picketed San Francisco's Parc 55 hotel in 1989, accusing their employers of forcing them to work off the clock, preventing some workers from receiving overtime pay.

 
A housekeeper prepares a room at a San Francisco hotel in 2007. In nonunion hotels, workers put in hours loading their carts and performing other tasks, and are sometimes not paid for their time on such duties.

 
After then-Gov. Pete Wilson pushed to abolish overtime pay in 1997 for days of work longer than eight hours, people protested in front of the office of California's Industrial Welfare Commission in San Francisco. The state body ultimately voted to go along with the governor.

 
Betty Johnson was a daycare worker in the town of Cotati in Sonoma County in 2004. At the time, such employees had no legal overtime rights in California.


Who Killed Overtime Pay?
Can Biden Sharply Expand Overtime Pay?
https://capitalandmain.com/can-biden-sharply-expand-overtime-pay
https://www.typeinvestigations.org/investigation/2022/05/11/can-biden-sharply-expand-overtime-pay/

 
In the break room of the sorting and recycling facility of Alameda County Industries in San Leandro, California in 2015, exhausted workers pause as the next shift clocks in. 

 
Domestic workers and their children marched outside California's State Capitol building in Sacramento in 2012 to demand a bill of rights that included the right to overtime pay. 

 
Workers at an Excel meatpacking plant in Nebraska in 1999 cut apart cow carcasses. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many meatpacking employees were pushed to work overtime, but some industry employers have a spotty record when it comes to paying their workers for extra hours.

 
Amid huge washing machines in the industrial laundry of California Linen Service in Oakland in 1992, employees handle laundry from local hotels and care homes. Such workers sometimes put in more than 40 hours per week, especially when hotels are busy.

 
Yan Li sews clothes she received from a garment contractor at her Oakland home in 2005. Working on a per-piece rate, she earns no overtime despite working long hours. Unable to make ends meet, her family of immigrants from China often eat thanks to the county food bank.


Who Killed Overtime Pay?
Several States Are Taking the Lead on Restoring Overtime Pay
https://capitalandmain.com/several-states-are-taking-the-lead-on-restoring-overtime-pay
https://www.typeinvestigations.org/investigation/2022/05/13/several-states-are-taking-the-lead-on-restoring-overtime-pay/

 
An immigrant carpenter framed a home under construction in Walnut Creek in 1997. Contractors in California often deny overtime pay to undocumented immigrants who are not unionized and who are aware that standing up to their bosses could result in a phone call to immigration authories. 

 
A driver in the port of Seattle, where such truckers frequently work long hours and have no right to overtime pay when they are classified as independent contractors. 

 
Honorata Nono, a Filipina domestic worker, took care of the 94-year-old Michiko Uchida in her home in Berkeley, California, in 2016. Nono, then 67, was active in the campaign to make the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights permanent because domestic workers and caregivers had no right to overtime pay even though many worked 12 to 16 hours per day.

 
Port driver Burhan Abdi held a paycheck in Seattle in 2012 showing that, as an independent contractor, his hours were not accounted for, so he received no overtime pay.

 
Hakima Arhab, a Berber immigrant from Algeria, pictured in 2012. She said she was fired from the Oakland Airport concession for Subway sandwiches after complaining that the business was violating the airport's living wage ordinance and not paying overtime.

 
Agustin Ramirez and others outside the office of the Industrial Welfare Commission in San Francisco in 1997, opposed then-Gov. Pete Wilson's effort to abolish overtime pay for people working more than eight hours a day.

 
CHP officers threw Santa Rosa labor attorney Newman Strawbridge to the floor in 1997 and arrested him as protesters inside the hearing room of the Industrial Welfare Commission disrupted a meeting in San Francisco to try to stop its vote to abolish overtime pay for employees working a long day. Overtime remained possible for some people working more than 40 hours per week.

 
Mexican workers strike against Southern California construction companies in Los Angeles in 1995. They accused the companies of using their undocumented status to pressure them into working without overtime pay and other legal requirements.


These stories are a series on overtime produced by Capital & Main in partnership with the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at CUNY's Newmark Graduate School of Journalism and Type Investigations, with support from the Puffin Foundation.

MORE THAN A WALL/Mas que un muro - COLEF 2022

 

More Than a Wall / Mas que un muro

30 years of photographs and oral histories

By David Bacon

El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, Tijuana, Baja California

May 2022

 

440 pp
357 duotone black-and-white photographs
12 oral histories with incisive journalism and analysis by David Bacon, Don Bartletti, Luis Escala, Guillermo Alonso and Alberto del Castillo.

Completely bilingual in English and Spanish

$35, soft cover

 

More Than a Wall / Mas que un muro is a book of photographs by David Bacon and oral histories created during 30 years of covering the people and social movements of the Mexico/U.S. border.  It presents a complex, richly textured documentation of a world in newspaper headlines daily, but whose reality, as it's lived by border residents, is virtually invisible.

Published by with support from the UCLA Institute for Labor Research and Education and the Center for Mexican Studies, the Werner Kohlstamm Family Fund, and the Green Library at Stanford University

To order in the U.S., click here:  
https://david-bacon-photography.square.site/product/more-than-a-wall-mas-que-un-muro/1?cp=true&sa=true&sbp=false&q=false

To order in Mexico, click here:

https://libreria.colef.mx/detalle.aspx?id=7864

 

Often we only see  the border from the U.S. side, despite the fact that many more people live in the border region south of the wall than north of it.  Despite the media fascination with the wall, people their lives and organize vibrant social movements that are virtually invisible in the U.S. Yet they have a direct impact. From winter strawberries to flat panel televisions, people north of the border consume what’s produced just a few miles south of it.

 

The intention of these photographs, taken over three decades, is to probe more deeply into the lives of the people of the border itself, rather than simply see it as a wall, or a place people try to cross to enter the United States.

 

The images show children working in fields and hard scrabble miners trying to survive in the desert. They depict strikes and land occupations virtually unknown to U.S. audiences, and often even to Mexican ones outside of the border region itself. These struggles have been going on for over a century, but have never been the subject of the kind of visual and narrative documentation presented here.

 

These photographs and the accompanying narratives provide a broad historical view, spanning the period from late 1980s to the present.  They provide a human face and story for those who seek to come to terms with the sources of migration, and to protect the human rights of migrants and working people generally.

 

Taking these photographs and conducting these interviews has been a cooperative project, built on relationships over three decades with the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations, the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras and California Rural Legal Assistance.  The result is an intensive look at border communities - a unique view documenting border work life, living conditions, culture and migration through photographs and narratives of the people who live there.

 

 

"The "border" is just a line. It's the people who matter their relationships with or without or across that line. The book helps us feel the impact of the border on people living there, and helps us figure out how we talk to each other about it. The germ of the discussion are these wonderful and eye-opening pictures, and the voices that help us understand what these pictures mean." JoAnn Intili, director, The Werner-Kohnstamm Family Fund

 

“David Bacon is the conscience of American journalism and an extraordinary social documentarist.” 

Mike Davis, sociologist, professor at UC Irvine, author of “City of Quartz” and other works.

 

“Bacon is a consummate professional. His work makes an outstanding case for engaged documentary, a proud tradition reaching to the beginning of photography. It offers a contrast to much modern documentary that has become self-absorbed and abstract. There is no book that has the scope, depth, and artistry of Bacon’s project.”

Douglas Harper, Professor, Department of Sociology, Duquesne University, President, International Visual Sociological Association

 

“A basic preoccupation in David’s work is to honestly portray the lives and livelihoods of excluded communities - individuals and groups rarely noted as significant actors in contemporary society. These evocative documentary photographs and forceful oral histories raised conscience and consciousness about globalizing processes affecting American urban life throughout the country.”

Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, Associate Director, Creativity & Culture, The Rockefeller Foundation

 

 

More Than a Wall/Mas que un muro

Table of Contents

 

More Than a Wall - David Bacon on the history of this work

Preface
 - Don Bartletti, 
Pulitzer-prize photographer for the Los Angeles Times

Introduction
 - Luis Escala Rabadán and Guillermo Alonso

 

Part One: The Wall


Bars, crosses and graves

They called us “Baja Pollos”

41 Photographs

Deportados and their families


Sanctuary in front of the detention center

37 Photographs

 

Part Two: Border Rebellions


Up against the border bosses

The life of a maquiladora worker

My youth has passed me by

People are tired of the wages


39 Photographs

 

Communities of Resistance

We were going to have real change

39 Photographs

Indigenous migrants rise up

We paid a price to confront racism

40 Photographs


Kids in the fields, parents on strike

Why kids don’t come to school

What kind of society is this? We produce all of society

51 Photographs

 

Part Three: In the Desierto del Diablo

Neoliberalism’s cost - the mine and the river

Becoming a luchadora social


It was the union that demanded protections

We had to go to work on the other side

38 Photographs

Communities in the desert


The legacy of Joaquin Murrieta

23 Photographs

 

Part Four: North of the Wall


Living poor, working and breathing the dust

I never imagined we would suffer this way


We are just looking to make a living


53 Photographs

 

Afterword: A journey through images - Alberto del Castillo Troncoso

 

 

David Bacon is a California-based writer and photographer. He is the author of several books about migration: The Children of NAFTA, Communities Without Borders, Illegal People – How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants, and The Right to Stay Home, and In the Fields of the North / En los Campos del Norte. His latest book is More Than a Wall/Mas que un muro, Colegio de la Frontera Norte (Tijuana).

 

Bacon was a factory worker and union organizer for two decades with the United Farm Workers, the International Ladies Garment Workers and other unions. Today he documents the changing conditions in the workforce, the impact of the global economy, war and migration, and the struggle for human rights. His photography has been exhibited in the U.S. Mexico and Europe, and his articles and photoessays have been published widely.

 

The photography archive of David Bacon was acquired by the Special Collections of the Green Library at Stanford University in 2019.