BIDEN IS PAYING GROWERS TO REPLACE FARMWORKERS WITH BRACERO CONTRACT LABOR

BIDEN IS PAYING GROWERS TO REPLACE FARMWORKERS WITH BRACERO CONTRACT LABOR
By David Bacon
Truthout, 12/21/23
https://truthout.org/articles/biden-is-paying-growers-to-replace-farmworkers-with-bracero-contract-labor/

 

Farmworkers brought to the U.S. in the H-2A visa program harvest melons early in the morning in a field near Firebaugh, in California's San Joaquin Valley. Photo: David Bacon


On September 22, 2023, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced it would begin paying growers to use the notorious H-2A contract foreign labor (or guestworker) program. Tapping into $65 million from the American Rescue Act, the USDA will pay between $25,000 and $2 million per application to defray the expenses of recruiting migrant workers from three Central American countries - Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador - transporting them to the U.S., housing and feeding them while they're here, and even subsidizing part of their wages. Labor contractors, who compete with each other to sell migrant farm labor to growers at low wages, will be eligible as well as growers themselves.

The H-2A program is the modern version of the old bracero scheme, under which growers brought Mexicans to work in U.S. fields from 1942 to 1964. Workers had to pay bribes to come, were kept separate from the local workforce, and deported if they protested or went on strike. Because of widespread abuse of the workers who came through the program, and growers' use of bracero labor to prevent farmworkers from organizing, the program was abolished - one of the main achievements of the Chicano civil rights movement. But even at its height, the U.S. government never actually paid growers to bring in workers. Now, the Biden administration is doing just that.

The H-2A program allows growers to recruit workers, who today mostly come from Mexico. They can and do discriminate, hiring almost entirely young men and then pressuring them with production quotas to work as fast as possible. Workers have an H-2A visa, which allows them to stay only for the length of their contract - less than a year - and they cannot legally work for anyone other than the grower or labor contractor who recruits them. They can be fired for any reason, from protesting to working too slowly, and once they are terminated, they lose their visa and must leave the country. Recruiters maintain blacklists of workers fired for those reasons, and especially for striking and organizing, refusing to rehire them in future seasons.

Although the bracero program had ended in 1965, the H-2A visa category reestablished a contract labor program, in the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. The program remained relatively small until it began to mushroom during the Bush and Obama administrations. The Biden administration is now expanding it even further by subsidizing growers who use it.

The Biden administration's purpose for its subsidy program, called the Farm Labor Stabilization and Protection Pilot Program (FLSPPP), is political. In announcing it, the USDA lists three goals. The first, "addressing current labor shortages in agriculture," means not just giving growers a government-sponsored labor recruitment system, but even paying them to use it. While growers complain about labor shortages, unemployment in farmworker communities is higher than in urban areas. Agribusiness has been intent, however, on keeping wages extremely low. Many growers were Donald Trump supporters, and the rural areas of California and Washington State are still littered with old Trump signs from the 2020 campaign. But hope dies hard. The Biden campaign would welcome whatever support it can get from agribusiness in the tight 2024 election to come.

Samantha Power, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, held a meeting with growers at the USDA in September 2022. She thanked them for working with the administration on "a critical priority - expanding the pool of H-2A farmworkers from Central America, specifically from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras." "We have got your back," she promised them. "We are committed to helping maintain a strong pipeline of experienced farmworkers to support you."

The second stated goal of the pilot program is to "reduce irregular migration from Northern Central America through the expansion of regular pathways." As Republicans attack the president for being "soft" on immigration, the Biden administration hopes to forestall caravans arriving at the border by channeling thousands of potential migrants into work visa programs. The FLSPPP does nothing to change the conditions that produce migration, nor does it allow migrants to access the asylum system and become U.S. residents. In fact, it is no coincidence that a work visa program is being unveiled as Biden negotiates with Republicans over measures to make the asylum process basically unavailable to those same migrants fleeing poverty and repression.

The third goal, "improving the working conditions for all farmworkers," is political theater. Applicants for subsidies under the pilot program are required to provide H-2A workers with living wages, overtime pay, workers' rights training, health and safety protections, and no retaliation if they try to organize a union. These protections and benefits - in many cases, simply the base legal requirement - don't even exist on paper for almost all farmworkers who are already living in the U.S. And because, according to the National Agricultural Workers Survey, about 44 percent of all farmworkers are undocumented, it's difficult for them to use what legal protections exist. However, instead of pushing for immigration reform that would provide them with legal status, the Biden administration is helping growers bring in H-2A workers to replace them.

With weak enforcement on the ground, it's unlikely that H-2A workers would get these benefits either. Violations of the rights and minimum standards for both H-2A and resident farmworkers are endemic in U.S. agriculture. The program contains no funding for even a minimal increase in Department of Labor (DoL) investigations of existing violations, much less those to come.

The proposal shocked many farmworker advocates and organizers. A number of them sent a letter of protest to the Biden administration, which I also signed as a fellow of the Oakland Institute. "As farmers, farmworkers, and their advocates, we are writing to express our indignation that USDA is committing $65 million of public money to pay farm employers, including Farm Labor Contractors, to raise wages, improve housing or other adjustments for H-2A workers before making any significant changes in the conditions of the millions of farmworkers already in this country," the letter read.

Documentation of worker abuse in the H-2A program goes back decades, and many farmworker advocates and unions doubt it can be reformed. "Because of its record of abuse of both H-2A workers and local farmworkers," the protest letter stated, "we have called for the abolition of the H-2A program for many years." Sarait Martinez, director of the Binational Center for Oaxacan Indigenous Development, which organizes farmworkers against wage theft and other abuse, told Truthout, "This program pits resident farmworkers against contract workers recruited by growers, and makes it impossible to end the poverty in farmworker communities, treating it as normal and unalterable."

At the same time that USDA is handing out subsidies, the enforcement system that should protect farmworkers from wage theft, illegal wages, and other violations of workplace standards and rights is in freefall. A 2023 study by the Economic Policy Institute found that investigations by the Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division (WHD) have plummeted by over 60 percent - from a high of 2,431 in 2000 to only 879 in 2022. The department has only 810 investigators for the nation's 164.3 million workers, or one inspector per 202,824 workers. As a result, the DoL only investigates fewer than 1 out of every 100 agricultural employers each year, although, notes the study, "when WHD does investigate an agricultural employer, 70 percent of the time, WHD detects wage and hour violations."

From 2000 to 2022, violations of the H-2A visa program accounted for roughly half of the few cases in which employers were forced to pay back wages and civil penalties, rising to nearly three-fourths during the Biden administration. Because enforcement is weak, cases of employers and labor contractors using H-2A workers to replace local workers, and cheating those H-2A workers, are multiplying.

One example of cheating occurred with notorious labor violator Sierra del Tigre Farms in Santa Maria, California. In September 2023, more than 100 workers were terminated before their work contracts had ended and told to go back to Mexico. The company then refused to pay them the legally required wages they would have earned. Its alter ego, Savino Farms, had already been fined for the same violation four years earlier, an indication that the profits of labor violations outweigh the small penalties.

One worker, Felipe Ramos, was owed more than $2,600. "It was very hard," he remembers. "I have a wife and baby girl, and they survive because I send money home every week. Everyone else was like that too. The company had problems finding buyers, and too many workers." In fall 2023, Rancho Nuevo Harvesting, Inc., another labor contractor, was forced by the Department of Labor to pay $1 million in penalties and back wages to workers it had cheated in a similar case. The frequency and seriousness of these cases in one relatively small valley alone indicate that the problems with the program are fundamental, structural and widespread.

As the USDA "pilot" subsidy program is being rolled out, the U.S. Department of Labor has proposed a set of reforms it says may reduce the long-documented abuse of H-2A farmworkers. Yet even in the published text of the proposed reforms, the DoL staff who drafted it summarize the structural reasons that make the impact of reforms so doubtful:

Over the past decade, use of the H-2A program has grown dramatically while overall agricultural employment in the United States has remained stable, meaning that fewer domestic workers are employed as farmworkers. ... Some of the characteristics of the H-2A program, including the temporary nature of the work, frequent geographic isolation of the workers, and dependency on a single employer, create a vulnerable population of workers for whom it is uniquely difficult to advocate or organize to seek better working conditions. ... This lack of sufficient protections adversely affects the ability of domestic workers to advocate for acceptable working conditions, leading to reduced worker bargaining power and, ultimately, deterioration of working conditions in agricultural employment.

The existing local farmworker workforce suffers from the conditions the Department of Labor describes. In another wage theft claim in July 2023, a group of resident workers charged that high-end winery J. Lohr conspired with a group of labor contractors to pay less than the minimum wage, while hiding records of the violation. The Binational Center for Indigenous Community Development, which brought the suit, has fought five similar cases in the last year.

Instead of spending its limited resources to protect and advance the wages and job rights of the farmworkers who live and work in the U.S. (68 percent of whom are immigrants themselves), the Biden administration is making it more attractive for growers to bring in guest workers to replace them. This gives growers a workforce that is easier to control, and who leave the country when the work is done. It continues a policy that extends back through the Trump, Obama, Bush and Clinton presidencies.

About 2 million workers labor in U.S. fields. Last year, the Department of Labor gave growers permission to bring 371,619 H-2A workers - or about a sixth of the entire U.S. farm labor workforce - an increase from 98,813 in 2012. Employing such a large quantity of H-2A labor cannot be done, as the DoL admits, without displacing domestic workers, who continue to endure extensive wage theft and an average family income of $20,000 per year.

Employers who hire local workers are ineligible for the pilot program subsidies unless they recruit H-2A workers - essentially bribing them to use H-2A workers to replace residents. There is no requirement from the USDA that employers of local workers implement any of the pilot program's conditions, and no additional resources are destined for defending the existing farmworker workforce. This will directly hit farmworker families and communities across the country.

The Biden administration's political calculations could prove disastrous as well. By doubling down on the program, it is essentially telling farmworkers and their advocates, in an election year, that the administration is solely concerned with the welfare of growers. Yet almost all farmworker unions and communities campaigned heavily against Trump in 2020. They were often Biden's main support in rural areas where growers were solidly in the Republican camp.

"By implementing this pilot program, the Department of Agriculture has failed miserably to engage with us or hear our arguments," the protest letter concluded. "We call upon USDA to cancel it and redirect the $65 million to a campaign to rebuild the domestic farm labor force."

OAXACANS CELEBRATE 30 YEARS OF ORGANIZING

OAXACANS CELEBRATE 30 YEARS OF ORGANIZING
Photographs by David Bacon

 

    On December 1st the Centro Binacional de Desarrollo Indigena Oaxaqueña (the Binational Center for Oaxacan Indigenous Development) celebrated its 30th anniversary.  Dancers, musicians, gigantes and diablos led several hundred indigenous Oaxacan families, together with a handful of community supporters, as their procession made its way out of the Hall of Industry, and then through the Fresno County Fairgrounds.
    The Centro is the sister organization of the Frente Indigena de Organzaciones Binacionales (Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations).  Both were established in the early 1990s, and have chapters and offices throughout the communities in rural California where Oaxacan migrants have settled.  
    Thirty years ago few could have predicted the growth in the political presence of California's Oaxacan community. Today dozens of people staff four CBDIO offices, speaking seven indigenous Mexican languages. Building that base through those years helped the community survive when the pandemic hit.  CBDIO and FIOB activists distributed food to keep people eating, brought them to testing centers, and helped provide vaccines and knowledge of their rights as essential workers that saved lives.
    In these photographs Oaxacan community activists show their deep roots - the culture of small indigenous towns in Mexico has been reproduced and is celebrated in California, two thousand miles north.  In the quotes below leaders of FIOB and CBDIO explain the context of this work and its origins.  The late Rufino Dominguez Santos was a co-founder of both FIOB and CBDIO, together with Gaspar Rivera Salgado, director of the Center for Mexican Studies at UCLA.  Oralia Maceda, who heads the CBDIO office in Fresno, has been an organizer with FIOB for many years.
    To see the full selection of photographs, click here:  https://www.flickr.com/photos/56646659@N05/albums/72177720313126509

 

 

    Indigenous Oaxaqueños understand the need for community and organization. When people migrate from a community in Oaxaca, in the new places where they settle they form a committee comprised of people from their hometown.  They are united and live near one another.  This is a tradition they don't lose, wherever they go.
    Beyond organizing and teaching our rights, we try to save our language. Even though 500 years have passed since the Spanish conquest, we still speak it.  We are preserving our way of dancing, and rescuing our lost beliefs -- that nature is something sacred for us, just as it was for our ancestors.
    - Rufino Dominguez Santos - Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006)
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801473074/communities-without-borders/#bookTabs=1

 

 

    The labor of migrants in the U.S. has been used throughout its history.  They tell us to come work, and then when there's an economic crisis, we're blamed for it.  This policy of attacking migrants has never stopped in the United States.  They accuse us of robbing other people's jobs, and our rights are not respected.
    But neither Republican nor Democratic administrations have acted to pass legislation to legalize migrants, and this is the solution to the problem.  They've done nothing.  Instead, we've seen a policy of deporting migrants, of imprisoning them unjustly.  This doesn't accomplish anything.  We feel like we're shouting at a wall because we can't change any of this.  
    - Rufino Dominguez Santos - The Right to Stay Home:  How US Policy Drives Mexican Migration  (Beacon Press, 2013)
http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2328

 

 

    At first there were no women involved in FIOB.  Rufino asked me to share my experiences in Oaxaca, and we started going to different cities - Fresno, Selma, Santa Maria, and Santa Rosa.  Once we had a women's conference, but there were more men than women.  We encouraged them to bring their wives since it is important for all people to know their rights.
    Today, women sometimes participate more than men.  The biggest obstacle for women is the lack of time.  They have to work in the fields, and take care of their families.  They don't have childcare.  When they come to meetings they worry about their kids and get distracted.  Transportation is much more difficult here. In Oaxaca I can take a bus anywhere.  Here there is no transportation in rural areas.
    I believe men have to be more conscious of women's needs, so they can participate.  But it is women's responsibility to find out how and get involved.  I told my mom to not to ask me again to quit because it would be the same as if I asked her stop going to church. I told them, this is my life and I like it here.  My family got the message.
    - Oralia Maceda - Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006)
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801473074/communities-without-borders/#bookTabs=1

 

 

    The parallel process of long-term settlement and geographic concentration has led to the creation of a "critical mass" of indigenous Oaxacans, especially in California ... Their collective initiatives draw on ancestral cultural legacies to build new branches of their home communities.  
    Their public expressions range from building civic-political organizations to the public celebration of religious holidays, basketball tournaments involving dozens of teams, the regular mass celebration of traditional Oaxacan music and dance festivals such as the Guelaguetza, and the formation of village-based bands, some of which return to play in their hometown fiestas.
    - Gaspar Rivera Salgado and Jonathan Fox - Indigenous Mexican Migrants in the United States (UCSD, 2004) https://www.academia.edu/812305/Indigenous_Mexican_MIgrants_in_the_United_States

 

 

    The implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement devastated the local economies of Indigenous communities.  Because they depended on the production of corn and other commodities, when the treaty allowed U.S. corporations to dump corn on the Mexican market it forced people in those communities to migrate. Once in the U.S., those uprooted from communities where they'd lived for generations faced exclusion economically, socially and politically, both as migrants and as Indigenous people.
      The multi-billion-dollar agriculture industry in California is based on cheap labor and the exploitation of farmworkers. Agricultural work is seasonal, and  farmworkers employed on a seasonal basis earn an average annual income of $18,000, making it extremely hard for them to sustain their families.
      Yet despite the essential nature of their work, undocumented workers still have no social net programs helping them survive during the offseason period, and were excluded from the Federal pandemic assistance bills. Because of their undocumented status, they can't apply to unemployment or other supplemental income, causing a long-term effect impact on their children and families.  
    Farmworkers need a path to citizenship as their lack of immigration status makes them vulnerable in the workplace and the community. The global COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated that inequality. Farmworkers were called essential, but that didn't translate into benefits. Instead, the COVID-19 Farmworker Study found they were systematically excluded.
    The Central Valley has a long history of farmworker resistance.  Although farmworkers have the right to organize, there is still a huge power imbalance between workers and their employers.  As they struggle to live, big companies now seek to increase their exploitation by expanding the H-2A temporary worker program. Farmworkers will survive and thrive despite this and other barriers, but the government has a responsibility to respond to their needs and humanity, not just grower complaints of a labor shortage.
    As we struggle to heal from the pandemic and its impacts, we need to honor indigenous farmworkers with policies that will make their lives better.
    - Sarait Martinez, director of the Centro Binacional de Desarrollo Indigena Oaxaqueña, Article for Arte Americas accompanying the exhibit, "Boom Oaxaca" - https://boomoaxaca.com/

 

 

 

 

RIDING SPANISH SUBWAYS

RIDING SPANISH SUBWAYS

Photographs by David Bacon

 

Descending the long escalator into Madrid's Sol metro station, I try to imagine what it was like during the Civil War.  Even this far undergroound, the boom of howitzers, the howling sirens and the earth shaking under the bombs had to have been terrifying. 

 

Like so many European metro stations, this one holds memories of war.  Moscow and London both endured the rain of exploding terror from the Nazi Luftwaffe, while below people slept on station platforms to escape it.  But before they struck those two cities, from 1936 to 1939, Nazi planes made Madrid the target for the world's first bombing of a civilian population. 

 

Madrileños held off the onslaught of Franco's fascist armies for three years.  They found shelter from the bombs in the 32 stations already built on the metro's three lines by the time the war started.  Hundreds of those who perished under the fascist assault were taken in subway cars to graveyards outside of the city in trains nicknamed the "metro of the dead." 

 

Barcelona's metro started operation just five years after Madrid's, in 1924.  Its metro stations provided the shelter from March 16-18, when Mussolini personally ordered Italian bombers to flatten the city.  In twelve raids over those three days 979 people died.  Over 200 raids followed and three times as many lost their lives.

 

I didn't expect Barcelona's metro stations to be halls of memory, but you can take the subway to the Barceloneta station.  There, in the city museum along the waterfront a few blocks away, the Civil War is not forgotten. Old photographs honor the Catalan independence leaders executed by Franco after the Republic fell. 

 

You might think that after Franco finally died, and fascists no longer controlled Spain, the cities might have painted murals in the metro stations.  There they might provide a new generation a vision of their own heroic, bitter history.  There are none, however - a strange and disturbing absence.

 

You may not see much of the past in the metro stations, but you do see the people of these cities as they are now.  The metro is full of working people and students.  It's not a system for the rich, who have redesigned cities for the convenience of cars and individual means of transport.  Subways are collective, and they are cheap.

 

The Madrid and Barcelona metros go everywhere.  Their many lines are the cities' veins and arteries and people their bloodstream. Madrid has 13 with 276 stations, and Barcelona's 8 lines stop at 165. 

 

If, like me, you look a little lost at first trying to figure out the ticket machine, a metro worker will usually appear at your shoulder, explaining the cheapest way to buy your fares.  They'll also warn you about the regulations.  It's warm in the stations and on the trains, so young people often show some skin, but I still wonder what inspired one prohibition. "Travelling without footwear or without covering the torso or lower part of the body" is a serious violation,

 

Today metro systems have spread across the world.  Some 195 cities in 62 countries have one.  China has some of the biggest, and the most recent, with 278 lines in 45 cities.  The Shanghai metro alone, which opened in 1993, has 499 miles of track and provides 2.8 billion trips a year.

 

The Spanish trains look new as well, and the stations are clean and modern.  These photographs of the riders of today are a window into the present, showing the Spaniards as they pass under the ground to their work, recreating their cities every day.  Photographs taken today can't present the reality of what the metro endured, and how it must have appeared over 80 years ago.  But they do provide this vision of place and the people who inhabit it.  With imagination, the open a path into their history.

 

CAN PRESIDENT BIDEN'S EXECUTIVE ORDER DELIVER FOR CARE WORKERS?

CAN PRESIDENT BIDEN'S EXECUTIVE ORDER DELIVER FOR CARE WORKERS?
By David Bacon
Equal Times, 27 October 2023
https://www.equaltimes.org/in-a-sector-built-on-historic?var_mode=calcul

 

Honorata Nono (left) is a Filipina immigrant domestic worker and organiser. She takes care of Michiko Uchida in her home in San Francisco, California.  (Photo (c) David Bacon)

As the age of the US population continues to rise - and millions of people with disabilities, additional needs and children need care - so too does the country's insatiable demand for home healthcare and domestic workers. But years of underinvestment in the sector, and the chronic undervaluing of the important work carried out disproportionately by women of color (particularly those with an immigrant background) has left the sector in a perilous state.

It is a situation that has a deep and shameful history, rooted in the fact that enslaved African-American women were forced to provide unpaid household care for white families during the period of human chattel slavery that operated in the United States from its founding in 1776 until 1865. Following the abolition of slavery, the low wages and poor conditions of domestic work was sustained by a series of violent, racist laws known as 'Jim Crow'.

Against this backdrop, when it passed the US Congress in 1935, the National Labor Relations Act recognised the collective bargaining rights of US private sector workers and established a process to require employers to bargain with their unions. The law carried a political price, however. Racist senators and congressional representatives in the Democratic Party (known as Dixiecrats because they were all from the US South, or from 'Dixie') demanded exclusions. Domestic workers, who were still largely African-American women, would not be covered. Neither would farm workers, mostly Mexican and Filipino immigrants in that era.

The Fair Labor Standards Act, passed three years later, gave private sector workers the right to overtime pay and minimum wages. Again, domestic workers and farm workers were left out, at the insistence of Dixiecrats. It is no accident, therefore, that the labor rights and wages of both groups were held far below those of other workers in the decades that followed. Yet despite the exclusion, farm workers continued to organise. And in the last few decades, domestic workers have sought to end their exclusion as well.

Organising locally, nationally and globally

In California and other states, rising activism accompanied the increase of immigrant workers in the domestic worker labor force. According to labor historian Jennifer Guglielmo: "In the 1970s and 1980s, the domestic workforce began to change dramatically. African-American women moved out of domestic labor in large numbers and into clerical, sales, public sector, and professional jobs. Mexican-American women in the south-west also left domestic work for these jobs [...]. This shift led employers to hire more immigrant women from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia in much larger numbers." This wave of migration was in part the product of the displacement of families and communities in countries forced to adopt neoliberal structural adjustment policies and free trade agreements.

One of them, Cristina "Ate Bingbing" recalls, "My life started as a domestic worker when I decided to work abroad because my life was so difficult in the Philippines."  She recounts having to work despite the risk of COVID during the pandemic.  "I am being forced to choose between two very important things: your livelihood or your health. I am a single mom, and I support my daughter, who I haven't seen in years ever since I decided to leave the Philippines to look for work abroad. If something happens to me here, I have no idea what will happen to my family or when I will see my child again."

In the 1990s, immigrant domestic workers in urban centres began to organise community-based workers' centres. San Francisco's Mujeres Unidas y Activas started as a project of the Northern California Coalition for Immigrant Rights, for example, while the Colectiva de Mujeres was originally a women's centre within the city-sponsored Day Labor Program. In the early 2000s they joined, first with Bay Area organisations like Filipinos for Affirmative Action, and then with Southern California organisations like the Coalition for Human Rights in Los Angeles and the Filipino Workers Center, to form a statewide network. This process paralleled others in New York and other states. In 2007, five California organisations joined six from New York and one from Maryland to form the National Domestic Workers Coalition.  

Just a few years later it played a key role in the adoption of a landmark international labor standard for domestic workers in 2011, International Labor Organization Convention 189 on Decent Work for Domestic Workers, which recognised for the first time the right to minimum working standards for domestic workers.  Following a campaign by an alliance of trade unions and domestic worker organisations, C189 has since been ratified by 36 countries.  The United States, however, isn't among them.

When the California Domestic Worker Coalition put a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights on the state legislature's agenda in 2012, then-AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka recognised the historic justice of their demands. "It's not right that domestic workers should be excluded from overtime pay laws," he told a crowd in Washington DC. "It's time for that to end. It's not right that domestic workers are excluded from collective bargaining laws. It's time for that to end. Domestic workers' rights are civil rights. Domestic workers' rights are human rights."

Trumka responded to the stories he was hearing from workers who'd come to push for the bill's promise of racial and labor equity. Teresita Gao-Ay, a domestic worker from San Diego, told him she'd been a caregiver since 1986, working from 7am to 9pm. "I had to do everything from cooking, cleaning the whole house, laundry that had to be pressed and folded, including sheets, gardening and caring for the dog. And I had to do this for the whole family, not just for the client I was taking care of. But how can you say no? I was living in their house. Plus, they said they'd call the police if I didn't do as they asked. Then, when I was injured on the job, no one paid me for the days I had to take off to recover."

"Care workers deserve to make a decent living"

The Covid-19 pandemic brought the plight of care providers into sharp focus everywhere, but in the US, where resources in the care sector were already stretched thin, the situation has worsened as a result of thousands of experienced care workers either leaving the sector or losing their lives after contracting Covid. According to the AFL-CIO: "Care prices have also skyrocketed, straining working families and forcing them to spend a significant portion of their income on services."

When President Joe Biden issued an executive order in April this year, seeking to use the administrative power of the federal government to raise domestic, home care and child care worker wages and make the care they provide to working families more affordable, he implicitly recognised the historic injustice. "Care workers deserve to make a decent living, and that's a fight I'm willing to have," he declared.  "No one should have to choose between caring for the parents who raised them, the children who depend on them, or the paycheque they rely on to take care of both."

The executive order contains a number of directives to different parts of the federal government, covering the programs they administer. The Department of Health and Human Services, for instance, was told to consider actions to reduce or eliminate families' co-payments for childcare. Other agencies were directed to identify which of their grant programs can support childcare and long-term care for individuals working on federal projects. The order calls for increasing the pay of Head Start teachers and childcare providers.  Head Start is the main Federally and state funded program for early childhood education, for pre-school age children.

The order seeks to ensure there are enough home care workers to provide care to seniors and people with disabilities enrolled in Medicaid, which provides free or low-cost health coverage to low-income families and individuals. It proposes to set minimum staffing standards for nursing homes, as well as conditioning a portion of Medicare payments on how well a nursing home retains workers. "This will be the first time that we'll have a care standard," explains Mia Dell, deputy director for advocacy at the AFL-CIO.

This development also aligns with demands from the international labor movement for greater investment in care to ensure equitable access to quality public care and health services. "It advances the social equity goal of the executive order, because the nursing homes with the worst history are those serving low-income communities of color." Better staffing standards and pay would also benefit the workers of color and women making up most of that workforce, another equity component of the order, Dell says.

The President's statement announcing the executive order highlighted the budget proposals intended to advance these goals. The American Rescue Plan, which provided funding to overcome the impact of the pandemic, contained over US$60 billion for care issues. The administration statement credited that funding with saving the country's system of private childcare providers. The Biden Budget, if adopted, would include US$150 billion over ten years to expand Medicaid home services, and proposes US$600 billion over ten years for expanded childcare and preschool programs. However, it faces extreme Republican opposition in Congress.

Historic exclusion

Today, the consequences of the historic exclusion of domestic workers run deep. In 2022 the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) issued a report, the Domestic Workers Chartbook, that outlines the basic living and working conditions for the 2.2 million domestic workers in the United States. That number is expected to grow rapidly - more than three times as fast as employment in other occupations - because the ageing of the US population and workforce is expanding the number of people needing care.

The real size of the workforce is likely larger, the EPI says, because many domestic workers are paid informally, making them less likely to report employment and earnings. In addition, over a third of domestic workers are immigrants, many of whom lack legal immigration status, and many fear the consequences of contact with the authorities, including participation in national surveys.

The lower pay level for domestic work reflects the racist and sexist structure of the US workforce, where people of color, immigrants and women are paid less than average. A majority of domestic workers are Black, Hispanic, or Asian-American and Pacific Islander women. Over 40 per cent are older than 50.  According to the EPI: "The typical domestic worker is paid US$13.79 per hour, including overtime, tips, and commissions - 36.6 per cent less than the typical non-domestic worker, who is paid US$21.76. The typical domestic worker's annual earnings are just two-fifths of a typical worker in another occupation." As a result, "domestic workers are much more likely than other workers to be living in poverty," the report concludes.

The human dimension of these statistics was described by Honor Nono, a Filipina domestic worker in San Francisco. "The work of a caregiver is no joke," she told a 2016 rally supporting the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. Nono spoke as a member of the Pilipino Association of Workers and Immigrants, originally set up by Filipinos for Affirmative Action. "Clients vary, they may be kind or unkind, happy or grouchy, difficult or easy, even dangerous. You can break your back, your neck, arms, or shoulder assisting your clients, transferring them from bed to wheelchair or vice versa. That is why we say the caregiving job is 3D: difficult, dirty and dangerous. Some caregivers do not get the minimum wage, workers compensation or paid overtime."

Nono has been an organiser of other care givers. "We make all other work possible," she told the rally, "and we work not only with our hands but with our hearts, because the people under our care also deserve love, respect and dignity. We are always in a battle, physically, and emotionally."

Build Back Better

Passing a Domestic Worker Bill of Rights in California has been part of a national strategy to pass similar legislation elsewhere. To date, ten states and three cities have adopted it in some form, and they often include guarantees of paid time off, overtime, a requirement for written agreements and protection against discrimination. In California, the first bills originally proposed guarantees of eight hours of sleep for live-in workers, the right to use kitchen facilities to cook their meals, sick pay and vacations, cost-of-living raises and advance notice of terminations.

The final Bill of Rights was more limited, but the original demands reflect a broad agenda of goals that domestic workers seek to win over time. In Seattle, for example, a more recent bill, passed last year, brings domestic workers under the state's minimum wage law and qualifies them for unemployment insurance. A Domestic Workers Standards Board, with worker, employer and community representatives, will make further recommendations for improving working conditions.

When the Biden administration came into office in January 2021, many of these goals were incorporated into the Build Back Better bill, which included many elements of the Bill of Rights adopted by several states.  Other parts of Build Back Better would have made it possible for undocumented immigrants, including thousands of domestic workers, to gain legal immigration status. In negotiations with conservative Democrats, however, Build Back Better was pulled off the Democrats' agenda, and only a bill funding infrastructure improvements was passed. That was a blow to domestic workers and immigrant rights advocates, among many others.  

The inclusion of the domestic worker agenda in Build Back Better, and then the executive order in April, were the fruits of years fighting against their original exclusion from basic labor legislation.  "The Covid pandemic showed the urgency of the need and created a unique opportunity for making systemic reforms," says Dell. "Making care available to all workers was included in Build Back Better. When it was knocked out and we could no longer pass those reforms, the executive order made sense."

Nevertheless, it is difficult to quantify the concrete impact of the executive order, in terms of the number of people it enables to access care and the changes in the economic situation of care givers. "Basically, the administration was pulling every lever it could. In reality, there are only so many levers," Dell says.

One major achievement of the statewide strategy was legislation in California that gave unions the right to bargain over wages paid to about 500,000 home care workers who provide care to people receiving support from the state's In-Home Supportive Service Program. Two unions - the United Domestic Workers, a local affiliate of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Workers organized in 1977, and Local 2015 of the Service Workers International Union - were then able to negotiate wages for workers on a county-by-county basis. That led to substantial raises, and a similar system was later achieved for childcare workers. Today UDW represents 98,000 workers, and Local 2015 represents about 450,000. The number of actual union members, however, is not publicly available, however.

The effort continues to pass a national Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, although that path is effectively blocked without a change in the political balance of forces in the Congress. In addition, in 2014 the rightwing-dominated US Supreme Court held that home care workers couldn't be required to pay union dues, and weren't actually workers at all, but 'caregivers' who don't come under labor law and can't be considered state employees. In the meantime, state-by-state efforts are continuing. They make progress in states where domestic workers and care recipients are well-organised, and where progressive Democrats have legislative majorities and governors. "The state-based model has allowed us to organise at scale, but there are not enough states," Dell warns.

The elections of 2024 could change that calculation, but whatever happens, Dell says that unions will keep fighting for decent work for care workers: "We must make sure that workers are paid a living wage, with access to benefits, and the opportunity to join a union."


Each year, 29 October marks the International Day for Care, as part of the call for greater public investment in a resilient and inclusive care economy. For more information, you can visit the International Trade Union Confederation's online care portal.  This article was copublished with Equal Times, with support from the Ford Foundation
 

FIGHTING FOR THE PUBLIC SPACE - Mexico City Streets

MEMORY AND REVOLUTION IN MEXICO CITY - Mexico City Streets
Social movements claim public space in one of the largest cities in the Americas.
by David Bacon
The Progressive - October 9, 2023
https://progressive.org/latest/memory-and-revolution-mexico-city-bacon-231009/

 

Every day Mexico City taxi drivers, trying to navigate the city's intense traffic, tune into the morning's radio announcements of marches and demonstrations.  There are a lot of them - colorful, loud and insistent.  Over the years it has been easy to step out of the Maria Cristina in the morning, walk a block up to the Reforma, and join them with my camera. Much of the political life of the city is found in the street.  Its social movements use the public space often as a reminder of earlier protests and actions that have given form to Mexican politics.  

Those politics reflect an interplay of street protest and a more formal electoral process.  Today, following a new more open procedure for choosing presidential candidates (itself in part a product of movements in the streets), Mexico's governing party Morena (the Movement for National Regeneration), has selected as its standard bearer the city's mayor, Claudia Sheinbaum.  Given the popularity of Morena and its founder, current President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, she is virtually certain to be elected.

She is an engineer, a skilled politician, the daughter of a leftist family, and of course a woman.  If elected, she will be Mexico's first female head of state, joining a growing number of women who head or have headed governments throughout the Americas (notably not including the United States).  But it's not just women in office that is changing politics.  The country's Supreme Court recently struck down the prohibition of abortion.  Women have been protesting abuse and gender-based violence for years, especially since the disappearance of scores of young maquiladora workers in Juarez, on the Mexico/U.S. border.

It's no surprise, therefore, to see that women have taken over a traffic island in the middle of the Reforma to highlight these attacks and demand justice.  A metal, violet-colored silhouette of a woman with her fist in the air rises above the corrugated walls of a kiosk.  The surfaces have first been painted back, and then the names of women murdered and subjected to repression have been hand lettered in white.

The number of names is extraordinary.  Each panel of the kiosk emphasizes repression directed towards a particular group.  One displays the names of women journalists.  Another lists indigenous activists.  It includes Bety Cariño, ambushed and killed as she brought support to an autonomous Triqui town in Oaxaca, and Digna Ochoa, defender of the poor, shot in her Mexico City office.  A third panel memorializes the 49 children burned to death in the ABC nursery.

On paper banners hung on strings at the edge of the curb are the words of ordinary women, giving account of abuse:  "Because of fear, because of reprisals, because I was not protected," or "Because he was family, I was afraid of what they'd think of me, and when I told my mother, and she told his mother, they said I'd probably provoked him," or simply, "He scares me."

 

Further up the Reforma is another permanent memorial.  Not far from the guarded facade of the U.S. Embassy, and the buildings housing rich banks and government offices, is the Ayotzinapa encampment.

Nine years ago, students set out in commandeered busses from their teachers' training school in Guerrero to the annual march commemorating the death of hundreds of students in the city's Tlateloco Plaza in 1968.  Forty three Ayotzinapa students were seized and disappeared.  Through those nine years the investigation into the crime's authors has reached into the highest levels of the government, especially the armed forces.  While previous administrations tried to pretend the students were simply victims of a narcotics cartel, it has become clear that there were deep political reasons for their murder.  

The Ayotzinapa school itself has been the target of the Mexican right for its history of training rural teachers.  The school gave students a radical and Marxist analysis of their country, preparing them to be social organizers, even revolutionaries.  It followed the tradition of one of its best known professors, Lucio Cabañas, who took up arms against the Mexican government in the 1960s.  

Over the years since the 43 murders, new generations of Ayotzinapa student have kept up pressure on the government by coming to the capital every month.  They have built a permanent camp on the Reforma, with cabins and shelters for sleeping and space for meetings.  Surrounding it are silkscreened images of the disappeared students, strung in rows on the shelter's walls, facing the traffic.  This planton, or encampment, even boasts a small library, cared for by Martin, one of a group dedicated to maintaining the space.

On September 28 the families of the 43 disappeared lifted another planton they'd maintained in front of the Military Camp #1 in Mexico City, after a new report from the Commission for Truth and Access to Justice authored by Undersecretary for Human Rights Alejandro Encinas.  Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador stated, “We have not abandoned the case, we are going to continue investigating it for the mothers and the fathers, for justice and also for our convictions."  He gave a new order to the army to release files on the case it had withheld, including documentation of the personal involvement of past President Enrique Peña Nieto in covering up the crime.

Public space is contested space for protest movements in any city.  In some, any effort to create a permanent presence is greeted with fire hoses, arrests and worse.  Mexico City has its own history of trying to sweep social movements out of sight.  But a tradition of popular protest is equally strong, including the planton.  It has popular recognition, which the government must take into account.

 

 

Perhaps the Ayotzinapa encampment, and the Glorieta de las Mujeres que Luchan (the Roundabout of the Women in Struggle) are products of a certain political moment.  But perhaps they will become as much a part of the recognized life of the city as the Angel of Independence.  The column with its winged statue has towered over the Reforma since 1910, the first year of the Mexican Revolution.

The two occupations of public space mark their own watershed in Mexican politics, and that change, with or without memorials, will perhaps last decades as well.