Risky business
04/27/2006
Come Monday, a large portion of the state’s population will be staying home from work and school and refraining from buying things — despite impassioned pleas to the contrary — as part of continuing protests over the government’s failure to fairly regulate immigration.
Likely missing from the landscapes of our normal lives that day — better known as Labor Day in every other part of the world except the United States and Canada — will be the folks who keep our lives on track; busing our dishes, washing our cars, cutting our lawns, cleaning our homes and watching our kids.
Coincidentally, Monday is also May Day and International Workers’ Day, holidays that came to be associated more with Cold War perceptions of the former Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China than as a legitimate celebration of workers who fought and sometimes died for better working conditions and standards of living.
In September, America and Canada celebrate their own versions of Labor Day, which these days marks the end of summer and the start of the fall school semester more than anything else. But the truth is, nothing could be more in keeping with the spirit of the American labor movement than the walkout and boycott that is being planned for Monday.
Just as coal miners, steel workers and other skilled and unskilled workers of 120 years ago — most of them also of immigrant stock — were forced to stand their ground and do sometimes radical things in order to achieve rights to standardized wages, an eight-hour day and vacations, so, too, do many people today feel the need to express themselves in order to be recognized for their contributions to society.
Needless to say, many leaders in the Latino, activist, labor, political and religious communities are as worried as they are torn. As the Los Angeles Times’ Teresa Watanabe reported recently, organizers of the pro-immigrant rallies of a few weeks back now can’t decide on the best way to proceed.
Members of the March 25 Coalition, one of the primary organizing groups of the massive immigration rallies in downtown LA, believe such action, organized in the confrontational spirit of such civil rights giants as Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King Jr., is necessary to drive home the message that immigrants aren’t criminals, but critical components to the success of our society.
Others, however, such as the We Are America coalition, another organizer of the LA demonstrations which includes the Catholic Church, is dead set against people taking off from work, staying home from classes and staging boycotts. Go to work, go to school, then attend rallies afterward, they urge.
The problem for most of the people who will be taking all the risks by taking a day off is they will not have the formal backing of any of their employers or any of the organizations that are designed to protect jobs, namely unions, associations and guilds, many of which are prohibited by their own contracts from participating in the walkout.
That means people who choose to take the day off from work and school and celebrate a holiday that’s acknowledged in their home country but not here will be taking enormous risks.
In anticipation of the boycott and walkout, some public agencies and businesses are giving their workers fair warning to either find replacements or make some other arrangements ahead of time — or face the consequences.
You see, no matter how sympathetic an employer may be, whether it’s the state, county of LA or a mom-and-pop restaurant, work still needs to be done, and a pool of other politically weak and vulnerable people are at the ready to replace protesters.
So be forewarned.
But with that said, we applaud the courage of those who are willing to risk what little they have in order to make a forceful statement — and in the finest of American traditions — that immigrants are neither criminals nor political pawns, and that the worth of working people does not lie entirely in the disproportionately low salaries they earn for all their toil.
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