November, 2006

Dispatch from the Promised Land

BY ELENA HERRADA

PHOTO/JOHN SLAUGHTER

DETROIT -- A group of activists opened a Worker Center here on May 1, 2006, after a long planning period. It was a direct response to the demonstrations of March 27, 2006, when more than 50,000 immigrants and their supporters took to the streets in Detroit, and millions more across the nation.

We had been planning to do something for a long time to help out with individual cases of undocumented workers' issues of being denied pay, denied overtime, injured on the job and many other human rights violations. Their status makes them vulnerable to all manner of exploitation, from employers demanding sexual favors from women in order to be hired into low paying jobs, to being denied any avenue of redress if denied basic rights. Employers have called immigration in to stop organizing drives, to intimidate workers from speaking up against unfair and arbitrary treatment, or to maintain power over a workforce of undocumented workers.

When a group of workers came to a local social service agency to protest being fired for attending the March, we were called and held a demonstration at the worksite. Press from California, Texas, Mexico, Great Britain and all manner of independent media called us to find out what was happening in Detroit. We did not know that we would be talking to radio stations and TV stations and newspapers in Mexico City.

Once we were successful in the effort to get the people reinstated to their jobs with back pay -- after meeting with the owner of the company -- we asked the fired workers to stand up with the next group of workers who walked off their jobs for being cheated out of overtime pay. After a demonstration at an auto part supplier, a lawsuit was filed in Federal Court for check fraud (collecting income taxes and social security for people who have no social security numbers). More and more workers are contacting us to join this lawsuit against Lotus Internationa. … We are at the point of production here. Undocumented Mexican and Central American workers are working in sweat shops in the Detroit area, making parts for companies that employ workers under some of the best industrial union agreements in the world: UAW in the Big Three plants.

The mission of Latinos Unidos and Centro Obrero, our worker center, is to fight unjust policies, empower all of us against such aggression, teach English to Spanish speakers, Spanish to English speakers and engage in dialogue between the large African American community in Detroit and the newly arrived, vibrant Latino community. We hope to integrate the new people into the community so that the rest of the people who have been here all along do not harbor resentment toward them, so that what happened to our families doesn't happen to them. We know that if newcomers are isolated and "otherized" by the mass media and the government which seeks to exploit them and then deport them, no one will stand up against it.

We are located at UAW Local 22, the old Cadillac local in Detroit, which extended a warm welcome to us and works with us to make these low-paying auto parts supplier jobs and other exploitive work the good-paying union jobs that are the tradition of our beloved Promised Land, Detroit. Workers have always come here to live the good life. We may be in hard times now, but we have never wavered in the struggle to make it the best place for working class people of all colors and origins to "take their stand." (…Staying in a community where one is expected only to work and then leave when a season ends is an act of resistance, and thus requires one to "take a stand.")

By definition, Detroit is a place of hard work and struggle. The people here will stand up to whatever comes. The challenges of setting up a worker center are unpredictable and exhausting, but this is the new order. Currently we have no funding, but we have had fundraisers to support us and our work and we have been successful in that people hear of the Centro Obrero and find us without any written notice of where we are or what we do. The UAW has given us a home, money to live on, and resources to do our work. We ask the people who come in to stand with each new group as they resist each act of aggression against them. We have been slowly building a center of activists from each workplace. It is all word of mouth and we are jumping every day. We have no choice but to figure it out and be ready.