RECYCLING WORKRS SAY "ENOUGH!"

RECYCLING WORKRS SAY "ENOUGH!"
By David Bacon
Working In These Times, 10/31/14
** http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/17306/recycling_workers_strike_temp_agency

SAN LEANDRO, CA-Within days of each other last week, two groups of recycling workers declared they'd had enough of what they see as regimes of indignity and discrimination. One group voted to unionize, and another, already union members, walked out on strike.

"They think we're insignificant people," declares striker Dinora Jordan. "They don't think we count and don't value our work. But we're the ones who find dead animals on the conveyor belts. All the time we have to watch for hypodermic needles. If they don't learn to respect us now, they never will."

Workers celebrate the union election victory at Alameda County Industries.

Jordan's employer is Waste Management, Inc. (WMI), a giant corporation that handles garbage and recycling throughout North America. In just the second quarter of 2014 WMI generated $3.56 billion in revenue and $210 million in profit, "an improvement in both our net cash provided by operations and our free cash flow," according to CEO David P. Steiner.

Shareholders received a 35-cent per share quarterly dividend, and the company used $600 million of its cash in a massive share buyback program. Two years ago Steiner himself was given 135,509 shares (worth $6.5 million) in a "performance" bonus, to add to the pile he already owns.

But at its San Leandro, California, facility, WMI has been unwilling to settle a new contract with Jordan's union, Local 6 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, for three years.

Last week, she and other members of the negotiating committee returned to the facility after another fruitless session. They called workers together to offer a report on the progress in bargaining-standard practice in Local 6. One supervisor agreed to the shop floor meeting, but another would not. The workers met anyway. Then the second supervisor told them to clock out and go home, a disciplinary measure that would at least dock the rest of the day's pay.

Strikers at the Waste Management recycling facility.

"That's when we finally said 'Enough!'" Jordan explains. "As a union, we support each other. If some of us can't work, then none of us will." They walked out on an unfair labor practice strike, and immediately met at the union hall and voted to strike.  That strike ended on October 30, after a week.

At another facility in the same city, workers at Alameda County Industries were equally angry. At the end of a late night vote count in a cavernous sorting bay, surrounded by bales of recycled paper and plastic, agents of the National Labor Relations Board unfolded the ballots in a union representation election.

When they announced that 85 percent had been cast for Local 6, workers began shouting "¡Viva La Union!" and dancing down the row of lockers.

Sorting trash is dangerous and dirty work. In 2012, two East Bay workers were killed in recycling facilities. With some notable exceptions, putting your hands into fast moving conveyor belts filled with cardboard and cans does not pay well-much less, for instance, than the jobs of the drivers who pick up the containers at the curb. And in the Bay Area, the sorting is done almost entirely by women of color, mostly immigrants from Mexico and Central America and African Americans.

Just after voting, in the ACI barn with pallets full of recycled waste.

This spring, recycling workers at Alameda County Industries, probably those with the worst conditions, began challenging their second-class status.   Not only did they become activists in a growing movement throughout the East Bay, but their protests galvanized public action to stop the firings of undocumented workers.

At ACI, garbage trucks with recycled trash pull in every minute, dumping their fragrant loads gathered on routes in Livermore, Alameda and San Leandro. These cities contract with the firm to process their trash. In the Bay Area, only one city, Berkeley, picks up its own garbage. All the rest sign contracts with private companies. And even Berkeley contracts recycling to an independent sorter.

ACI contracted with a temp agency, Select Staffing, to employ the workers on the lines. Sorters therefore have no health insurance, vacations or holidays. Wages are very low, even for recycling: After a small raise two years ago, sorters get $8.30 per hour on day shift and $8.50 at night.

A year ago, workers discovered this was an illegal wage. San Leandro passed a Living Wage Ordinance in 2007, mandating (in 2013) $14.17 per hour or $12.67 with health benefits. Last fall, some of the women on the lines received leaflets advertising a health and safety training for recycling workers put on by Local 6.

The union's organizing director Agustin Ramirez says, "When they told me what they were paid, I knew something was very wrong."

Ramirez put them in touch with a lawyer, who sent ACI and Select a letter stating workers' intention to file suit for back wages. In early February, 18 workers, including every person but one who'd signed, were told that Select had been audited by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) a year before. ICE, the company said, was questioning their immigration status.

Workers cheer after the vote total is announced at Alameda County Industries.

Instead of quietly disappearing, though, about half the sorters walked off the lines on February 27, protesting the impending firings. They were joined by faith leaders, members of Alameda County United for Immigrant Rights, and workers from other recycling facilities, including WMI. The next week, however, all eighteen accused of being undocumented were fired.

"Some of us have been there 14 years, so why now?" wondered sorter Ignacia Garcia.

Despite fear ignited by the firings and the so-called "silent" immigration raid, workers began to join the union. Within months, workers were wearing buttons and stickers up and down the sorting lines. At the same time, sorters went to city councils, denouncing the raid and illegal wages, asking councilmembers to put pressure on the company processing their trash.

By the time Local 6 asked for the election, ACI had stopped campaigning against the union in fear of alienating its city clients and had ended its relationship with the temp agency. In last week's balloting, only one worker voted for no union, while 49 voted for the ILWU.

Because cities give contracts for recycling services, they indirectly control how much money is available for workers' wages. That's taken the fight for more money and better conditions into city halls throughout the East Bay.

Waste Management, Inc., has the Oakland city garbage contract, and garbage truck drivers have been Teamster members for decades. When WMI took over Oakland's recycling contract in 1991, however, it signed an agreement with ILWU Local 6. Workers had voted for Local 6 on the recycling lines, at the big garbage dump in the Altamont Pass and even among the clerical workers in the company office.

At WMI, workers also faced immigration raids. In 1998, sorters at its San Leandro facility staged a wildcat work stoppage over safety issues, occupying the company's lunchroom. Three weeks later, immigration agents showed up, audited company records and eventually deported eight of them. And last year, three more workers were fired at WMI, accused of not having legal immigration status.

When Teamster drivers were locked out at WMI for more than a month in 2007 over company demands for concessions, Local 6 members respected their lines and didn't work. That was not reciprocated, however, when recyclers staged their walkouts over firings last year.

A striking ILWU member appeals to a driver to respect the picket line.

Last week the Teamsters told drivers to cross Local 6 lines again. One unidentified Teamster officer told journalist Darwin Bond-Graham that Local 6 had not asked for strike sanction.  "Our members can't just stop working," he said.  Local 6 officers say they have asked for sanction. Relations between the two unions grew even tenser when the Teamsters, which also represent drivers at Alameda County Industries, appeared on the ballot in the election for the recycling workers. It received nine votes.

Under the contract that expired three years ago, WMI sorters got $12.50-more than ACI, but a long way from San Francisco, where Teamster recyclers get $21 an hour. To get wages up, recycling workers in the East Bay organized a coalition to establish a new standard, the Campaign for Sustainable Recycling. Two dozen organizations belong to it in addition to the ILWU, including the Sierra Club, the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, Movement Generation, the Justice and Ecology Project, the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy and the Faith Alliance for a Moral Economy.

San Francisco, with a $21 per hour wage, charges garbage rates to customers of $34 per month. East Bay recyclers pay half that wage, but East Bay ratepayers still pay $28-30 for garbage, recycling included. The bulk of that money clearly isn't going to the workers.

Fremont became the test for the campaign's strategy of forcing cities to mandate wage increases. Last December the Fremont City Council passed a 32 cent rate increase with the condition that its recycler, BLT, agree to raises for workers. The union contract there now mandates $14.59 per hour for sorters this year, finally reaching $20.94 in 2019.

Oakland has followed, requiring wage increases for sorters as part of its new recycling contract. That contract was originally going entirely to California Waste Solutions, but after WMI threatened a suit and a ballot initiative, it recovered its half of the city's recycling business.

The new Local 6 contract that ended the strike yesterday follows the pattern laid out by the new Oakland city requirement on its recyclers.  Workers will get a signing bonus of $500 to $1500, depending on seniority, to compensate for the three years worked under the old contract.  They will all get an immediate raise of $1.48 per hour, and 50¢ more on New Years.  Then starting next July, wages will rise $1.39 per year until 2019, when the minimum wage for sorters will be $20.94.  The strikers at WMI ratified their new agreement by a vote of 111 to 6.

Waste Management strikers stop a truck.

Yet this strike was about much more than money.  Over the last week, workers from Alameda County Industries would come by the picket lines after their shift ended, to help the strikers.  While they also undoubtedly would like their wages to rise to this new standard, for both groups this was really a battle to end the second-class status of the sorters.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE BORDER WALL

IN THE SHADOW OF THE BORDER WALL

By David Bacon

New America Media, 9/24/14

http://newamericamedia.org/2014/09/in-the-shadow-of-the-border-wall.php

In downtown Tijuana, a huge concrete channel was built to house the Tijuana River.  The river rises in Sierra de Juarez in the south, and eventually crosses the border five miles before it reaches the beach.  Only a trickle of water, however, runs down the middle of this vast expanse of cement.  Instead, its walls house people.  Many have come up from the south, especially Oaxaca.  Some thought they might get jobs in a maquiladora factory, while others thought they might have some luck jumping the fence.

Juan Guerra cooks dinner in the camp.

 

Juan Guerra lives under one of the bridges that cross the river channel.  In their camp of stranded migrants he heats tortillas and a stew of vegetables, gathered from food thrown out by nearby restaurants catering to tourists.  Juan speaks Zapotec, an indigenous language of the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca.  Some in the camp speak Mixtec, another indigenous tongue, while others from Mexican states further north just speak Spanish.  "I'm proud that I speak my language," he says, "but people look down on me here.  Maybe it's because I'm from Oaxaca, or maybe it's just that I have no money or place to live."

Mexico is a country of young people.  Its median age is 26.7 and the average age of border crossers is even younger - 20 years old.  Guerra says he's 25, and the others living in the camp under the bridge look younger.  In the streets of Tijuana live hundreds of street children even younger than that. 

One man eats dinner while another climbs the channel wall to the camp.

I had a friend, Mario, who was a Tijuana cop.  He talked about the kids in a very matter-of-fact way.  "There are so many living on the street here," he said.   "Some are abandoned by their parents when they go across the border, or when they arrive in Tijuana from other parts of Mexico."  Once I drove with him through the honky-tonk area of downtown.  Some of the buildings at the bottom of Avenida de la Revolucion, as it gets close to the border, have broken boards and doorways on their front facing the street.  Small, dirt-paved alleyways weave through the blocks, where many street children live.  "They sleep in hotel rooms, under food carts, or in abandoned buildings during the day," he explained.

Next to the river's channel rise apartment houses for the luckier of Tijuana's working class residents.  These are the families who can pay enough rent to escape the dirt streets of the hillside barrios ringing the city.  In the trash bins behind the buildings, Luisa, a homeless woman, collected discarded plastic bottles.  She's doing the same thing homeless people do in San Diego, just a few miles north.  The border often seems a chasm separating wealth and poverty.  But the lives of people who have no home are basically the same, regardless of which side they live on.

Luisa finds plastic bottles in a bin behind an apartment house.

Mario had stories about street children that sounded like tales from Oliver Twist.  "Doña Lupe," he says, "has thirty three children.  She used to be a pollera [someone who guides people across the border].  Then she taught her kids to sell roses in the street in front of the clubs.  They'd surround a customer, and while they're asking him to buy roses, they've hidden a knife in the bunches.  Someone cuts the pocket of the pants of the customer, and their wallet falls out." 

Mario remembered the time when there was no fence on the border.  When he started he believed those crossing the border without papers were just criminals.  "I thought they deserved to be caught and punished because they were breaking the law," he said.  "But after a while, I began to understand that immigration and undocumented people exist in many countries.  After that, I began to look at myself as their protector, rather than as their enemy."

The wall.

Today no one can cross the border in Tijuana.  There are multiple fences, including one made of iron bars over twice the height of a person.  A concrete no-man's land on the U.S. side is lit by floodlights, and Border Patrol agents are omnipresent.  But there was a time, two and three decades ago, when people could still cross in Tijuana, hilariously dramatized in a famous scene in a Cheech and Chong movie.  Mario remembered a similar scene, but it wasn't as funny.

"Once the Grupo Beta squad [the Tijuana police group monitoring migrants] was called to a place where a lot of pollos [border crossers] had assembled to jump the fence," he recalled.  "A whole lot of them jumped over, and began to run.  The border patrol was about a hundred yards away.  There were two brothers among the pollos, and the migra got one.  After they had him, his brother began to throw rocks at the agents, to get them to let him go.  So then the migra began to chase the one throwing rocks.  He ran to the wall and began climbing back over into Mexico.  As his hand grabbed the top of the fence, and he was hanging there, the agents grabbed his legs and pulled him down.  They threw him down into the dirt, and one of the agents put his foot on his neck."

A camp in the Tijuana River channel.

There wasn't much love lost between the U.S. Border Patrol and Tijuana cops.  Border Patrol agents think the cops are all on the take from drug gangs, Mario said.  And the cops think the Border Patrol is filled with agents who look down on Mexicans.  "We criticize the U.S. government for sending army troops to patrol the border here, but the Mexican government sends troops to the border with Guatemala," he charged.  Once the Mexican government sent him there after the Guatemalan government asked the Mexican government to investigate complaints of beatings and rapes.  Mario said he found the crimes were committed by former police and border guards themselves. 

Mario's dead now, but I once asked him what he thought the border should be like.  "I've come to the conclusion that it's OK the way it is," he said.  "What would happen if our roles were reversed?  Lots of Americans live in Rosarito [half an hour south of the border], and have houses and jobs.  The government doesn't say anything because it thinks they're good for the economy.  But what would happen if the U.S. fell into the same kind of crisis we have now in Mexico, and millions of people wanted to come here?  We'd build a wall twice as tall as it is now."

Families at Playas de Tijuana.

In Tijuana the wall and the border are omnipresent facts -- taken for granted, yet a physical and social presence in each resident's life.  At Playas de Tijuana, going to the beach seems at first the same as anywhere.  Looking south along the sand families stand and sit in the sun and wade in the waves.  But looking north a 20-foot high barrier of iron posts marches into the Pacific, a wall whose other end terminates in another ocean entirely, 1,954 miles away.

Curious visitors go up to look between the bars, at the concrete barriers beyond, and then a similar stretch of sand that continues north to San Diego.  A little park -- Friendship Park -- welcomes families on the Mexican side, but the impenetrable wall (at least for humans) belies any visible sign of friendship with the U.S.   On the park's little platform and exercise bars, Jorge, a boxer, acts out his fantasy of the ring.  He moves through his exercise routine, from one stance to another.  They all seem to defy the border itself.

Jorge, the Tijuana boxer.

OAXACANS WANT THE RIGHT TO NOT MIGRATE

LETTER FROM MEXICO #3

Oaxacans Want the Right to Not Migrate

By David Bacon

The Progressive, web edition

http://www.progressive.org/news/2014/10/187898/oaxacans-want-right-not-migrate

OAXACA DE JUAREZ, MEXICO (10/20/14) -- For six weeks hundreds of teachers in the southern Mexico state of Oaxaca have been living in tents, in the capital city's main plaza, the zocalo.  Bonifacio Garcia, one of the protestors, declares, "We will stay here until the state Chamber of Deputies agrees that our education reform will move forward in all our schools." 

Teachers planton in the Zocalo, or main plaza, in Oaxaca.

Each week teachers from one of Oaxaca's regions take a turn at sleeping in the tents.  This is the week for the schools on the coast, including the communities of people whose ancestors were slaves.  Garcia comes from Santiago Tapextla, near Pinotepa Nacional, where most people trace part of their ancestry back to Africa. 

On the coast, family trees are very mixed.  Most also reveal other ancestors among the indigenous people who were here long before the Spanish conquerors arrived.  "Spaniards brought slaves with them from the Caribbean and Africa," Garcia explains. "After Mexico outlawed slavery in 1821 we became an autonomous community.  But in Mexico African people aren't considered an original people, the way indigenous people are.  We're still not really recognized, so we have to fight for our rights."  

Garcia is principal of a "telesecondaria" -- a secondary school in a remote area where part of the instruction is given through a national televised curriculum.  While he uses that TV program, he and his fellow teachers reject most of the other reforms Mexico's national government has attempted to impose.  Oaxacan teachers and their union, Section 22 of the National Union of Education Workers, say the Federal education reforms rely too heavily on standardized testing, and punish teachers for the low scores of their students. 

Teachers Bonifacio Garcia and Gabriel Vielma Monjaroz talk with another teacher in their encampment in the main plaza of Oaxaca.

Instead, Section 22 formulated its own education reform plan five years ago, the Program to Transform Education in Oaxaca (PTEO).  It seeks to develop an intensely cooperative relationship between teachers, students, parents and the surrounding community. Lulu, a young preschool teacher from Huatulco, further south along the coast, says, "I have a much closer relationship now to the parents of my children than we did before."

For Garcia, the central purpose of PTEO is to help students get a better education, especially those in rural areas who speak pre-Hispanic languages like Mixteco, Zapoteco or Triqui -- Oaxacans speak 23 indigenous tongues.  But education, he believes, should also provide an alternative to the out-migration that is devastating small farming communities. 

"I know the cost of migration very well, " he says.  "I lived for four years in Elgin, Illinois, working for an organization there that helped immigrants understand their rights.  So I know how hard life can be in the north.  Migration also hollows out our communities here.  If we want young people to stay, we have to have an alternative that is attractive to them.  That starts with education.  That's why our program to change the schools is so important, and why we're willing to sit here in the zocalo until the government agrees."

A group of preschool teachers from the coast in the teachers' planton.

Oaxaca has about 3.5 million people, who began leaving the state because of intense rural poverty in the 1970s.  At first people migrated to work on the industrial farms of northern Mexico.  But then indigenous Oaxacan towns, dependent on growing corn and other agricultural products, were hit hard by the North American Free Trade Agreement.  In 1990, before the agreement was implemented, about 527,000 people had already left.  A decade later that number had mushroomed to 663,000.

Beginning in the 1980s, Oaxacan migrants began crossing the border, first into California, and then dispersing into states all over the U.S.  By 2008 about 12.5 million Mexican migrants were living north of the border (up from 4.6 million in 1990) -- 9.4% of the population of Mexico.  But even in this huge wave, Oaxacans have been over-represented -- 19% of its people are migrants.

Rufino DomÆnguez, who heads the Oaxacan Institute for Attention to Migrants, estimates that there are about 500,000 indigenous people from Oaxaca in the U.S., 300,000 in California alone.  One result has been an explosion of Oaxacan culture in exile.  Currently, at least 16 Guelaguetzas (the annual festival that showcases the elaborate dances of Oaxaca's many regions) take place, not just in California (where there are 11), but also in Seattle WA, Poughkeepsie NY, Salem OR, Odessa TX, and Atlantic City NJ.

Two teachers in their encampment in the main plaza of Oaxaca.  Their banner says, "In these times, it is more dangerous to be a student than to be a criminal," which refers to the murder of students at the teachers' training college in Ayotzinapa.

Beautiful dances, however, are performed by communities that live on the economic margin.  Rick Mines, author of the 2010 Indigenous Farm Worker Study, says surveys reveal that among California╒s indigenous Mexican farm workers (about 120,000 people) a third earn minimum wage, while a third are paid illegal wages below that.  ╥The U.S. food system has long been dependent on the influx of an ever-changing, newly-arrived group of workers that sets the wages and working conditions at the entry level in the farm labor market,╙ he elaborates. 

California has a farm labor force of about 700,000 workers, so the day is not far off when indigenous Oaxacan migrants may make up a majority.  Indigenous people constituted 7% of Mexican migrants in 1991-3, the years just before NAFTA. In 2006-8, they made up 29%╤four times more.  The rock-bottom wages paid to this most recent wave of migrants sets the wage floor for all the other workers in California farm labor, keeping the labor costs of California growers low, and their profits high.

It was no surprise, therefore, that anger over discrimination, displacement, migration and poverty ran through many denunciations heard last week in Oaxaca at the triennial assembly of the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations (FIOB).  "We are not people who were 'discovered' by the Spaniards, the Americans or anyone else," thundered Romualdo Juan Gutierrez Cortez, FIOB's new binational coordinator.  "We are people in struggle!"

The newly elected binational coordinator of the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations (FIOB), Romualdo Juan Gutierrez Cortez.

Gutierrez is a teacher with a long political history in Oaxaca.  He was elected a decade ago to the state Chamber of Deputies, and after his term ended, was jailed in reprisal by the governor from Mexico's old ruling party, the Party of the Institutionalized Revolution.  When a teachers' strike spiraled into a virtual insurrection in 2006, the following governor put his name on a list of activists to be arrested yet again.  When the PRI lost the governorship for the first time in 70 years in 2010, Gutierrez went to work in the state's migrant assistance agency.

FIOB is a unique organization created in 1992 by both Oaxacan migrants in California, and by the communities in Oaxaca from which they come.  It has chapters in four California cities, in several towns in Baja California in north Mexico where Oaxacans work as migrants, and in many indigenous towns in Oaxaca itself.  Many FIOB activists are teachers because educators play such an important role in community life.  Now FIOB will be headed by two of them -- Gutierrez and Ezequiel Rosales, who led the union during the 2006 strike.

In 2010 both FIOB and the union supported the candidate who defeated the PRI -- Gabino Cue, the former mayor of Oaxaca's capital city.  That gave teachers enough political influence to insist that the Oaxaca Institute for Public Education, which administers the state╒s schools, begin implementing their PTEO reform.  It's been a fight, however.  Two years ago, Claudio Gonzçlez, one of Mexico's wealthiest and most powerful businessmen and head of a national group backing standardized testing, warned Governor CuÄ that he had to ╥break the hijacking of education by Secciùn 22╙.  He called the teachers ╥tyrants.╙  Under pressure from the PRI administration in Mexico City, Oaxaca's state government is backtracking on its commitment to PTEO.  That's the reason for the encampment in the zocalo.

A delegate speaks from the floor of the FIOB assembly.

When Cue was elected, FIOB met with him to ask that he appoint Dominguez, FIOB's former binational coordinator, to head the Oaxacan Institute for Attention to Migrants.  Cue then declared that his administration was dedicated to implementing the "right to not migrate."  This right, a centerpiece of FIOB's political program for a decade, calls for alternatives to forced migration, including better schools, higher agricultural prices, jobs, and health care in rural areas.  If people have an alternative, FIOB activists argue, they can choose freely if they want to leave home or not. 

FIOB's outgoing binational coordinator, Bernardo Ramirez, says people in the U.S. don't really understand what causes migration.  "The wage here in Oaxaca is 73 pesos ($6) a day," he explains, "and in some of the poorest areas people are living on 30 pesos a day.  They'll eat if they produce their own corn for tortillas and beans, but they just have enough money to buy an egg.  When the free trade agreement came in, they lost the market for the little they were producing.  The products coming in from the U.S. had government support and subsidies.  Mexicans couldn't compete with that.  People see migration as their only option to survive." 

In a poor state like Oaxaca it is difficult to provide the alternative.  High hopes for Cue led to frustration and anger when the state couldn't deliver on many promises of economic development.  FIOB has tried to encourage its own rural development projects.   "We want people to produce what we eat," Ramirez says, depending less on buying processed food, or instance. 

A delegate speaks from the floor of the FIOB assembly.

FIOB also goes into the schools, especially secondary schools where young people are already thinking of leaving, to dispel illusions that life is always better in the north.  "The people who come back just talk about the good part of migration," Ramirez charges bitterly.  "They don't talk about how many days they had to walk through the desert.  They don't mention that seven or eight people were sleeping on the floor in the room where they were living.  They don't say they were robbed or beaten while they were traveling, and the government did nothing."

Therefore, in addition to advocating the right to not migrate, FIOB also says people have the right to migrate, and to basic human and civil rights when they do.  Deportations from the U.S. were on everyone's mind.  FIOB members in California have been marching for months to demand a halt to the separation of families, and to support the thousands of migrants who spend time in detention centers every year.  In Oaxaca, people in almost every community have had a deportation experience that has left its bitter memories.

The California section of FIOB has criticized for years U.S. proposals for immigration reform, because of their emphasis on enforcement and guest worker programs.  It has called for a progressive alternative, based on labor and human rights, and at the Oaxaca meeting voted to join a U.S. network of organizations supporting it, the Dignity Campaign. 

Cheers at the end of the FIOB assembly.

Last year FIOB activists implemented this formal position by helping Oaxacan farm workers organize an independent union in Washington State.  During that fight the grower employing them, Sakuma Farms, fired several workers, denied families a space to live in the company labor camp, and tried to keep wages at the level of the state's minimum.  When workers organized to protest, ranch owners tried to bring in a replacement force of guest workers from Mexico, under the H2A work visa program. 

During the workers' strike last year, Ramirez went to Washington State.  FIOB and the new union, Familias Unidas por la Justicia, then mobilized opposition that kept the U.S. Department of Labor from approving the farm's application.  In last week's assembly one worker, Herminio Ortiz Espinoza, described his four years as a guest worker in Canada.  "The bosses always yelled at us and treated us as though we were inferior," he recalled.  "I had a friend who protested, and he was deported right away.  After that, we were all afraid to say anything."

"We've talked with 70% of the people recruited in Oaxaca, and there are enormous violations of the rights of workers by guest worker programs," Ramirez adds.

"We're also concerned about the Oaxacans who are already living in the United States.  Sakuma Farms already had a lot of workers, very good ones.  But the grower wanted to keep them from organizing, defending themselves and demanding higher wages.  He knew people here in Mexico are desperate for work, and that he could make them work for the minimum.  He wanted to put Oaxacans into competition with other Oaxacans.  That's why in FIOB we want an immigration reform in the U.S. that doesn't have guest worker programs.  Migrants need the right to come and work, but to work with rights."

The newly-elected leaders of the FIOB.

At the end of the assembly, FIOB reiterated its support for the union at Sakuma Farms, and its opposition to guest worker programs.  When it announced its opposition a decade ago, it was virtually alone among migrant organizations in Mexico in doing so.  Today, as guest worker programs grow in the U.S., and the number of people who return with direct experience in them grows as well, so does that opposition. 

As the delegates left at the end of the assembly, a number went to talk with the teachers in the zocalo, sharing their outrage over the students killed and kidnapped at the teachers' training school in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero.  This issue is convulsing Mexico.  Banners and signs hung everywhere in the encampment, expressing revulsion at the attack. 

The assembly itself accused the government of responsibility for Ayotzinapa, calling it "state terrorism that the government is implementing in order to suppress social protest." Back in the U.S., FIOB members mounted protests at consulates in Los Angeles, Santa Maria, San Diego, Oxnard and Fresno.  In a letter delivered in each, FIOB's new officers also demanded that the U.S. government recognize its responsibility "for the economic and political instability of Mexico, because it is the greatest consumer of drugs, because it supports the big corporations that produce the arms used by Mexican criminal groups, and because it imposed on Mexico the North American Free Trade Agreement and other neoliberal policies."

A sign in the teachers' encampment in the main plaza of Oaxaca has a slogan common throughout Mexico:  "Ayotzinapa, your pain in my pain, your fight is my fight.  They took them away alive, and we want them returned alive."  It refers to the murder of six students and the kidnap of another 43 at the teachers' training college in Ayotzinapa.

The letter added, "We want a Mexico with democracy, justice and liberty, where young people who are the future of our country can thrive and participate with their knowledge and skills in building a healthy, strong and dignified country." 

Today people speaking Oaxaca's indigenous languages live in very distant places, separated by thousands of miles and a militarized border.  But whether in the zocalo or the FIOB assembly, they increasingly function as a single community.  Anti-immigrant hysteria may have come to dominate politics in the rich countries of the north, but Oaxacans are moving in the opposite direction.  They are asserting the right to decide when and how crossing borders is in their interest.  And instead of being simply divided by borders, they are organizing across them.