AMNESTY: IT'S ALL ABOUT KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED AND PASSING THE TRUE COST OF ALL THAT "CHEAP" LABOR AND RELATED WELFARE TO THE AMERICAN MIDDLE-CLASS.
Restaurant Industry's Hypocrisy and Addiction to Cheap Foreign Labor on Display in D.C. Ballot Initiative
By Dan Cadman
CIS Immigration Blog, June 21, 2018
Washington, D.C. voters this week approved a ballot measure called Initiative 77 that would raise the minimum mandatory wages of tipped restaurant workers to $15 per hour. Local and national restaurant associations had pulled out all the stops to fight it.
What I find interesting is that these same associations fighting against the minimum wage are all in favor of foreign guestworker programs. The National Restaurant Association (headquartered in Washington, D.C., of course) has an entire section of its webpage devoted to this subject. Among other things, it advocates:
Restaurants want to bring in tens of thousands of cheap foreign workers nationwide, consequences to the economy and sagging wages of citizens and resident aliens be damned — and so what if they overstay and become a stagnating social problem? They cease to be the restaurant or service industries' problem. After all, there's always next year's new round of slots to be filled.
https://cis.org/Cadman/Restaurant-Industrys-Hypocrisy-and-Addiction-Cheap-Foreign-Labor-Display-DC-Ballot
THE DAY WE PUT EMPLOYERS OF ILLEGALS IN PRISON, WE END MEXICO'S INVASION AND LOOTING, as well as our jobs, housing and homelessness crisis!
ICE agents raid Ohio meatpacking plants, arrest 146 immigrants
By Jerry White
21 June 2018
In one of the largest workplace raids in recent years, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested 146 workers at a meat processing plant in northeastern Ohio on Tuesday. The raid was part of the Trump administration’s campaign to terrorize and deport immigrant workers.
With helicopters circling overhead, dozens of heavily armed federal agents from ICE, its surveillance arm, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), and local police descended on the Fresh Mark factory in Salem, Ohio, arresting 98 men and 48 women. Simultaneous raids were carried out on Fresh Mark facilities in Massillon and Canton, Ohio, where ICE agents seized employment records but made no arrests.
This was the second major raid of an Ohio workplace this month, following the storming of Corso’s Flower & Garden Center landscaping centers in Sandusky and Castalia on June 5, which resulted in the arrest of 114 immigrant workers.
A video released by ICE showed agents preparing for the raid by checking their weapons, putting on bullet proof vests and studying satellite photos of the Salem plant before driving their SUVs into the factory’s parking lot. Workers, still dressed in their white meat-cutting smocks, were removed from the plant and lined up at a loading dock, where agents checked their papers. Agents can be seen escorting away workers who have been handcuffed with plastic zip ties.
Fresh Mark workers lined up by ICE agents before arrests (Source: ICE)
An American-born worker told the local media that she was “in shock” from seeing her co-workers arrested and taken away. Everyone she works with, she said, “were good people.”
Several friends and relatives, some of them crying, crowded around the factory gates to inquire about the fate of their loved ones, while families and local churches scrambled to care for the approximately 60 children whose parents had been taken away. ICE agents handed out flyers with a toll-free “locator hotline” number for the families of those arrested.
“We arrived after the raid and we saw ICE agents taking the workers out of the plant and loading them onto buses,” Justin Wier, a reporter for the Youngstown Vindicator, told the World Socialist Web Site. “Witnesses told us they put Americans and, of course, some of the Hispanic workers could have been American citizens, off to one side, while they asked for documents from the Hispanic workers.” He said the newspaper had been told that all Hispanics were being taken away, even workers with proper documentation and permits for work.
The detainees, who were primarily from Guatemala and Mexico, were sent to the Northeast Ohio Correctional Center, where workers from the Sandusky raid are also being held. The private prison, run by CoreCivic, formerly known as the Corrections Corporation of America, is notorious. Detainees at the facility, which ICE contracts to hold 2,000 immigrants, conducted a hunger strike last year to protest intolerable conditions. The federal agency responded by putting all detainees on lockdown and depriving them of food and water for 27 hours, according to a relative, who said, “It’s inhuman.”
Although ICE says it released several Salem suspects out of “humanitarian concerns, such as health or family considerations,” the agency said most of the undocumented workers “will be detained in facilities in Michigan and Ohio while awaiting removal proceedings.”
Homeland Security Investigations agents arresting workers Tuesday (Source: ICE)
A spokeswoman with St. Paul’s Church, which helped care for the separated children, said, “A few people managed to send some text messages, but for the most part people couldn’t talk to anybody. They were terrorized.”
The Trump administration and its fascistic advisors cynically claim that their witch-hunt of immigrant workers is aimed at protecting the jobs and wages of native-born workers. Throughout history, however, the war on immigrants has always been aimed at the entire working class. The goal of capitalist owners and nativist politicians is to divide and weaken the working class and create an atmosphere of fear and intimidation so that employers can exploit both native-born and immigrant workers with impunity.
The meatpacking industry, and Fresh Mark in particular, are notorious for exploiting immigrant workers with the full knowledge of the authorities. In December 2017, Samuel Martinez, a 62-year-old Guatemalan worker, died after his leg was ground up in an augur at Fresh Mark’s Canton plant. In 2011, 20-year-old Marcos Perez-Velasquez, also a Guatemalan native, was electrocuted at the same plant while attempting to plug in a fan.
In response to the raids, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) and its parent union, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), which have 2,800 members at the three Ohio plants including those arrested in Tuesday’s raid, issued a perfunctory protest.
Longtime RWDSU President Stuart Appelbaum said the union was “outraged by the actions of Donald Trump.” He added that the union “will not stand for violence against immigrants, we will not stand for tearing families apart and we will not stand for the terrifying tactics of the Trump administration.”
Appelbaum, however, made it clear that the union would do nothing to oppose the Gestapo-style raids, offering nothing more than verbal promises to “assist workers affected by this ICE raid.”
For his part, UFCW President Marc Perrone issued a craven statement echoing the criticisms of Trump by leading Democrats and Republicans, which have focused on the brutal separation of children from their parents while not opposing the detention and deportation policy as a whole.
Perrone said: “Today’s actions will only drive this nation further apart, while also spreading unmistakable pain among neighbors, friends, coworkers and loved ones… We urge President Trump and members of Congress to work together to fix our broken immigration system, and to keep the demands of due process and family unity at the forefront.”
The unions have been fully complicit in the driving down of wages and return to conditions recalling those depicted in The Jungle, the 1906 Upton Sinclair novel about the exploitation of largely Eastern European workers in Chicago’s slaughterhouses and processing plants.
During the 1980s, UFCW betrayed bitter strikes at Iowa Beef Processors, Oscar Mayer, Hormel and other meat processors. After Hormel workers in Local P-9 in Austin, Minnesota, refused to accept the industry-wide 23 percent wage cut to which the UFCW had agreed, the union put the rebellious local under trusteeship and removed its leaders. Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Rudy Perpich, dispatched the National Guard to escort scabs and arrest striking Hormel workers in scenes that are eerily similar to the roundup of immigrant workers in Ohio. After the strike was broken, the UFCW created a new local based on the workers who had crossed the picket lines.
National Guard dispatched against striking Hormel workers in 1985
The influx of immigrant workers from Central America, Asia and Africa largely occurred after this wave of betrayed strikes, which resulted in a 50 percent decline in wages throughout the industry.
While Trump blames foreign-born workers for destroying jobs, just 18 miles from the Salem plant is the General Motors Lordstown Assembly Plant, where 1,200 workers will lose their jobs Friday when the automaker eliminates the second shift. GM, which made $12.8 billion in profits last year, is replacing full-time workers with low-paid contractors, with the blessing of the United Auto Workers union. At the same time, the company is using Trump’s tax cuts to drive up the value of its stock and increase the money flowing to its richest investors.
Among workers there is a growing recognition that anti-immigrant chauvinism is being whipped up in the US and around the world to divert attention from those really responsible for the assault on the working class.
“It’s time to wake up and recognize we are all citizens of the world who all bleed red,” Beth, a fifth generation Chrysler worker from Kokomo, Indiana, told the WSWS. “I tell workers this is a trap to divide and conquer us, and it’s being driven by corporate greed. They are trying to instill a fear in the working class that there is not enough money in the world for everybody. But there is more than enough money, food and resources. The problem is it’s all controlled by the rich.
“It is not immigrants taking our jobs, it’s the corporations like GM, which is laying off workers. They don’t care about us. The rich never have enough, they want it all. We have to stop these atrocities, like ICE raids and taking children away from their mothers, and unify workers around the world.”
Trump promises Wall Street, the Plundering U.S. Chamber of Corporate Fascist, Mexico and voting illegals:
NO (real) WALL, NO E-VERIFY, CONTINUED NON-ENFORCEMENT, OPEN BORDERS ADVOCATE TO HEAD DHS….
But isn’t that already the La Raza Supremacy Democrat’s agenda???
PARTNERS WITH MEXICO:
The LA RAZA DEMOCRAT PARTY and the PRO-BUSINESS GOP to keep wages for LEGALS depressed (today they are depressed to 1973 levels).
But you will still get the tax bills for the Mex welfare state and crime tidal wave!
“Illegal aliens are not supposed to work, and knowingly providing shelter for illegal aliens can be construed as harboring and shielding, elements of a felony under federal law, Title 8 U.S. Code § 1324.”
“Where aliens and jobs are concerned, even many categories of nonimmigrant aliens (temporary visitors) including aliens who lawfully enter under the Visa Waiver Program or with tourist visas may not work in the United States and immediately become subject to removal (deportation) if they seek gainful employment.” ----MICHAEL CUTLER – FRONTPAGE mag
IMPOSE E-VERIFY AND YOU INSTANTLY CREATE MILLIONS MORE JOBS AND FORCE WAGES UP!
WE COULD END MEXICO’S INVASION IF WE PUT EMPLOYERS OF ILLEGALS IN JAIL
NumbersUSA’s Rosemary Jenks:
E-Verify Ignored in DACA Negotiations Because ‘Members of Congress Know It Will Work’
Members of Congress broadly oppose a legislative nationwide E-Verify mandate for employers because “they know it will work,” said NumbersUSA’s Rosemary Jenks, explaining why E-Verify is not being pushed in congressional negotiations for an amnesty deal for recipients of the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Jenks further noted that both parties are beholden to special interests supportive of “mass migration.”
JOE LEGAL v LA RAZA JOSE ILLEGAL
Here’s how it breaks down; will make you want to be an illegal!
THE TAX-FREE MEXICAN UNDERGROUND ECONOMY IN LOS ANGELES COUNTY IS ESTIMATED TO BE IN EXCESS OF $2 BILLION YEARLY!
Staggering expensive "cheap" Mexican labor did not build this once great nation! Look what it has done to Mexico. It's all about keeping wages depressed and passing along the true cost of the invasion, their welfare, and crime tidal wave costs to the backs of the American people!
AMERICA: YOU’RE BETTER OFF BEING AN ILLEGAL!!!
This annual income for an impoverished American family is $10,000 less than the more than $34,500 in federal funds which are spent on each unaccompanied minor border crosser.
A study by Tom Wong of the University of California at San Diego discovered that more than 25 percent of DACA-enrolled illegal aliens in the program have anchor babies. That totals about 200,000 anchor babies who are the children of DACA-enrolled illegal aliens. This does not include the anchor babies of DACA-qualified illegal aliens. JOHN BINDER
|
No comments:
Post a Comment