http://www.debito.org/?p=9171#comment-254665
Loverilakkuma Says:
July 4th, 2011 at 10:49 am
“the difference is on the attitude that the country and the law takes on it. In one country, as a victim you have recourse and the law will back you up; in another, you don’t and the law won’t.”
Agreed. This apathetic attitude pretty much articulates for an undying phenomenon of JP cultural uniqueness–a.k.a. “Galapagos mentality.”
性懲りもなく・・・・
tepidoにも書いたが、一応こっちにも、
Workplace Fairness - hidden America undocumented workers
Undocumented workers are among the most vulnerable and exploited workers in America. They are often victims of unpaid wages, dangerous conditions and uncompensated workplace injuries, discrimination, and other labor law violations. Undocumented workers who try to stand up for their rights routinely face physical and immigration-related threats and retaliation.
Undocumented workers are among the most vulnerable and exploited workers in our country, as frequent victims of unpaid wages, dangerous conditions and uncompensated workplace injuries, discrimination, and other labor law violations. Workers who attempt to remedy the abuse routinely face physical and immigration-related threats and retaliation.
There are an estimated 6.5 million undocumented immigrant workers in the U.S., representing a vital workforce in manufacturing, service, construction, restaurant, and agriculture sectors. Immigrant and non-immigrant communities alike must be informed that all workers妖ocumented or undocumented預re protected under our most basic federal and state employment and labor laws.
The most common protections denied undocumented workers include:
The right to receive the promised wage and/or at least the minimum wage and overtime pay for work actually performed.
The right to healthy and safe conditions on the job.
The right to receive workers compensation benefits for injuries on the job.
The right to be free from discrimination based on sex, color, race, religion, and national origin; age; and disabilities.
以前も取り上げた
Slaughterhouse Sweatshop: Filmmaker exposes US dirty secrets
Posted by Brenda Norrell - February 15, 2010 at 10:45 pm
Guatemala filmmaker tells story of stories of the ICE raid in Postville, Iowa
By Brenda Norrell
TUCSON -- Americans want to go to the supermarket and find their meat neatly packaged. They don't want to hear about the 14-year-old girl from Guatemala who worked 12 hours a day, or the woman who was raped by her supervisor at the meat packing plant. They don't want to hear about the mothers who have "kill" water thrown on them or hear a young girl crying from the pain in her hands from operating power meat cutting shears.
Americans don't want to hear about Postville, Iowa, or how the US spent $5.2 million on a raid that revealed the underbelly of not just the meat packing industry, but of the abuse of migrant workers by US companies and the sinister justice delivered by the US Justice Department.
Guatemalan filmmaker Luis Argueta is telling this story. On Monday night at the University of Arizona, Argueta previewed thirty minutes of his work in progress of the feature documentary film, "abUSed: The Postville Raid." It is just a portion of the 350 hours of testimonies and interviews he has conducted in Postville and Guatemala over the past 20 months.
・・・・・
Argueta said US corporations view the poor and desperate as "disposables." With excellent storytelling and cinematography, Argueta tells of the struggles for survival and dignity of migrant workers, many of whom are Mayans and other Indigenous Peoples.
Argueta said US authorities care whether a cow is killed with a sharp knife, but nothing about the migrant worker.
More about the film:
http://www.abusedthepostvilleraid.com
"abUSed: The Postville Raid" Theatrical Trailer
別に最近始まった話ではあるまい。
The Abuse of Illegal Immigrants
Published: July 22, 1997
The deaf Mexicans discovered last weekend living in virtual slavery in two cramped houses in Jackson Heights, Queens, were victims of the evils that can be inflicted on illegal immigrants who live in constant fear of discovery and deportation. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani of New York has responded to the Mexicans' plight with sensitivity and compassion, arranging for them to be sheltered by the Red Cross in hotel rooms instead of being bused off to a Pennsylvania jail. But there is little question that most of the illegal immigrants will eventually have to be deported back to Mexico.
The United States has a right and a duty to restrict immigration to this country. But people who are powerfully motivated to come here anyway will find themselves highly vulnerable to their smugglers and abusive employers.
8 Myths About Sweatshop
1."There are no sweatshops in the U.S."
Sweatshop exploitation is not an overseas problem. The worst kinds of working conditions – indentured servitude and slavery – exist right here in the United States. For example, in 1994, 72 Thai slaves were found working 22 hours a day under threats of physical violence inside a barbed-wire compound in El Monte, CA. Workers in many industries (auto, toys, electronic, even data processing and services) are caught up in new global sweating systems. Long hours are spreading across the country, regardless of industry, community, trade, income, or skill level. Repetitive motion injuries are on the rise.
ハリケーンカトリナの復旧のときも、
Study: Immigrant workers endure hazardous conditions, abuse post-Katrina
Posted 6/7/2006 8:59 AM ET E-mail | Save | Print |
NEW ORLEANS (AP) ― They are the backbone of post-Hurricane Katrina reconstruction: Workers who converge at dawn and wait to be picked up for 14-hour shifts of hauling debris, ripping out drywall and nailing walls.
But because many are in the country illegally, immigrant workers rebuilding New Orleans are especially vulnerable to exploitation, according to a study released Tuesday by professors at Tulane University and the University of California at Berkeley.
The illegal immigrants often work in hazardous conditions without protective gear and earn far less than their legal counterparts, the study said. Nearly one-third of the illegal immigrants interviewed by researchers reported working with harmful substances and in dangerous conditions, while 19% said they were not given any protective equipment.
Illegal immigrants also were paid significantly less ― if at all ― earning on average $10 per hour, compared with $16.50 for documented workers, the study said.
・・・・・
While 83% of documented workers interviewed by the researchers said had access to medicine when needed, only 38% of illegal immigrants did. Around one-third of illegal immigrants said they understood the hazards of removing asbestos or mold, compared with more than 65% of documented laborers. Thirty-three percent of legal workers received medical attention when needed for a reported problem, compared to 10% of undocumented workers.
Some of those waiting for work said they are afraid of complaining.
"It's too dangerous for my body," said 29-year-old Saul Linan, an illegal immigrant from Mexico. "But I don't say anything. If I do, the boss says, 'Hey, if you don't work hard, I'll take you to immigration.'
例のすっぱいいちご、というドキュメンタリーもこっちのパクリだろう。
IN the strawberry field
In the Strawberry Fields
The management of California's strawberry industry offers a case study of both the dependence on an imported peasantry that characterizes much of American agriculture and the destructive consequences of a deliberate low-wage economy
Work in the Strawberry Fields - Presentation
・・・・・
THE NEW SERVITUDE
When I met Felipe (a pseudonym, as are all the other names presented without surnames), he seemed in bad shape. His clothes were dirty and torn, his face haggard and unshaven. His strawberry field looked like hell too. The rows were littered with rotting berries, old boxes, and soda cans. There were broken irrigation hoses; no plastic enclosed the beds. "Too expensive," he told me. "The company doesn't pay me enough." Nearby, his workers picked "cat-faces"--small, deformed berries--off second-year plants. Rain had seriously damaged the field. Felipe was selling his fruit for twelve cents a pound. He couldn't understand why the price for strawberries for processing was so low, but the terms of his sharecropping contract required him to accept it. "They use us all year as slaves," he said.
・・・・・
Chinese Immigrants Finding Christ on American Shores
By Wendy Griffith
CBN News Anchor/Reporter
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Many of them are illegal immigrants, paying human traffickers as much as $80,000 to get from China to New York. It's a long, dangerous journey that includes hiding in cargo containers, risking imprisonment, or being thrown overboard.
Amazingly, most have no difficulty paying the money, which is regarded as an investment. Families and relatives pool their money together with hopes of big payoffs in the future.
It's estimated that about 30,000 illegal Chinese immigrants enter the U.S. each year.
For those fortunate enough to make it to America safely, their top priority is making money to pay back their smugglers. As for religion, most arrive as Buddhist, Confucians, or with no religion at all.
But, it's often in the U.S., working in the sweat shops or restaurants, that they hear about Jesus.
搾取店で働きながら、神のお力を借りて、希望を見いだす人もいるようではある。
もっとも最低賃金以下で働いているのは移民だけとは限らないようであるが・・・
Criticism of Walmart
From Wikipedia
Workers in America, Cheated
Published: September 2, 2009
An important new study has cast an appalling light on a place where workplace laws fail to protect workers, where wages and tips are routinely stolen, where having to work sick, injured or off the clock is the price of having a job.
The place is the United States, all across the lower strata of the urban economy.
The most comprehensive investigation of labor-law violations in years, released Wednesday by the Center for Urban Economic Development, the National Employment Law Project and the U.C.L.A. Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, surveyed 4,387 workers in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. Its researchers sought out people often missed by standard surveys and found abuses everywhere: in factories, grocery stores, retail shops, construction sites, offices, warehouses and private homes. The word sweatshop clearly is not big enough anymore to capture the extent and severity of the rot in the low-wage workplace.
Fabian Gutierrez, 32, a Mexican immigrant who lives in Chicago, said he worked for less than minimum wage and no overtime for months, and he put up with the situation because he was desperate to support his wife and young daughter. (Nam Y. Huh / Associated Press)
L.A. leads New York, Chicago in abuse of low-wage workers, survey says
UCLA study finds widespread violation of minimum wage and overtime laws. Large pool of illegal immigrants and predatory business strategies in garment and building sectors are major factors.
Fabian Gutierrez, 32, a Mexican immigrant who lives in Chicago, said he… (Nam Y. Huh / Associated Press)
January 06, 2010|By Patrick J. McDonnell
Low-wage workers in the Los Angeles area are even more likely than their counterparts in New York and Chicago to suffer violations of minimum wage, overtime and other labor laws, according to a new UCLA study being released today.
The study found that almost nine out of 10 low-wage workers surveyed in Los Angeles County had recently experienced some form of pay-related workplace violation, or "wage theft." Almost one in three reported being paid less than the minimum wage and nearly 80% said they had not received legally mandated overtime.
"We knew these violations were happening, but we never really imagined it was as prevalent as this study demonstrates," said Ruth Milkman, a sociologist and principal author of the study, conducted by UCLA's Institute for Research on Labor and Employment.
The authors described the study as a ground-breaking effort to quantify the plight of a vulnerable, largely immigrant population that is often missed in standard surveys.
Los Angeles employees also reported working off the clock, not receiving proper meal and rest breaks, being forced to work despite injuries and facing retaliation from employers for complaining or trying to start a union. Almost one in five Los Angeles restaurant employees and others receiving tips reported that employers or supervisors illegally pocketed all or part of their tips.
The study found that small and large employers across a broad swath of industries in Los Angeles County regularly violated labor laws. "These problems are not limited to the underground economy or to a few bad apples," the report said.
