More on Eating With Accountability

Brownfemipower (BFP) pushed me to think past the given frames on choosing what I eat.

First, let it be said that I still eat fast foods occasionally because I'm too lazy to plan ahead. I still eat meat. I also weigh way more than I ought to, which, in my case, is not for a lack of decent grocery stores in my neighborhood, or because I can't afford to fill my belly with nutritious foods and so opt for carbs. I am beginning to excavate this enormously complex issue. I'm not hypocritically "talking the talk." I'm thinking out loud. There's a difference. I'm taking next steps on a journey.

BFP made my week by acknowledging my response to her posts and EllePhD’s on this vegan/vegetarianism subject. I’m happy to have connected partly because I couldn't reach BFP directly to tell her how much I admire her work. For that matter, I still can’t. She’s turned off the "Comments" option on La Chola. But now that I've dug around in the tombs of the Internet, I think understand why, and I now consider that act a wonderful example of owning her own power. BFP could have just gone away, driven into silence by that particular pack of hyenas. (You know who you are.) Instead, thank God, she turned her mike back on and drew some insurmountable boundaries for people who plainly are not acquainted with the concept.

BFP’s response makes me really happy, too, not just because I am a huge fan of her crystalline thinking and writing, but also because I so much want to link across the chasms that the birth lottery carved between our paths. It's not easy, it's perilous, and it doesn't come with promises of perfection on either side, I know. But linking across race, class, sex, gender, nationality, immigration status , religion (and all the rest) is mortally essential. Mortally, morally, vitally essential.

Because you know we're supposed to fail at it. We're not supposed to talk with each other, and if we try, we're supposed to blow it. Everything about the status quo depends on our not connecting across the chasms. When the buttons they’ve planted blow up, we’re really just doing their dirty work. Lateral hostility. All that. It’s true. Look how much time we’ve lost already.

Which isn’t to say we can’t get angry or disagree with each other. It’s just that there’s a way to do so without gutting each other like catfish. To me, BFP illustrates how in her post in reply to EllePhD about vegetarian/veganism. She isn’t attacking anybody. This is one of the several reasons I admire her work.

Second, let it be said that this is a skill too few possess, including me. There's a difference between knowing what I ought to do and being talented at it. Again, I’m just beginning to excavate this next enormously complex issue. These are next steps on the journey.

More thoughts on eating with social consciousness.

It’s also about the vendors.

On the vast list of things I just do not get is why progressives are not all over the whole constellation of worker justice issues: a living wage, worksite conditions, wage theft/fraud practices, health and safety factors, union busting, and all the rest.

Oh, right. “Benefits.” Let’s stop calling health insurance, retirement income, and profit-sharing, and personal leave “benefits,” OK? “Benefits"? As if they’re ours solely at the discretion of the patriarch who owns our labor? Uh, no. This archaic term intrinsically undermines the truth, which is that these are non-negotiable, earned universal worker rights.

As a dear friend puts it, it doesn’t matter whether someone else writes your paycheck or hands you cash in exchange for your work: If somebody else pays you, you’re a worker.

So it’s obvious, isn’t it, that the way the grocery store or chain treats its personnel is directly related to the way your own boss treats you, right? Over time, unfair labor practice in one sector becomes unfair labor practice in all sectors. We get accustomed, and if we have it a bit better than some, well, unlke us, they're just "workers." That's just a "labor" problem. Not.

If that isn’t sufficient reason to get your head out of your sphincter and get active in worker justice, then what about this?

If eating with consciousness is about how the food gets to our mouths and where it comes from, then it’s also about all the other links in the chain, including the warehouse stockers and the cashiers and the gourmet deli workers. It’s about all the labor practices of their employers.

And if that isn’t sufficient reason to pull it out and get busy, then consider this:

Any employer who is willing to cheat his workers of a living wage, clean and safe working conditions, and universal worker earnings (healthcare, leave, retirement income, profit-sharing) is willing to cheat his customers of fair quality for a fair price. It's about one chain of stores for poor Latinos and another for wealthly Scottsdale. It's about expired product on the shelves, and half-rotted produce, and dirty butcher shops, because if the prime motive is money, don't think for a moment that you as consumer aren't fair game, too.

So let’s stop calling it "eating with a social consciousness." Consciousness is essential, but it isn’t a substitute for doing something to benefit the rest of the production line. Consciousness strikes me as the minimum factor necessary to benefit myself in this matter. If I eat with a social consciousness, I eat very well and support relatively fewer adverse repercussions for others, but I don’t actually change anything materially.

That takes eating with accountability.

I don’t get out much anymore, but I really believe that the last time I saw the (largely) white radical-to-progressive contingent get out en force around any of this was when Ronald Reagan busted the Air Traffic Controllers. There was a huge protest at the Mall in DC, and I'll never forget it because it began to seem, there for a while, that we might expand our peace and justice movements to include (gasp) all workers-- as if all workers are intrinsically linked in power, strategy, and, well, the fate of humanity. That would include poor white male workers. It seems to me that we could have changed the country if we had had the wit to include them in our demands, because then their anger and resentment would have been redirected. We would have made them allies instead of the reactionary tsunami that swept Reagan, Bush, and Bush into office.

The point is that it isn’t about menus. It's about all of us, and it’s about opening our eyes to every implication of the fact that we actually are all in this together, regardless of the fact that some of us are fuckers. We certainly can prioritize, but I don't think we can leave anybody out of the peace/justice equation.

I don’t aim to perfection. I just aim to do a little bit better with this horrible reality every day.

Immigrant Rights ARE Worker Rights

Have you ever carried hundreds of pounds of blistering hot steel rebar up and down makeshift construction ladders for 14 hours in 115 degree heat? I didn't think so. Well, here's one thing you can take to the bank. When Enrique gets home from a day's work, sorry but he just really doesn't have the energy to go on a crime spree, and he can't afford a gun anyway.

Is every policy in the country based on BS, superstitions, and myths or is it just immigration policy and workplace safety and health?

So. See if this looks like a recipe for success: I live in the state with the worst ranking in the country for worker rights. It's also the state with the highest concentration of low skilled immigrant workers. See any coincidences here? I don't.

When desperation joins hunger and "foreignness," what you get is a powerless worker with no voice and no visibility. When you've got that, you've got paradise for a handful of unscrupulous rich white SOBs who rule this state and disaster for everybody else.

The Phoenix 50, I think they're called. The founding pastor of a church we attended -- note past tense -- used to brag that he hung out with them, was one of them. Maybe that explains why he didn't think the women on his staff needed a pension. This church, with its $8 Million endowment, thinks "social justice" means making sure every woman at the Christmas party gets asked to dance.

Anyway, last night I had the honor of interviewing an undocumented worker about what it's like to lay rebar in the corrupt and vicious Phoenix commercial construction industry. I got an education that made me cry. And made me ashamed and very angry.

1. Enrique (not his name) says it's good that he works for the worst construction employer in town, because the others don't have jobs. This company underbids everybody else. That's the main way to keep the profits in the white men's pockets and the risk on the back of the Brown men doing the work.

2. The company doesn't provide water at the work sites. You heard me. This is the Sonoran Desert, it gets hotter than hell here, and in the summer sun on bare dirt with huge piles of steel lying around, it is hell.

3. Starting out or a ten-year veteran with this company, you'll make $12/hour. They don't do raises. That's how it is for most of the guys. There's no training. You just learn the hard way.

4. Enrique has to bring 5 gallons of ice water to work every day and haul it himself wherever he's assigned, high up or on the ground. Along with his 50-pound tool belt. If the temperature exceeds 100 degrees, the company will give him a 10 cents/hour water supplement. That's 80 cents a day, and it doesn't even cover the ice.

5. He has to provide his own gloves ($2.50), hard hat $20), rebar pliers ($15), safety harness ($250), safety hook ($10), and tools. He goes through three pairs of gloves a week, even with duct tape. His safety harness lasts about a year.

6. He has no sick days, no vacation days, and no pension. When he starts to approach 35, he knows he'll be fired for younger, stronger, faster meat. But he's got nowhere else to go.

7. If his wife and kids were here and he wanted health insurance for them, it would cost him $80 to $100/week.

8. There are no safety requirements in Phoenix, AZ. If he dehydrates, faints, and falls off the freeway he's building, that's his tough luck. He worries about that.

9. He's glad he works for this outfit all the same, because right now, they're building a highrise. Sheriff Joe Arpaio doesn't conduct suprise raids for "illegals" at high-end construction sites in nice neighborhoods. Sheriff Joe prefers freeway construction sites and dirt pits in Buckeye.

10. Enrique commutes by car 60 miles round trip. When he's reached 40 hours in a week, he's sent home. This is to avoid having to pay Enrique overtime. If he hits 40 hours fifteen minutes after he's driven 30 miles to get to work, well, that's just too bad. Worse still, if the foreman doesn't want to sign him in that day, he won't get paid for his commute time, either. This method keeps him from ever knowing for sure when he'll have reached 40 hours, so he can't plan his work week to take a second job.

11. If he sprains his back, he either misses work and risks being fired or he works with a sprained back. He knows. He's been there and done that.

12. Rebar lying in the desert sun gets too hot to touch barehanded, and blisters the men's shoulders. It burns through leather work gloves in two days. When he cuts the wire to wrap the rebar into its grids, the ends snap back and slash his forearms.

13. Sometimes he gets referred to another job site with no notice. But again, if either the sending or the receiving foreman doesn't like his looks, he won't be signed in and he won't get paid for his commute time. Sometimes he won't get paid, period. The gas his his problem. He spends $70/week just to get to work.

15. Enrique is terrified of being picked up. He says everyone he knows is terrified. Because what if he doesn't have his passport or any money with him? What if he's wearing shorts and flip-flops just to walk to the corner market? If he's caught in a raid, Enrique will be deported "as is." He knows Mexican guys who've ended up in Guatemala without a centavo to get home. As he's talking to me, he looks panicky, as who wouldn't. Enrique tells me that it's good that his wife and babies aren't here because what would they do if some day he didn't come home? What would they think? What would they do? How would he ever find them again?

Enrique has been here for five years. In that time, he has put himself through union training and, by moving back and forth between employers, has managed to build his marketable experience and to leverage the system so that he now makes $23.75/hour, which still is easily $12 to $15 less than he would make in Philadephia or New York or even L.A. as an experienced rebar man.

Enrique pays federal, state, and city taxes and Social Security because these are taken straight out of his paycheck, just as they are for you and me. He's not getting anything for free. But he never sees a tax refund and he'll never use Social Security. He'll either be dead or deported before he's 65.

This is who we're harassing, abusing, cheating, deporting, and terrifying.

Enrique is an innocent, naive, sweet, young peasant man. His dark brown eyes are big as a deer's, graced with long lashes. He's about 5'7" tall but his shoulders are massive. He's cooking his dinner when we arrive. It's beans and red chile and chicken left over from last night.

If Enrique were at home in Chihuahua, he'd be a farmer like his father and his brothers, except there's no more land and what there is can't support all these families.

He's never known anything but hard work. All that crap about "lazy" Mexicans is the biggest lie in town. I know. I've hired lots of these guys to help me with yard work and landscaping. They kill themselves.

Enrique wears his crucifix, goes to Mass when he can, and sends his money home to his wife. Enrique didn't come here to rip off the system or rape little old ladies. He came here to build his dreams. He came here on faith and trust, ready to bust his back to build a better life. He didn't think it would be like this in the USA.

Enrique isn't who we need to worry about. It's his bosses I fear. And the Phoenix 50 and the pols they put in office. It's the McBushes we have to fear, not Mexican peasants with an upward mobility complex.

Homeland Security and Labor Seek to Strip Worker Rights from H-2A Visa Program

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)has an important resource on US guestworker programs. The title says it all: "Close to Slavery." And that was before this, from Interfaith Worker Justice:

Department of Labor Worsens Plight of Farmworkers
Interfaith Worker Justice just became aware of new rules that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Labor (DOL) want to propagate in order to help agribusiness hire more guest workers to harvest crops. The rules, which were crafted with input from farm operators but none from farmworker unions or advocates, would eliminate existing rights under the H-2A visa program for agricultural workers and worsen already deplorable labor conditions.

IWJ has drafted a letter to DOL Secretary Elaine Chao and is gathering signatures for the letter from religious leaders. Here is the text of the letter:

November 7, 2007

Dear Ms. Chao,

We write to you with concern for the rights of farmworkers in the U.S. The Departments of Labor and Homeland Security have proposed new rules to increase the number of agricultural guest workers and relax regulations concerning pay, housing, and other issues, according to recent stories in the New York Times (“U.S. Seeks Rules to Allow Increase in Guest Workers”) and the Los Angeles Times (“U.S. lets in more immigrants for farms”). These rules are intended to address the labor shortage caused by increased border security measures and the cumbersome H-2A visa process.

As people of faith concerned about maintaining adequate standards for all workers, we question this rush to relax regulations and government oversight in the interests of profitable agribusiness associations and farms. Moreover, these rules would go against the express mission of the Department of Labor to promote workers’ welfare and improve work conditions.

The H-2A program as it exists contains some labor protections, which, while inadequate, must not be compromised. For instance, the requirement that employers must advertise for jobs provides an opportunity for citizens and legal residents to work in this industry, without a mere assertion by growers that no non-immigrant workers are available. U.S. citizens or legal residents will always fill productive jobs if they receive adequate pay and benefits. If the majority of farm workers are undocumented, it is because employers choose to use an exploitable and cheaper source of labor.

Rather than administrative rule-making that worsens labor conditions, the administration should support the AgJOBS legislation, a bipartisan bill that was the result of difficult but productive negotiations between the agricultural industry and farm workers unions. The bill includes a reasonable path to legalization for agricultural guest workers, while helping to insure an adequate supply of labor to farms.

As people of faith, we are called to uphold the dignity of every worker and every human being. We urge you to work with us in asking Congress to pass the AgJOBS bill and in ceasing to consider rules that would lead to greater exploitation of farm workers in the United States.

We thank you for your consideration of this important matter.