[Educationforall] spam con huevos, labor views, news, and concerns, 1.13.12-I

[Carlos Pelayo]

Truthdiggers of the Week: Poverty Researchers  David Sirota on Education and the Elite  AFL-CIO Conference Honors Dr. King's Legacy‏Wisconsin Rising: Grassroots Documentary Film Follows the People's Movement in Madison from Revolt to Recalls  Mayor Takes On Teachers' Union in School Plans Garment Worker Center is looking to hire an Organizing Coordinator - L.A.‏Moyers & Co.: How Washington and Big Business Colluded to Make the Rich Richer  Bill Moyers: Lessons on Democracy From Woody Guthrie (Video)  migration - a product of free market reforms‏ Two on Foxconn in China‏ 
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Truthdiggers of the Week: Poverty Researchers
"Truthdiggers of the Week: Indiana University Poverty 
Researchers" -- Here’s a sobering dose of reality: Poverty in America has 
risen to the 27% mark in the last half-decade, and perhaps worse, the prospects 
for our nation’s poorest won’t necessarily get better as the economy picks up. 
It’s not news many want to hear, but we’re glad a group of researchers at 
Indiana University were gutsy enough to release it. 









Indiana University Study: Millions of Americans to Be Driven Into 
Poverty
"At Risk: America’s Poor During and After the Great Recession" 
-- This study by Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs 
examines the impact of the Great Recession and its aftermath on poverty in 
America. 





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David Sirota on Education and the Elite
"Education Reformers Send Their Kids to Private School" -- 
There really are “Two Americas,” as the saying goes—and that’s no accident. 
Nowhere is this more obvious than in education—a realm in which this elite 
physically separates itself from us mere serfs. 






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Jan. 13, 
2012





When Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) traveled to Austin yesterday 
for a right-wing roundup of Texas legislators, he was greeted by more than 125 
people protesting his anti-worker 
agenda.
More than 
550 labor and civil rights activists and leaders are in Detroit this weekend to 
honor the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the AFL-CIO’s annual Dr. 
Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday Observance and National Conference. The Jan. 
12-16 observance serves as an opportunity to recommit to working toward King’s 
cornerstone goals of economic and social justice.






Got 
comments? Post them at blog.aflcio.org.

 Texas 
Protesters Greet Wisconsin’s Walker
 Climate Change Battle Plan Must Include Workers, Communities, 
Investors, Enviros
 In 
Bastrop, Texas, a Union Member Steps Up 
 N.H. 
Workers Prepare for Attack of Zombie Bills
 White 
House: Insource Jobs, Decrease Inequality
 Hostess Bankruptcy Filing Hits 5,000 BCTGM 
Members
 Two 
Years After Quake, Haitians Have Few Jobs or a Living 
Wage
Read more important 
news of the day on the 
issues working families care about. 










Follow the 
AFL-CIO:
         
    




Take the next step. Become a mobile 
activist
by joining the AFL-CIO Rapid Action Text 
Team.
Text NEWS to AFLCIO 
(235246) to receive action alerts and more.
(Message and data 
rates may 
apply.)

To find out more about the AFL-CIO, please visit our 
website at www.aflcio.org.
Click here to 
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-

Wisconsin Rising: Grassroots Documentary Film Follows the People's 
Movement in Madison from Revolt to Recalls
Sam 
Mayfield is finishing a documentary on the fight for union rights in Wisconsin 
this past year, and she tells AlterNet her story. READ MORE 
By 
Sarah Jaffe / AlterNet
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Mayor Takes On Teachers' Union in School Plans
By DAVID W. CHEN and ANNA 
M. PHILLIPS 
In his State of the City address, the 
mayor hit a nerve by proposing a merit-pay system for teachers and not shying 
away from other controversial education topics.
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Subject: Garment Worker Center is looking to hire an Organizing 
Coordinator












Garment Worker Center

1250 S. Los Angeles St, 
#213
Los Angeles, CA 90015
United States.

(213) 
748-5866





Please 
forward widely to your contacts in the social justice community in LA and across 
the country - We are on the search for a great match for 
GWC!
**********************************************************************************************
To our community supporters and broader social justice 
family,  


GWC is seeking a passionate individual who is outraged 
by the conditions of the industry. An individual who understands that building 
an organization like this will have the power to transform the lives of tens of 
thousands of people and potentially change the landscape of LA if 
successful. We are seeking an individual who is looking to this 
location as a long-term commitment and fulfillment of their passions. 
 


GWC will continue to be an organization principally 
led by a volunteer staff. We continue to have a strong group of volunteers (both 
garment worker and non-garment worker) that keep rolling out GWC’s regular 
activities and events with a broader layer of volunteer garment worker member 
support.  


We believe that with YOUR continuing support and your 
assistance in publicizing our search for our Organizing Coordinator for our GWC 
family, this model and transition will continue to move forward and gain 
strength. We’re looking for folks committed to immigrant rights and low-wage 
worker issues who are self-motivated, detail oriented and are interested in 
working in an organization with a commitment to work towards participatory, 
democratic, and nonhierarchical models of resistance. 
 


For more details about this position, please see the 
job description posted at this link Garment Worker Center is looking to hire an Organizing 
Coordinator




You are receiving this email because of your prior association 
with Garment Worker Center or their affiliates. If you do not wish to receive 
further communications from Garment Worker Center, please click here to be removed instantly. 
Garment Worker Center 
1250 S. Los Angeles St, #213, Los Angeles, CA 90015, United States. 

Campaigns Powered by Tikkl. 
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Moyers & Co.: How Washington and Big Business Colluded to Make 
the Rich Richer
Moyers & Co., Programming Announcement: 
"This weekend Bill Moyers returns to television with Moyers & Company. In 
his first show, Bill explores how Washington made the rich richer at the expense 
of the middle class. On Friday, the premiere episode of Moyers & Company, 
Bill's guests - Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, authors of Winner-Take-All 
Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer - And Turned Its Back on the 
Middle Class, argue that America's vast inequality is no accident, but in fact 
has been politically engineered." 
Read the Article 

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Bill Moyers: Lessons on Democracy From Woody Guthrie 
(Video)
Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers, Moyers & Co.: "With a 
center being built in Tulsa devoted to the work of Woody Guthrie, Bill looks 
back at the singer-songwriter's life and work, finding many points of irony and 
relevance given the current state of our economy and democracy. Is this land 
truly made for you and me? In this visual and musical journey, Bill asks the 
question, and puts forth a sobering answer." 
Watch the Video 


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Migration: A Product of Free Market Reforms
By David 
Bacon
Americas Program website, Posted on: 
12/01/2012
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/6038


Editor's Note: 
This is the first installment of a three-part series on migrant rights by 
journalist and immigration activist David Bacon. This article is taken from the 
report "Displaced, Unequal and Criminalized - Fighting for the Rights of 
Migrants in the United States" that examines the origins of the current 
migratory labor phenomenon, the mechanisms that maintain it, and proposals for a 
more equitable system. The Americas Program is proud to publish this series in 
collaboration with the author.


A political alliance is developing 
between countries with a labor export policy and the corporations who use that 
labor in the global north. Many countries sending migrants to the developed 
world depend on remittances to finance social services and keep the lid on 
social discontent over poverty and joblessness, while continuing to make huge 
debt payments. Corporations using that displaced labor share a growing interest 
with those countries' governments in regulating the system that supplies 
it.

Increasingly, the mechanisms for regulating that flow of people are 
contract labor programs-called "guest worker" or "temporary worker" programs in 
the U.S., or "managed migration" in the UK and much of the EU. With or without 
these programs, migration to the U.S. and other industrial countries is a fact 
of life. Despite often using rhetoric that demonizes immigrants, the U.S. 
Congress is not debating the means for ending migration. Nothing can, short of a 
radical reordering of the world's economy.





Santiago Juxtlahuaca, Oaxaca, Mexico -- Zacarias 
Salazar plows a cornfield with an ox.

Nor are the current waves of 
immigration raids and deportations in the U.S. intended to halt it. In an 
economy in which immigrant labor plays a critical part, the price of stopping 
migration would be economic crisis. The intent of immigration policy is managing 
the flow of people, determining their status here in the U.S., in the interest 
of those who put that labor to work.

Migrants are human beings first 
however, and their desire for community is as strong as the need to labor. The 
use of neoliberal reforms and economic treaties to displace communities, to 
produce a global army of available and vulnerable workers, has a brutal impact. 
Existing and proposed free trade agreements between the U.S. and Mexico, Canada, 
Central America, Peru, Colombia, Panama, South Korea, and Jordan not only do not 
stop the economic transformations that uproot families and throw them into the 
migrant stream-they push that whole process forward.

On a world scale, 
the migratory flow caused by displacement is still generally self-initiated. In 
other words, while people may be driven by forces beyond their control, they 
move at their own will and discretion, trying to find survival and economic 
opportunity, and to reunite their families and create new communities in the 
countries they now call home. But the idea of managing the flow of migration is 
growing.

It is the contention of this paper that these global economic 
forces are driving the development of U.S. immigration policy. Increasingly, the 
political fault lines that divide the U.S. immigrant rights movement are 
determined by decisions to either support this general trend in policy, and its 
political representatives in Washington DC, or to oppose it and create a social 
movement for equality and rights based in the communities of migrants 
themselves.

The development of a labor supply and labor management system 
to govern the flow of migrants, that is, of people, requires increasingly 
ferocious enforcement. With the criminalization of work for undocumented 
migrants a quarter century ago, along with the resurrection of a contract labor 
program for migrants, in the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, the 
parameters were set for the debates over immigration policy that continue to the 
present. Today immigration raids and enforcement actions, harsh and racist 
legislation, and the hysteria that comes with all this, are sweeping our 
country. Today's migrants have become needed low-wage labor and criminals at the 
same time.

This paper will outline first the global economic 
forces driving displacement and migration, and their impact on communities. It 
will then outline the basic structure and purpose of U.S. immigration policy, 
and the basic proposals for changing it. It will examine the division between 
mainstream, Washington DC-based supporters of corporate immigration reform and 
community- and labor-based groups who call for an alternative, and finally it 
will outline their proposals for an alternative based on human and labor 
rights.

We begin with the examination of one particular stream of 
migrants, of indigenous people from Oaxaca, both because their experience is 
similar to others, but also because organizations in the communities involved 
have articulated a sophisticated analysis of the system in which they 
move.


Where the Flow of People Begins

Rufino Domínguez, the 
former coordinator of the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations, who now 
heads the Oaxacan Institute for Attention to Migrants, estimates there are about 
500,000 indigenous people from Oaxaca living in the U.S., 300,000 in California 
alone.

According to Rick Mines, author of the 2010 Indigenous Farm Worker 
Study, "the total population of California's indigenous Mexican farm workers is 
about 120,000 Š a total of 165,000 indigenous farm workers and family members in 
California." Counting the many indigenous people living and working in urban 
areas, the total is considerably higher, he says, easily meeting Domínguez' 
estimate.





Monterrey, Mexico -- La Alianza barrio, a community 
of displaced people, who work in maquiladoras.

The study counted 54,000 people who had emigrated 
from 350 Oaxacan towns, or about 150 per town. Given the size of many small 
communities, this supports the widespread assertion of many indigenous Oaxacans 
that some towns have become depopulated, or are communities of the very old and 
very young, where most working-age people have left to work in the 
north.

"In the early 1990s there were about 35,000 indigenous farm 
workers in California," Mines says, "while in the 2004 to 2008 period there were 
about four times as many, or 120,000 indigenous Mexican farm workers." In 
addition, indigenous people made up 7% of Mexican migrants in 1991-3, the years 
just before the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement. In 2006-8 
they made up 29% - four times more.

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. They are truly the workforce that has been 
produced by NAFTA and the neoliberal changes in the global economy. Further, 
"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," Mines says. The rock-bottom wages paid to 
this most recent wave of migrants - Oaxaca's indigenous people - sets the wage 
floor for all the other workers in California farm labor, keeping the labor cost 
of California growers low, and their profits high.

Economic crises 
provoked by the North American Free Trade Agreement and other economic reforms 
are now uprooting and displacing these Mexicans in the country's most remote 
areas, where people still speak languages that were old when Columbus arrived 
from Spain. While farm workers 20 and 30 years ago came from parts of central 
Mexico with a larger Spanish presence, migrants today come increasingly from 
indigenous communities. "There are no jobs, and NAFTA forced the price of corn 
so low that it's not economically possible to plant a crop anymore," Dominguez 
says. "We come to the U.S. to work because we can't get a price for our product 
at home. There's no alternative."

As he points out, U.S. trade and 
immigration policy are linked together. They are part of a single system, not 
separate and independent policies. The negotiation of the North American Free 
Trade Agreement was in fact an important step in the development of this 
relationship.

Since NAFTA's passage in 1993, the U.S. Congress has 
debated and passed several new trade agreements - with Peru, Jordan, Chile, and 
the Central American Free Trade Agreement. At the same time it has debated 
immigration policy as though those trade agreements bore no relationship to the 
waves of displaced people migrating to the U.S., looking for work. Meanwhile, a 
rising tide of anti-immigrant hysteria has increasingly demonized those 
migrants, leading to measures to deny them jobs, rights, or any pretense of 
equality with people living in the communities around them. To resolve any of 
these dilemmas, from adopting rational and humane immigration policies to 
reducing the fear and hostility towards migrants, the starting point must be an 
examination of the way U.S. policies have both produced migration, and 
criminalized migrants.


The Immigration Reform and Control Act and 
NAFTA

Trade negotiations and immigration policy were formally joined 
together when Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) in 
1986. Immigrant rights activists campaigned against the law because it contained 
employer sanctions, prohibiting employers for the first time on a federal level 
from hiring undocumented workers. Those advocates said the proposal amounted to 
criminalizing work for the undocumented. IRCA's liberal defenders pointed to its 
amnesty provision as a gain that justified sanctions, and the bill eventually 
did enable over 4 million people living in the U.S. without immigration 
documents to gain permanent residence. Showing the broad bipartisan consensus 
for the bill's approach to immigration in Washington DC, the bill was signed 
into law by Ronald Reagan, a Republican and the country's most conservative 
president up to that time.

Few noted one other provision of the law. IRCA 
set up a Commission for the Study of International Migration and Cooperative 
Economic Development to study the causes of immigration to the U.S. The 
commission was inactive until 1988, but began holding hearings when the U.S. and 
Canada signed a bilateral free trade agreement. After Mexican President Carlos 
Salinas de Gortari made it plain he favored a similar agreement with Mexico, the 
commission made a report to President George Bush Sr. and to Congress in 1990. 
It found, unsurprisingly, that the main motivation for coming to the U.S. was 
economic. To slow or halt this flow, it recommended "promoting greater economic 
integration between the migrant sending countries and the United States through 
free trade" and that "U. S. economic policy should promote a system of open 
trade." It concluded that "the United States should expedite the development of 
a U.S.-Mexico free trade area and encourage its incorporation with Canada into a 
North American free trade area," while warning that "it takes many years - even 
generations - for sustained growth to achieve the desired effect."





Postville, Iowa - Maria Rosala Mejia Marroquin, a 
Guatemalan immigrant, was arrested in an immigration raid at the Agriprocessors 
meatpacking plant in Postville. She was released to care for her child, but had 
to wear an ankle bracelet to monitor her movements.  She could not work or 
travel, and was eventually deported.

The negotiations that led to 
NAFTA started within months of the report. As Congress debated the treaty, 
Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari toured the United States, telling 
audiences unhappy at high levels of immigration that passing NAFTA would reduce 
it by providing employment for Mexicans in Mexico. Back home Salinas and other 
treaty proponents made the same argument. NAFTA, they claimed, would set Mexico 
on a course to become a first-world nation. "We did become part of the first 
world," says Juan Manuel Sandoval, coordinator of the Permanent Seminario on 
Chicano and Border Studies at Mexico City's National Institute of Anthropology 
and History. "The back yard."

NAFTA, however, did not lead to rising 
incomes and employment, and therefore, it did not decrease the flow of migrants 
to the U.S. Instead, it became an important source of pressure on Mexicans, 
particularly Oaxacans, to migrate. The treaty forced yellow corn grown by 
Mexican farmers without subsidies to compete in Mexico's own market with corn 
from huge U.S. producers, subsidized by the U.S. farm bill. Agricultural exports 
to Mexico more than doubled during the NAFTA years, from $4.6 to $9.8 billion 
annually - $2.5 billion in 2006 in corn alone. In January and February of 2008, 
huge demonstrations in Mexico sought to block the implementation of the 
agreement's final chapter, which lowered the tariff barriers on white corn and 
beans.

As a result of a growing crisis in agricultural production, by the 
1980s Mexico had already become a corn importer. Corn imports rose from 
2,014,000 to 10,330,000 tons from 1992 to 2008. According to Alejandro Ramírez, 
general director of the Confederation of Mexican Pork Producers, Mexico imported 
30,000 tons of pork in 1995, the year NAFTA took effect. By 2010 pork imports, 
almost all from the U.S., had grown over 25 times, to 811, 000 tons. As a 
result, pork prices received by Mexican producers dropped 56%.

Imports had a dramatic effect on Mexican jobs. "We 
lost 4000 pig farms," Alejandro Ramírez estimates. "On Mexican farms, each 100 
animals produce 5 jobs, so we lost 20,000 farm jobs directly from imports. 
Counting the 5 indirect jobs dependent on each direct job, we lost over 120,000 
jobs in total. This produces migration to the U.S. or to Mexican cities - a big 
problem for our country." Once Mexican meat and corn producers were driven from 
the market by imports, the Mexican economy was left vulnerable to price changes 
dictated by U.S. agribusiness or U.S. policy. "When the U.S. modified its corn 
policy to encourage ethanol production," he charges, "corn prices jumped 100% in 
one year."

NAFTA then prohibited price supports, without which hundreds 
of thousands of small farmers found it impossible to sell corn or other farm 
products for what it cost to produce them. The CONASUPO system, in which the 
Mexican government bought corn at subsidized prices, turned it into tortillas 
and sold them in state-franchised grocery stores at subsidized low prices, was 
abolished.

Mexico couldn't protect its own agriculture from the 
fluctuations of the world market. A global coffee glut in the 1990s plunged 
prices below the cost of production. A less entrapped government might have 
bought the crops of Veracruz farmers to keep them afloat, or provided subsidies 
for other crops. But once free market structures were in place prohibiting 
government intervention to help them, those farmers paid the price. Veracruz 
campesinos joined the stream of workers headed north. There they became an 
important part of the workforce in the Smithfield pork processing plant in North 
Carolina, as well as in other industries.

U.S. companies were allowed to 
own land and factories, eventually anywhere in Mexico, without Mexican partners. 
U.S.-based Union Pacific, in partnership with the Larrea family, became the 
owner of the country's main north-south rail line, and immediately discontinued 
virtually all passenger service, as railroad corporations had done in the US. 
Mexican rail employment dropped from over 90,000 to 36,000. Facing 
privatization, railroad workers mounted a wildcat strike to try to save their 
jobs, but they lost and their union became a shadow of its former presence in 
Mexican politics.

Slashing wages in privatized enterprises and gutting 
union agreements only increased the wage differential between the U.S. and 
Mexico. According to Garrett Brown of the Maquiladora Health and Safety Network, 
the average Mexican wage was 23% of the U.S. manufacturing wage in 1975. By 2002 
it was less than an eighth, according to Mexican economist, and former Senator 
Rosa Albina Garabito. Brown says that since NAFTA went into effect, real Mexican 
wages dropped by 22%, while worker productivity increased 45%.

Low wages 
are the magnet used to attract US and other foreign investors. In mid-June, 
2006, Ford Corporation, already one of Mexico's largest employers, announced it 
would invest $9 billion more in building new factories. Meanwhile, Ford said it 
was closing at least 14 US plants, eliminating the jobs of tens of thousands of 
U.S. workers. Both moves were part of the company's strategic plan to stem 
losses by cutting labor costs drastically and moving production. When General 
Motors was bailed out by the U.S. government in the current recession, it closed 
a dozen U.S. plants and laid off tens of thousands of workers. Its plans for 
building new plants in Mexico went forward without any hindrance.

In 
NAFTA's first year, 1994, one million Mexicans lost their jobs, by the 
government's count, when the peso was devalued. To avert the sell off of 
short-term bonds and a flood of capital to the north. U.S. Treasury Secretary 
Robert Rubin engineered a $20 billion loan to Mexico, which was paid to 
bondholders, mostly US banks. In return, U.S. and British banks gained control 
of the country's financial system. Mexico had to pledge its oil revenue to pay 
off foreign debt, making the country's primary source of income unavailable for 
social needs.

As the Mexican economy, especially the border maquiladora 
industry, became increasingly tied to the U.S. market, Mexican workers lost jobs 
when the market for what those factories produced shrank during U.S. recessions. 
In 2000-2001 400,000 jobs were lost on the U.S./Mexico border, and in the 
current recession, thousands more have been eliminated.


Displacement - A Product of Free Market 
Reforms

All of these policies produced displaced people, who could no 
longer make a living or survive as they'd done before. The rosy predictions of 
NAFTA's boosters that it would raise income and slow migration proved false. The 
World Bank, in a 2005 study made for the Mexican government, found that the 
extreme rural poverty rate of 35% in 1992-4, prior to NAFTA, jumped to 55% in 
1996-8, after NAFTA took effect. This could be explained, the report said, 
"mainly by the 1995 economic crisis, the sluggish performance of agriculture, 
stagnant rural wages, and falling real agricultural prices."

By 2010 53 
million Mexicans were living in poverty, according to the Monterrey Institute of 
Technology - half the country's population. About 20% live in extreme poverty, 
almost all in rural areas. The growth of poverty, in turn, fueled migration. In 
1990 4.5 million Mexican-born people lived in the U.S. A decade later, that 
population more than doubled to 9.75 million, and in 2008 it peaked at 12.67 
million. About 11% of all Mexicans now live in the U.S. About 5.7 million were 
able to get some kind of visa, but another 7 million couldn't, and came 
nevertheless.





Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico -- A boy jumps over a 
polluted canal on his way to cross the border.

People were migrating from Mexico to the U.S. long 
before NAFTA was negotiated. Juan Manuel Sandoval emphasizes that "Mexican labor 
has always been linked to the different stages of U.S. capitalist development 
since the 19th century - in times of prosperity, by the incorporation of big 
numbers of workers in agricultural, manufacturing, service and other sectors, 
and in periods of economic crisis, by the deportation of Mexican laborers back 
to Mexico in huge numbers." The current wave of deportations - one million 
people in the last two years - bears him out.

From 1982 through the NAFTA era, successive economic 
reforms produced more migrants. The displacement of people had already grown so 
large by 1986 that the commission established by IRCA was charged with 
recommending measures to halt or slow it.

Its report urged that "migrant-sending countries 
should encourage technological modernization by strengthening and assuring 
intellectual property protection and by removing existing impediments to 
investment" and recommended that "the United States should condition bilateral 
aid to sending countries on their taking the necessary steps toward structural 
adjustment. Similarly, U.S. support for non-project lending by the international 
financial institutions should be based on the implementation of satisfactory 
adjustment programs." The IRCA commission report even acknowledged the potential 
for harm by noting "efforts should be made to ease transitional costs in human 
suffering."

The North American Free Trade Agreement, however, was not 
intended to relieve human suffering. In 1994, the year the treaty took effect, 
U.S. speculators began selling off Mexican government bonds. According to Jeff 
Faux, founding director of the Economic Policy Institute, "the peso crash of 
December, 1994, was directly connected to NAFTA, which had created a speculative 
bubble for Mexican assets that then collapsed when the speculators cashed 
in."

"It is the financial crashes and the economic disasters that drive 
people to work for dollars in the U.S., to replace life savings, or just to earn 
enough to keep their family at home together," says Harvard historian John 
Womack. "The debt-induced crash in the 1980s, before NAFTA, drove people 
northŠThe financial crash and the Rubin-induced reform of NAFTA, New York's 
financial expropriation of Mexican finances between 1995 and 2000, drove the 
economically wrecked, dispossessed and impoverished north again."

The 
U.S. immigration debate has no vocabulary that describes what happens to 
migrants before they cross borders - the factors that force them into motion. In 
the U.S. political debate, Veracruz's uprooted coffee pickers or unemployed 
workers from Mexico City are called immigrants, because that debate doesn't 
recognize their existence before they leave Mexico. It would be more accurate to 
call them migrants, and the process migration, since that takes into account 
both people's communities of origin and those where they travel to find 
work.

Displacement itself becomes an unmentionable word 
in the Washington discourse. Not one immigration proposal in Congress in the 
quarter century since IRCA was passed tried to come to grips with the policies 
that uprooted miners, teachers, tree planters and farmers, in spite of the fact 
that Congress members voted for these policies. In fact, while debating bills to 
criminalize undocumented migrants and set up huge guest worker programs, four 
new trade agreements were introduced, each of which would cause more 
displacement and more migration.


David Bacon is a writer and 
photojournalist based in Oakland and Berkeley, California. He has been a 
reporter and documentary photographer for 18 years, shooting for many national 
publications. He has exhibited his work nationally, and in Mexico, the UK and 
Germany. Bacon covers issues of labor, immigration and international politics 
and is an associate editor at Pacific News Service and a regular contributor to 
the Americas Program.

The report "Displaced, Unequal and Criminalized - 
Fighting for the Rights of Migrants in the United States" was prepared for the 
Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.



For more articles and images, see  
http://dbacon.igc.org


See also Illegal People -- How Globalization Creates 
Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants  (Beacon Press, 2008)
Recipient: C.L.R. James Award, best book of 
2007-2008
http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2002


See also the photodocumentary on indigenous migration 
to the US
Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR 
Press, 2006)
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4575


See also The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the 
U.S./Mexico Border (University of California, 2004)
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9989.html-- 

__________________________________

David Bacon, Photographs and 
Stories
http://dbacon.igc.org

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Two on Foxconn in China
 
Apple Opens Partners' Doors to Labor Group, Lists
Suppliers
 
By Stanley James and Adam Satariano - Jan 13, 2012
 
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-13/apple-opens-suppliers-doors-to-labor-group-after-foxconn-worker-suicides.html
 
Apple Inc. (APPL) agreed to let outside monitors into
factories of partners, such as Foxconn Technology Group
(2317), and listed suppliers for the first time to
counter criticism about conditions of workers making
its gadgets.
 
The iPhone maker becomes the first technology company
to join the Fair Labor Association. The
Washington-based FLA was set up in 1999 to monitor
workplace environments globally in an initiative by
former U.S. President Bill Clinton, and its
participants include Nike Inc. (NKE) and Nestle SA.
(NESN) Apple also released its annual suppliers' audit
yesterday.
 
Apple's affiliation with the FLA highlights the risk to
multinational companies' brands due to difficulties in
policing suppliers as they outsource manufacturing to
cut costs. Nike became a founding member of the
association after reports of low pay, abuses and poor
conditions at sportswear factories in Asia sparked
boycotts and protests in the 1990s.
 
"Most big corporations have their 'Nike moment' at some
stage -- when they realize the difficulties of
maintaining their standards, particularly in an
increasingly global environment," FLA President Auret
van Heerden said. "The problem with the supply chain is
that it's a moving target."
 
The move by Cupertino, California-based Apple will
intensify scrutiny of its suppliers, including
Seoul-based Samsung Electronics Co. (005930) and
Inchon, South Korea-based Hynix Semiconductor Inc.
(000660) The FLA makes unannounced checks on about 5
percent of its members' supply chains each year,
according to Van Heerden. Underage Labor
 
Apple released a list of 156 companies that represent
97 percent of procurement costs, along with its annual
report on factories where the iPhone, iPad and other
products are made.
 
In the course of the 229 audits, Apple said it
discovered several violations, including instances of
underage labor at five facilities. Apple said it
required the suppliers to support the young workers to
return to school and to improve their management
systems to add age-verification procedures. Apple also
said it found instances of involuntary labor and
stopped working with one of suppliers involved.
 
Apple also discovered at least 90 factories with
records showing workers were exceeding its maximum of
60 hours a week and at least one day of rest per seven
days of work. The company found violations of
anti-discrimination rules for workers who were pregnant
or had hepatitis B. Apple said it made the suppliers
end the discriminatory screenings.
 
Van Heerden, of the FLA, said growing scrutiny of
global companies by investors and consumers means they
are more likely to insist suppliers introduce best
practices in countries where governments are unable or
unwilling to do so.
 
"If you're a 16-year-old girl in a developing country,
your best chance of enjoying proper rights is if you
get to work at a multinational," he said. "The power of
their contract is more powerful than the power of law."
Foxconn Scrutiny
 
Apple's biggest supplier, Taiwan's Foxconn, has been a
subject of scrutiny after at least 12 workers have
committed suicide at its plants in China. Three died
last year and more than 70 were hurt in blasts at two
iPad facilities, one of which was also owned by
Foxconn. In response to pressure from Apple and the
media, Foxconn more than doubled wages in 2010 for some
workers in China and employed counselors.
 
Apple will now subject itself and its suppliers to the
FLA's membership criteria, including submitting to
audits and enforcing a code of conduct based on
standards approved by the United Nations' International
Labor Organization.
 
Taipei-based Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. (2317),
Foxconn's flagship listed unit, gets 22 percent of its
revenue from Apple, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
Pegatron Corp. (4938) earns 16 percent of sales from
the U.S. company. Hong Kong Demonstrations
 
Efforts to improve conditions have failed to appease
some activists and labor groups. Demonstrators at the
September opening of Apple's flagship store in Hong
Kong called on the company to protect workers' rights.
China Labor Watch last month said the explosion at
Foxconn's plant in May and another on Dec. 17 at a
factory owned by Taipei-based Pegatron were caused by
ignition of aluminum dust produced by polishing iPad
cases.
 
Independent monitoring isn't the panacea to problems in
China's factories, said Geoffrey Crothall,
communications director of workers-rights group China
Labour Bulletin.
 
"The problem isn't whether or not they do audits, but
whether workers are treated in a reasonable manner," he
said. "What the workers need is an effective voice in
the workplace." Brand Value
 
Apple is more vulnerable than most to damage to its
reputation, according to an annual ranking compiled by
Interbrand. The brand was valued at $33.5 billion last
year, the eighth-highest in the world and up from 17th
place in 2010, according to the index.
 
The company's affiliation to the FLA marks a further
broadening of oversight for the agency. The association
was formed in 1999, primarily by the apparel industry,
after Clinton challenged companies and pressure groups
to address rising complaints about standards at
factories operating overseas, according to its website.
 
Beaverton, Oregon-based Nike, the world's largest
sportswear maker, was a founding member. Adidas Group
(ADS), Hennes & Mauritz AB and Juicy Couture owner Liz
Claiborne Inc. (LIZ) are among 33 participating
companies.
 
Basel, Switzerland-based Syngenta AG, the world's
largest maker of agricultural chemicals, sought the
FLA's help in 2004 to address concerns over child labor
and working conditions on Indian cottonseed farms.
Nestle, based in Vevey, Switzerland, in November
commissioned the agency to assess the use of child
labor and conditions at West African producers of cocoa
used in its products such as KitKat and Quality Street
candies.
 
Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) said this week that a protest on
Jan. 4 by 150 workers at a Foxconn factory in southern
China wasn't related to working conditions and the
majority of employees who took part had returned to
work. Some had threatened to jump from the roof of a
factory building, the Daily Telegraph reported, citing
an unidentified person said to have participated in the
action.
 
Forty-five of the 150 workers, who were protesting
against a plan to transfer them to another business
unit, resigned, according to a Foxconn statement.
 
To contact the reporters on this story: Stanley James
in Hong Kong at sjames8 at bloomberg.net; Adam Satariano
in San Francisco at asatariano1 at bloomberg.net
 
 
 
Foxconn Resolves a Dispute With Some Workers in China 
 
By DAVID BARBOZA
 
January 12, 2012
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/13/technology/foxconn-resolves-pay-dispute-with-workers.html
 
SHANGHAI -- Foxconn Technology, a major supplier to
several electronics giants, said on Thursday that it
had resolved a pay dispute with scores of workers at
one of its factories in central China after a large
protest that involved threats from some workers to
commit suicide.
 
The company, the largest contract electronics
manufacturer in the world, whose clients include Apple,
Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, said the dispute last
week had been resolved successfully and peacefully but
that 45 workers had resigned.
 
In a statement released on Thursday, Foxconn said most
of the protesting workers had agreed to return to work
after negotiations with the company and local
government officials. Details of the agreement were not
released, but one of the workers said they had been
promised additional compensation.
 
Foxconn said the protest had involved about 150 of the
32,000 employees at its campus in the city of Wuhan. It
was the latest incident in a long-running series of
labor troubles at the company, which supplies popular
goods like the Apple iPhone, the Amazon Kindle and the
Microsoft Xbox.
 
In 2010, there was a wave of suicides by distraught
workers at several of Foxconn's Chinese sites. The
company, which is controlled by Hon Hai Hai Precision
Industry of Taiwan, has been accused of forcing workers
to endure long hours and harsh working conditions for
little pay.
 
Under pressure from Apple and other major brands,
Foxconn has pledged to improve working conditions in
China, and the company has hired psychiatrists to
counsel workers.
 
The company has also begun a huge program to invest in
robots and to move some of its production to the
central and western parts of China, where labor is less
costly and more abundant. The company says the new
locations also allow migrant workers to live closer to
their hometowns.
 
But while working conditions at Foxconn and other
exporters in China may be slowly improving, the demands
of workers seem to be rising more rapidly.
 
There has been a rash of strikes and labor protests
across the country in recent months, partly in response
to inflation and a greater awareness of the labor laws.
The strikes, which sometimes involve thousands of
workers, often include demands for higher pay,
insurance and better working conditions.
 
In Wuhan, some of the workers who protested said they
were angry about being forced to move from Foxconn's
biggest campus, in the southern Chinese city of
Shenzhen, to Wuhan.
 
One worker who participated in the Wuhan protest said
by telephone that employees shifted to Wuhan had been
promised about $450 a month in salary, including
overtime pay, but that they had been given about a
third less than that and that working conditions in
Wuhan were much more difficult.
 
The worker, who asked not to be identified for fear of
being punished by Foxconn, said more than 100 workers
had decided to protest on the roof of a three-story
building on the campus. The protest lasted more than
eight hours.
 
Several threatened to commit suicide if their demands
were not met, he said. "That day was very cold," he
said. "Some women could not stand the freezing
temperatures and fainted."
 
In a statement released on Thursday, Foxconn said: "The
welfare of our employees is our top priority, and we
are committed to ensuring that all employees are
treated fairly and that their rights are fully
protected."
 
Gu Huini contributed research.

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