Every time ICE conducts an I-9 audit -- attempting to discover undocumented workers and demanding they be fired -- people suffer. Human beings. A worker can no longer provide for his or her family. Health care benefits cease. The US citizen children of an undocumented worker face the terror of not knowing if they will come home and find their parents vanished.
And so, tomorrow, in Berkeley, California...
Supporters of the 200 undocumented laborers recently fired from Pacific Steel Casting Company will participate in a protest for worker rights Friday with a March for Dignity from Old City Hall to Pacific Steel's facility in West Berkeley.
These laborers were fired as the ultimate result of an I-9 audit, started last year. This is just one of hundreds, if not thousands, of such raids across the country. Untold numbers of people who have been in this country for decades, raising children from birth to adulthood, are losing their jobs and facing the terrible uncertainty of deportation.
Not so surprisingly, these ICE raids often come during a period of labor strife. With regard to Pacific Steel:
There had been a strike in March, 2011, because the company was demanding reduction in health benefits. The work is hard, the conditions toxic (as in any foundry), and people are forced to work without a break.
Another strike-related dismissal was recently in the news at Pomona College.
As the New York Times reported two weeks ago:
The dining hall workers had been at Pomona College for years, some even decades. For a few, it was the only job they had held since moving to the United States...
Seventeen workers could not produce documents showing that they were legally able to work in the United States. So on Dec. 2, they lost their jobs...
For the last two years, many of the dining hall workers had been organizing to form a union, but the efforts stalled amid negotiations with the administration. Many on campus believe that the administration began looking into the employees' work authorizations as a way to thwart the union effort, an accusation the college president, David W. Oxtoby, has repeatedly denied...
"We were here for a very long time and there was never a complaint," said Christian Torres, 25, a cook who had worked at the college for six years. "But now all of the sudden we were suspect, and they didn't want us to work here anymore."
It's not just job dismissals of course. The administration will have, inexplicably, deported about as many undocumented people from this country during President Obama's first term as were deported during the eight years of Bush II's administration.
The Obama administration had deported about 1.06 million as of September 12, against 1.57 million in Bush's two full presidential terms. -- Reuters
No single protest march is going to stop ICE, or change the administration's policies, or produce an actual immigration reform law. But it has to start somewhere. This march is one of what will hopefully be a series of actions designed to call attention to immigration rights issues and begin the process of uniting disparate groups across the Bay Area (and eventually the country) with the immediate goal of a huge outpouring on May Day, May 1st, 2012, International Workers' Day and Immigration Rights Day.
Occupy Oakland, whose Labor Solidarity Committee helped organize the march along with various immigrants' rights groups and others, will be there. And if you live in the Bay Area and are free, you should too.
After all, this should need no translation:
MARCHA por la dignidad. A defender los derechos humanos y laborales de los/las immigrantes!
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p.s. Weather reports suggest a beautiful day tomorrow for the mile and a half long march, warm enough not to chill, cool enough not to sweat; perfect weather to march for human rights.