This is Slavery. How Trump is Helping Tycoons Exploit the Pandemic by Jane Mayer

This is outrageous and upsetting.  Give this a close read to learn about American slavery, as an African American woman interviewed for this story exclaimed. It's shocking and disgusting to read about how during a pandemic, Trump is loosening every regulation imaginable right now—from poultry and meat packing plants, to trucking companies and oil and gas pipelines. The New Yorker's focus here is on poultry companies who are hyper-exploiting their workers right now. 

This is happening as their greedy corporate bosses are delivering between 2 and 3 million dollars to the Trump campaign. Get this. They are his biggest campaign contributors,

This is Coronoavirus, disaster capitalism, my friends, that is literally sacrificing, Latinos, African Americans, and Asian Americans to highly dangerous, toxic, prison-like, freezing working conditions in plants where production rates of Birds Per Minute—while standing next to COVID-infected employees in COVID-infected plants—reach ever-higher, plateaus. 

It's terrifying to read that these companies have stopped generating official data for the public which, of course means, that the general public is also sacrificed and at risk.

Untold numbers are dying. This is inhumane. We need an abolitionist movement for what is happening in these industries hidden away from public view, reminiscent of Upton Sinclair's famous 1906 novel, The Jungle [free download available].

"The book so shocked Americans that President Theodore Roosevelt ordered an immediate investigation of slaughterhouses. The result was landmark consumer-protection legislation that formed the foundation of today’s Food and Drug Administration."

We need an FDR. We need consumer and worker protections all over again in this country. Here is one small, meaningful action we can all take today.  Please sign this petition—Poultry Companies: Give workers essential benefits and safe conditions during COVID19 where you can also make a contribution. National LULAC is also taking this on under the brilliant leadership of Domingo Garcia and Sindy Benavides.

This whole system needs to be upended. We need a national campaign to boycott any plant that treats its workers so horrifically. 

Just the thought of chicken produced under these conditions makes my stomach churn anyway.

Aside from the general principle of the matter, it's for the good of everybody's health and welfare. You may want to go straight to the NY website, as I just did, to listen to the audio version of this story.  The narrator, presumably the author, Jane Mayer, does an excellent job. Hearing her tell the story made it even more impactful for me.  So impactful that I had to blog about this right away.

-Angela Valenzuela

#BlackLivesMatter
#BrownLivesMatter
#AsianLivesMatter
#CoronavirusCapitalism
#AbolishSlavery
#AbolishSlaveryInAmerica

A Reporter at Large

July 20, 2020 Issue

How Trump Is Helping Tycoons Exploit the Pandemic

The secretive titan behind one of America’s largest poultry companies, who is also one of the President’s top donors, is ruthlessly leveraging the coronavirus crisis—and his vast fortune—to strip workers of protections.

By Jane Mayer

July 13, 2020

 Ronald Cameron, the head of Mountaire, which critics call a “brutal” employer, is one of Trump’s top donors.Illustration by Cleon Peterson

On June 22nd, in the baking heat of a parking lot a few miles inland from Delaware’s beaches, several dozen poultry workers, many of them Black or Latino, gathered to decry the conditions at a local poultry plant owned by one of President Donald Trump’s biggest campaign contributors. “We’re here for a reason that is atrocious,” Nelson Hill, an official with the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, told the small but boisterous crowd, which included top Democratic officials from the state, among them Senator Chris Coons. The union, part of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., represents some 1.3 million laborers in poultry-processing and meatpacking plants, as well as workers in grocery stores and retail establishments. Its members, many defined as “essential” workers—without the option of staying home—have been hit extraordinarily hard by the coronavirus. The union estimates that nearly thirty thousand of its workers in the food and health-care sectors have contracted covid-19, and that two hundred and thirty-eight of those have died.

For the previous forty-two years, a thousand or so laborers at the local processing plant, in Selbyville, had been represented by Local 27. Just two years earlier, the workers there had ratified a new five-year contract. But, Hill told the crowd, in the middle of the pandemic, as the number of infected workers soared, the plant’s owner, Mountaire Corporation—one of the country’s largest purveyors of chicken—conspired, along with Donald Trump, to “kick us out.”

Hill, who is Black and from a working-class family on the Delmarva Peninsula—a scrubby stretch of farmland that includes parts of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia—was used to the area’s heat and humidity. But, as he spoke to the crowd, behind dark glasses, his face glistened with anger. “It’s greed, that’s what it is,” he said. “It’s a damn shame.”

The jobs at Mountaire rank as among the most dangerous and worst paid in America. Government statistics indicate that poultry and meat-processing companies report more severe injuries than other industries commonly assumed to be more hazardous, including coal mining and sawmilling. Between 2015 and 2018, on average, a slaughterhouse worker lost a body part, or went to the hospital for in-patient treatment, about every other day. Unlike meatpackers, two-thirds of whom belong to unions, only about a third of poultry workers are represented by organized labor—and those who are unionized face mounting pressure. The industry, which is dominated by large multinational corporations such as Mountaire, has grown increasingly concentrated, expanding its political influence while replacing unionized employees with contract hires, often immigrants or refugees. These vulnerable workers are technically hired by temp agencies, relieving poultry plants of accountability if documentation is lacking. Trump has weakened federal oversight of the industry while accepting millions of dollars in political donations from some of its most powerful figures, including Ronald Cameron, Mountaire’s reclusive owner. In 2016, Cameron gave nearly three million dollars to organizations supporting Trump’s candidacy.

Founded in Little Rock, Arkansas, but incorporated in Delaware, Mountaire has operations in five states. It reportedly generated more than $2.3 billion in revenue last year. Because it is owned almost entirely by Cameron—and because it supplies poultry to other companies that put their own labels on the meat—the company’s public profile is virtually nonexistent. Cameron himself has received almost no media attention. “I’ve tried mightily over the years to bump into him, but he lays low,” Max Brantley, a longtime editor at the Arkansas Times, told me. According to trade journals, however, Mountaire has been spectacularly successful. Arkansas Business reported that the company’s sales in 2019 were a billion dollars higher than they were in 2010, nearly doubling the size of the business. Information on profits isn’t available, but as Mountaire’s revenues have risen wages for poultry workers have fallen even further behind. In 2002, workers were paid twenty-four per cent less than the national average for manufacturing jobs; today, they are paid forty-four per cent less. On average, poultry workers now earn less than fourteen dollars an hour.

By long-standing custom, labor contracts are binding for at least three years, giving a union time to prove its value to members. But in April a laborer at the Selbyville plant, Oscar Cruz Sosa, raised a legal objection to the contract, arguing that he’d been forced to join the union and pay dues against his will. He wanted a vote on whether to decertify the union. Mountaire maintains that it played no role in Cruz Sosa’s actions, and that the move to decertify the union was “entirely employee-driven.” But Cruz Sosa has had some outside help. His case was supported by lawyers from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, the foremost anti-union advocacy group, which is funded by undisclosed tax-deductible donations. Meanwhile, a mysterious group calling itself the Oscar Cruz Committee for Employee Rights sent out mailings, in English, supporting Cruz Sosa’s complaint. (Cruz Sosa speaks only Spanish.) The return address was the Rehoboth Beach branch of MailBiz, which rents post-office boxes.

Jonathan Williams, a spokesperson for the union, suspects that Cruz Sosa was a stalking horse. “It’s not hard to find one individual, who may get special privileges from management, and who maybe is offered a future position,” he told me. “It’s very, very rare, though, when an employee does the research, contacts the Department of Labor, and goes through all this effort. Usually, someone is being coached.” (Cruz Sosa didn’t respond to interview requests.)

When the union reached out to Cruz Sosa, his lawyers filed a grievance with the National Labor Relations Board, claiming harassment. The specific legal dispute is abstruse. Mark Mix, the president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, has called the contract’s language “illegal,” claiming that it didn’t make sufficiently clear that—as stipulated by law—new employees had thirty days to decide whether to join the union. The union argues that applications presented to new employees are unambiguous about the time frame, and says that the current contract has virtually the same boilerplate used in every contract with Mountaire since 1982.

After Cruz Sosa got thirty per cent of his co-workers to sign a petition, the National Labor Relations Board ordered an election at the Selbyville plant. When the union protested that this would violate the customary bar on overturning contracts before three years, the N.L.R.B. decided to broaden the case, reëxamining the entire concept of barring challenges to settled union contracts. The move has shocked labor-law experts. By statute, the N.L.R.B. has five members and is bipartisan, but the Trump Administration has filled only three seats, all with Republicans.

Given the pandemic, the union argued that there was no way an in-person election could be safely and fairly held in Sussex County, where Selbyville is situated. Delaware’s governor had declared a state of emergency on March 23rd, because of the surge in covid-19 cases, almost half of them in Sussex County, which has many poultry plants. The union asked for a stay, but on June 24th the N.L.R.B. moved to proceed with the election, by mail. The ballots that were sent out must be received by July 14th. Meanwhile, the board will weigh the larger question of whether such elections are legal, potentially overturning a precedent that dates back to the New Deal.

“We’re really being let down by the federal agencies,” Williams, the union spokesperson, said. He also lamented a shift at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the division of the Labor Department that enforces workplace safety. Since osha’s inception, in 1970, the agency has enforced federal law that makes it illegal to subject employees to “recognized hazards.” But during the pandemic the Times editorial board has been prompted to ask, “Why is osha awol?” Democrats pushed for the agency to issue an emergency rule forcing businesses to comply with the Centers for Disease Control’s health guidelines for covid-19, but the Labor Department refused.

Instead, on April 28th, forty-eight hours after Tyson Foods, the world’s second-largest meat company, ran a full-page ad in several newspapers warning that “the food supply chain is breaking,” Trump issued an executive order defining slaughterhouse workers as essential. The White House had appointed Cameron to an advisory board on the pandemic’s economic impact. The executive order commanded meat-processing facilities to “continue operations uninterrupted to the extent possible.” The Labor Department released an accompanying statement that all but indemnified companies for exposing workers to covid-19. It assured employers in essential industries that the agency wouldn’t hold them responsible if they failed to follow the C.D.C.’s health guidelines, as long as they made a “good faith” effort.

Meat and poultry workers had to keep working and risk infection—or lose their jobs. By July 7th, osha had received more than six thousand coronavirus-related workplace complaints but had issued only one citation, to a nursing home in Georgia. David Michaels, a professor of public health at George Washington University, who headed osha during the Obama Administration, told me that the agency was “saying that the Labor Department would side with the employers if workers sued,” and added, “That would be unthinkable in any other Administration. osha’s job isn’t to protect corporations—it’s to protect workers!”

The prospect of food shortages understandably caused concern in the White House. Yet reports show that in April, as Tyson and other producers were warning that “millions of pounds of meat will disappear” from American stores if they had to shut down, exports of pork to China broke records—and Mountaire’s chicken exports were 3.4 per cent higher than they were a year earlier. The next month, the company’s exports were 10.9 per cent lower than in 2019, but its exports to China and Hong Kong grew by 23.1 per cent in April and by fourteen per cent in May, according to statistics provided by Christopher Rogers, an analyst with Panjiva, which tracks the food-supply chain. Tony Corbo, a lobbyist for Food and Water Watch, a progressive nonprofit advocacy group, said, “They were crying about shortages, and yet we’re still exporting meat. The shortage was phony.”

Meanwhile, coronavirus cases exploded in the meat-and-poultry industry. Initially, Mountaire released statistics about employee infections. At the end of March, the company told the union that there had been forty-one cases in Selbyville. However, Hill’s shop steward, Manuel Rosales, told him not to trust this number. “Half the plant isn’t there,” he explained, either because the workers were sick or because they feared becoming so. A month later, a television station in North Carolina reported that a Mountaire plant, in Siler City, which employs some sixteen hundred workers, had at least seventy-four positive cases among workers and their families. After that, the company stopped sharing its covid-19 numbers. Mountaire became so secretive, Hill said, that workers “were seeing people disappear, and they didn’t know what the hell was going on.” In many cases, a “co-worker had tested positive, but the company wouldn’t tell anyone.” Rosales, who works in the deboning department at the Selbyville plant, told me, “People are coughing and they don’t look well, but they just want to keep the chicken coming. It’s all hush-hush.”

Cathy Bassett, the communications director for Mountaire Farms of Delaware, confirmed, “We’re not releasing any numbers,” adding, “I don’t even know those numbers. We’ve told our workers that if you’ve been exposed we’ll notify you.” According to Hill, the company argued to the union that it was protecting employee privacy. “They were hiding behind it,” Hill told me. “We weren’t asking for private health information—we were just trying to report the numbers.”

With Texas' economy beginning to open up today, it's always good to know whose interests are not only served by, but who's motivating policy that is literally a matter of life and death with the agenda of opening up the economy.  As author Sarah Lazare aptly concludes, this opening will cost nothing to Trump, the Koch Foundation, The Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, and the American Legislative Exchange Council all of whom oppose labor unions, workers' rights, and a living wage.  However, "the price for ordinary people will be immeasurable."

We have a grueling eight more months of this presidency.  We must all vote him and his party out of power in November.  While his poll numbers do not look good right now, we must take nothing for granted as he'll stop at nothing to do whatever he can to hold onto his incumbency. 

-Angela Valenzuela

MONDAY, APR 20, 2020, 12:55 PM

Koch-Funded Think Tanks Are Lobbying to Send Workers to Their Deaths

BY SARAH LAZARE

It’s no mystery what will happen if we rush to reopen the economy and send people back to work before epidemiologists say it is safe to do so. A model produced in consultation with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in March projected a worst-case scenario of 1.7 million Americans killed. Another estimate by the Imperial College London put this number at 2.2 million. We know that COVID-19, which has already taken more than 40,000 U.S. lives, is disproportionately killing African Americans. Poor people are already bearing the brunt of this crisis — and will die in even larger numbers if they are prematurely sent back to wait tables and crowd together in warehouses and factories.

Amid this climate, a small army of right-wing think tanks and conservative organizations is cynically invoking the plight of the downtrodden to make the case for swiftly reopening the economy and sending workers into deadly conditions. Some of the organizations beating this drum the loudest — the Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) — are behind the most anti-worker measures of our times, from the anti-union Janus Supreme Court ruling to the Trump administration’s work requirements for food stamps. As Trump, the GOP, CEOs and now billionaire-backed “protesters” call for the economy to reopen, these think tanks are working fervently behind the scenes, crafting talking points, speaking with legislators and building coalitions aimed at boosting Wall Street’s profits, at the expense of ordinary people.

“The people running these organizations are going to remain safely ensconced in gated mansions with little danger of getting infected themselves, while they make millions of Americans go back to work standing shoulder to shoulder,” Carl Rosen, general president for the UE union (United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America), told In These Times.

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On April 16, Kay Coles James, the president of the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, praised President Trump for issuing guidelines for states to reopen their economies in three phases. “The administration is rightly working to restore livelihoods in the midst of catastrophic job losses while also taking care to balance Americans’ health and safety,” said James. “The Heritage Foundation’s National Coronavirus Recovery Commission is also working quickly to deliver additional recommendations to governments at every level, the private sector, and churches, charities, and other parts of civil society on a pathway to reopen America.”

James was listed as a thought leader on Trump’s dubious “Great American Economic Revival Industry Groups” — likely at least partially a P.R. stunt, but nonetheless, a measure of influence and power. For the Heritage Foundation, it’s a sign that the organization’s campaign to reopen the economy might be paying off. The group announced a “National Coronavirus Recovery Commission” on April 6 and, soon after, issued a five-phase plan for reopening America. According to the Washington Post, the Heritage Foundation is working with other conservative groups including FreedomWorks and ALEC as part of an informal “Save Our Country” coalition aimed at reopening the economy. With funding from the Koch Foundation, ExxonMobil and a bevy of wealthy donors, the Heritage Foundation is at the center of political efforts to prematurely restart the economy.

Remarkably, the organization is citing the well-being of the poor people it wants to send into treacherous conditions when issuing this call. On April 13, James declared, “Keeping the American people at work and prosperous is what will produce better health outcomes for our citizens. A growing economy has the money for research and development into new medical innovations and cures; has more resources to better educate and train medical personnel; and creates greater capacities of beds, equipment, medicines, and personnel to handle the sick. It’s also an economy where abundance allows us to have the resources to help poorer citizens get the medical help that they need.” In other words, she is arguing that reopening the economy will make people sick, but market forces will somehow offset this catastrophe by providing the things we need to treat them—a claim made without evidence, and against the advice of epidemiological experts.

This insistence on sending workers into treacherous conditions “for their own good” stems directly from the organization’s history. The Heritage Foundation was heavily influential in the Reagan administration and right-wing Tea Party movement, and was a major influencer in the Trump administration’s transition team. It is vehemently anti-union, a fierce opponent of a $15 minimum wage, a fervent supporter of the 2018 Janus ruling, which pummeled public-sector unions, and a proponent of so-called right-to-work laws, which say workers don’t have to pay dues to the unions that represent them. Heritage has made gutting public programs for the poor a central focus throughout its existence, and opposes expanding healthcare access.

The organization saw one of its cruelest agenda items come to fruition in December of 2019, when the Trump administration placed further restrictions on who can receive assistance from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as food stamps, declaring that able-bodied adults without children in places that have an unemployment rate below 10% have to work 20 hours a week to qualify. This rule was approved by Trump despite warnings that 700,000 people would lose their food stamps. Maggie Dickinson, a researcher who studied SNAP in New York City from 2011 to 2013, wrote that “work requirements have been shown to not help unemployed people find work and to make it more difficult for them to feed themselves. But taking people who are unemployed off SNAP often does harm to more than just those who directly receive food assistance.” The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the rule change “appears to base its intellectual underpinning on policy developed at the conservative Heritage Foundation, experts say.” The Heritage Foundation, for its part, claimed credit in an article titled “Heritage Research Influences Food Stamp Eligibility Rule.”

According to Rosen of UE, “The only thing these corporations want to achieve is corporate profits as usual. That’s their real goal—not making sure working people have an income, not to make sure health and economic needs were taken care of. If those were their goals, they would support much more robust policies right now that make sure everyone has a full income and full healthcare through Medicare for All. These are the steps that have been taken in many European countries.”

“People need to be paid to stay home right now — that’s the only way we can recover as a country,” Rosen added. “Attempts to force people to go back to work when it’s not safe for them to do so is a horrendous, murderous policy.”

When it comes to the push to reopen the U.S. economy, the Heritage Foundation is not going it alone. As the Associated Press notes, the Koch-backed AFP was “one early shutdown opponent,” making the case that business should be allowed to “adapt and innovate.” Intercept reporter Lee Fang noted on March 26 that AFP, which calls itself a political advocacy group, “wants employees to return to work despite desperate pleas from public health officials that people should stay home as much as possible to help contain the spread of the coronavirus.” State chapters of AFP have also joined in the effort.

Like the Heritage Foundation, the AFP cites the hardships of poor people when pushing for the economy to reopen. “We can achieve public health without depriving the people most in need of the products and services provided by businesses across the country,” the organization said on March 20. “If businesses are shut down, where will people who are most in need get the things they need to care for themselves and others? Rather than blanket shutdowns, the government should allow businesses to continue to adapt and innovate to produce the goods and services Americans need, while continuing to do everything they can to protect the public health.”

Yet AFP, described by In These Times writer Mary Bottari as “the Kochs’ ‘grassroots’ lobbying arm,” has played a tremendous role in gutting public programs aimed at protecting ordinary people, including the CDC, and social welfare programs, particularly Medicaid. In recent years, the organization has gone on a blitz trying to pass right-to-work laws, seeing some success.

Before the COVID-19 crisis began, AFP was mobilizing against the PRO Act, which passed the House in February. This legislation would strengthen the right to strike, override “right-to-work” laws, and punish bosses who retaliate against workers for attempting to form a union. While the legislation is not perfect, it would “go a long way toward reversing decades of GOP-backed efforts to grind unions into dust,” Jeremy Gantz wrote in February for In These Times. AFP is presently circulating a letter which declares, “This legislation would turn back the clock on workers’ rights by undermining many pro-worker successes of recent years, just one year after the Janus v. AFSCME Supreme Court decision that affirmed union membership is a choice for all government workers nationwide.” AFP is not only pushing to send workers into dangerous conditions: It also wants to erode their right to collectively fight back.

But perhaps the biggest villain of all is ALEC, the Koch-backed “nonprofit” model-legislation shop that has devoted its nearly half-century of existence to eroding workers’ rights. ALEC has been active in efforts to reopen the economy. Its CEO Lisa B. Nelson told Newt Gingrich on March 27, “We believe preparations need to be made for a clarion call to get Americans back to work, and so the economy can start its rebound.” ALEC hosted a March 21 conference call featuring ALEC Board of Scholar Member Art Laffer, a right-wing economist and key figure behind the Reagan-era tax cuts for the rich. “We need to get production back — period,” declared Laffer, who was awarded the presidential medal of freedom by Trump last year.

As ALEC has called for policies that would endanger society’s most vulnerable, the organization has sought to portray itself as a victim. On an April 1 legislators call, ALEC Chief Economist Jonathan Williams said: “I think we all know how times of crises like these can be very dangerous times for those of us who believe in the ALEC principles of free markets and limited government and federalism.” Meanwhile, the organization is pushing for a host of other goals, including deregulation of telecommunications and supporting “federalism” and “state’s rights.”

In an interview, Laffer cited the plight of poor people when staking out his political positions. Reuters paraphrases, “‘I think it’s really important to balance out the economic consequences with the health consequences,’ Laffer said, adding that increased poverty from an extended shutdown could mean lower life expectancy, more suicide and a jump in child abuse.” (Notably, robust social programs, which Laffer opposes, are proven to reduce suicides during times of economic downturn.) And in a podcast interview, Nelson cited “working” as a public good: “Open america and get America working again,” she declared.

ALEC’s current advocacy emanates from a long history. As Mary Battari noted in a February 2018 story for In These Times, “ALEC was founded in 1973 as a venue for politicians and corporate lobbyists to meet behind closed doors and draft cookie-cutter legislation, known as ‘model bills,’ that promote corporate interests.” Today it boasts a massive network of 2,000 legislative members and 300 or more corporate members, according to The Center for Media and Democracy, which says, “ALEC is not a lobby; it is not a front group. It is much more powerful than that.” Aided by funding from corporations, corporate trade groups and the Koch Foundation, its bills have aimed to undermine unions, criminalize protests and privatize public goods. Over the past 15 years it has worked closely with conservatie advocacy groups, including AFP, to undermine unions.

According to Rosen, groups like ALEC are a big reason why we are so ill-prepared to meet the COVID-19 crises. “Over the last 50 years,” he says, “we’ve allowed corporate forces to systematically destroy the social safety net. There was no preparation done for a pandemic like this, even though it was clear that something like this could happen. The groups demanding we reopen are the ones that destroyed the social safety net, thereby creating the pressures making some people want to start up again.”

These three think tanks are pillars of a much broader effort to “reopen the economy,” which is another way of saying “treat workers as disposable widgets in service of corporate profits.” The oversized role of wealthy people in pushing this effort calls into question any claims that local protests for reopening constitute an organic, working-class movement. As the Guardian reports, “The Michigan Freedom Fund, which said it was a co-host of a recent Michigan rally against stay-at-home orders, has received more than $500,000 from the DeVos family, regular donors to rightwing groups.” The DeVos family is one of the richest in Michigan.

Joining in the cacophony are individual CEOs, who occasionally put conservative organizations’ talking points in cruder and more honest terms. Billionaire Tom Golisano, founder and chairman of Paychex Inc., told Bloomberg in late March, “The damages of keeping the economy closed as it is could be worse than losing a few more people. I have a very large concern that if businesses keep going along the way they’re going then so many of them will have to fold.” He added, “You have to weigh the pros and cons.”

Of course, for him, the “pro” is that he will not be the one serving tables, stocking warehouses or struggling to get healthcare once the economy reopens: When he talks about the costs, he’s talking about other people. The same can be said about the leaders of the conservative think tanks and organizations that are leading the push to send workers into danger: It will cost them nothing. The price for ordinary people will be immeasurable.

Lu Zhao and Indigo Olivier contributed research to this report.

An Interpreter Speaking Up for Migrants

By JULIA PRESTON | NY Times
Published: July 11, 2008

WATERLOO, Iowa — In 23 years as a certified Spanish interpreter for federal courts, Erik Camayd-Freixas has spoken up in criminal trials many times, but the words he uttered were rarely his own.

Then he was summoned here by court officials to translate in the hearings for nearly 400 illegal immigrant workers arrested in a raid on May 12 at a meatpacking plant. Since then, Mr. Camayd-Freixas, a professor of Spanish at Florida International University, has taken the unusual step of breaking the code of confidentiality among legal interpreters about their work.

In a 14-page essay he circulated among two dozen other interpreters who worked here, Professor Camayd-Freixas wrote that the immigrant defendants whose words he translated, most of them villagers from Guatemala, did not fully understand the criminal charges they were facing or the rights most of them had waived.

In the essay and an interview, Professor Camayd-Freixas said he was taken aback by the rapid pace of the proceedings and the pressure prosecutors brought to bear on the defendants and their lawyers by pressing criminal charges instead of deporting the workers immediately for immigration violations.

He said defense lawyers had little time or privacy to meet with their court-assigned clients in the first hectic days after the raid. Most of the Guatemalans could not read or write, he said. Most did not understand that they were in criminal court.

“The questions they asked showed they did not understand what was going on,” Professor Camayd-Freixas said in the interview. “The great majority were under the impression they were there because of being illegal in the country, not because of Social Security fraud.”

During fast-paced hearings in May, 262 of the illegal immigrants pleaded guilty in one week and were sentenced to prison — most for five months — for knowingly using false Social Security cards or legal residence documents to gain jobs at the Agriprocessors kosher meat plant in nearby Postville. It was the largest criminal enforcement operation ever carried out by immigration authorities at a workplace.

The essay has provoked new questions about the Agriprocessors proceedings, which had been criticized by criminal defense and immigration lawyers as failing to uphold the immigrants’ right to due process. Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the House Judiciary immigration subcommittee, said she would hold a hearing on the prosecutions and call Professor Camayd-Freixas as a witness.

“The essay raises questions about whether the charges brought were supported by the facts,” Ms. Lofgren said.

Bob Teig, a spokesman for Matt M. Dummermuth, the United States attorney for the Northern District of Iowa, said the immigrants’ constitutional rights were not compromised.

“All defendants were provided with experienced criminal attorneys and interpreters before they made any decisions in their criminal cases,” Mr. Teig said. “Once they made their choices, two independent judicial officers determined the defendants were making their choices freely and voluntarily, were satisfied with their attorney, and were, in fact, guilty.”

Mr. Teig said the judges in the cases were satisfied with the guilty pleas.

“The judges had the right and duty to reject any guilty plea where a defendant was not guilty,” Mr. Teig said. “No plea was rejected.”

The essay by Professor Camayd-Freixas, who is the director of a program to train language interpreters at the university, has also caused a stir among legal interpreters. In telephone calls and debates through e-mail, they have discussed whether it was appropriate for a translator to speak publicly about conversations with criminal defendants who were covered by legal confidentiality.

“It is quite unusual that a legal interpreter would go to this length of writing up an essay and taking a strong stance,” said Nataly Kelly, an analyst with Common Sense Advisory, a marketing research company focused on language services. Ms. Kelly is a certified legal interpreter who is the author of a manual about interpreting.

The Agriprocessors hearings were held in temporary courtrooms in mobile trailers and a ballroom at the National Cattle Congress, a fairgrounds here in Waterloo. Professor Camayd-Freixas worked with one defense lawyer, Sara L. Smith, translating her discussions with nine clients she represented. He also worked in courtrooms during plea and sentencing hearings.

Ms. Smith praised Professor Camayd-Freixas’s essay, saying it captured the immigrants’ distress during “the surreal two weeks” of the proceedings. She said he had not revealed information that was detrimental to her cases.

But she cautioned that interpreters should not commonly speak publicly about conversations between lawyers and clients. “It is not a practice that I would generally advocate as I could envision circumstances under which such revelations could be damaging to a client’s case,” Ms. Smith said.

Professor Camayd-Freixas said he had considered withdrawing from the assignment, but decided instead that he could play a valuable role by witnessing the proceedings and making them known.

He suggested many of the immigrants could not have knowingly committed the crimes in their pleas. “Most of the clients we interviewed did not even know what a Social Security card was or what purpose it served,” he wrote.

He said many immigrants could not distinguish between a Social Security card and a residence visa, known as a green card. They said they had purchased fake documents from smugglers in Postville, or obtained them directly from supervisors at the Agriprocessors plant. Most did not know that the original cards could belong to Americans and legal immigrants, Mr. Camayd-Freixas said.

Ms. Smith went repeatedly over the charges and the options available to her clients, Professor Camayd-Freixas said. He cited the reaction of one Guatemalan, Isaías Pérez Martínez: “No matter how many times his attorney explained it, he kept saying, ‘I’m illegal, I have no rights. I’m nobody in this country. Just do whatever you want with me.’ ”

Professor Camayd-Freixas said Mr. Pérez Martínez wept during much of his meeting with Ms. Smith.

Ms. Smith, like more than a dozen other court-appointed defense lawyers, concluded that none of the immigrants’ legal options were good. Prosecutors had evidence showing they had presented fraudulent documents when they were hired at Agriprocessors.

In plea agreements offered by Mr. Dummermuth, the immigrants could plead guilty to a document fraud charge and serve five months in prison. Otherwise, prosecutors would try them on more serious identity theft charges carrying a mandatory sentence of two years. In any scenario, even if they were acquitted, the immigrants would eventually be deported.

Worried about families they had been supporting with their wages, the immigrants readily chose to plead guilty because they did understand that was the fastest way to return home, Professor Camayd-Freixas said.

“They were hoping and they were begging everybody to deport them,” he said.

Ms. Smith said she was convinced after examining the prosecutors’ evidence that it was not in her clients’ interests to go to trial.

“I think they understood what their options were,” she said. “I tried to make it very clear.”

Legal interpreters familiar with the profession said that Professor Camayd-Freixas’ essay, while a notable departure from the norm, did not violate professional standards.

Isabel Framer, a certified legal interpreter from Ohio who is chairwoman of the National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators, said Professor Camayd-Freixas did not go public while the cases were still in court or reveal information that could not be discerned from the record. Ms. Framer said she was speaking for herself because her organization had not taken an official position on the essay.

“Interpreters, just like judges and attorneys, have an obligation to maintain the confidentiality of the process,” she said. “But they don’t check their ethical standards at the door.”

Poverty in plenty in "The Migrant Project"

Rick Nahmias follows his food to the fields and documents the journey on with Nikon.

By Sean Mitchell, Special to The Times
April 2, 2008

RICK NAHMIAS was at cooking school in an affluent ZIP Code of the Napa Valley, a mouth-watering abundance of fruit and vegetables arrayed for his instruction every day, when it occurred to him to wonder at the hidden source of this bounty. "It astounded me," he says, "that nobody there talked about where all this food was coming from."

A screenwriter, photographer and then researcher for political columnist Arianna Huffington, Nahmias had gone to Napa with the thought of maybe getting into the restaurant business. But his curiosity sent him in another direction altogether: on a mission to document through photographs the lives of contemporary farmworkers in California.

The result of his six-month immersion in the fields, "The Migrant Project," is on exhibit at the Museum of Tolerance through April 25, one stop on a national tour. The exhibit's 40 black-and-white images offer a glimpse into the seldom-acknowledged reality of the labor force necessary to provide food for the nation's supermarkets and dinner tables. These photographs of farmworkers and their families are not overtly political, yet taken as a whole, they raise unavoidable questions about the wages and living conditions of the people who make the state's $32-billion-a-year agricultural industry possible.

The poverty and drudgery of the estimated 1.1 million California farmworkers (nine in 10 of whom are Latino) are not news, except that Nahmias' photographs provide fresh evidence that their long-lamented hardships and indignities remain much the same as they were when César Chávez began organizing in the Central Valley in the 1960s.

"I think it's a fallacy if anyone thinks that documentarians don't have an objective, a point of view," Nahmias says. "I'm not trying to disguise the fact that I come to the subject with sympathy for the people I'm photographing. But I want to believe I'm putting the information out there and allowing the audience to form their own opinions."

New mission

After that week in Napa Valley in 2002, Nahmias, now 42, returned with a new passion that compelled him to quit his job with Huffington and begin investigating where his tomatoes and strawberries came from and who picked them. Versed in the ways of Hollywood as a writer with projects in development, he briefly considered making a documentary film but rejected the idea in favor of doing something that would require only himself and a camera, his old Nikon FE, "the one thing in my hands that I knew I could count on," he says.

A native of the San Fernando Valley and graduate of New York University (with a double major in film and religious studies), Nahmias wasn't a professional photographer and wasn't even sure how he was going to go about the assignment he had given himself. "I left with a lot of uncertainty about where my next paycheck was going to come from, but I felt I had to take a chance and do this."

He started applying for grants and didn't get any, meanwhile reading anything and everything about the history of farmworkers in California. He deliberately avoided the "iconic imagery" in such work by photographers Dorothea Lange and Horace Bristol, who traveled the same fields during the Great Depression, or in the more recent political protest photographs of Richard Steven Street.

After he was underway, at a friend's insistence, Nahmias did allow himself to look at the James Agee-Walker Evans book "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," an exploration of the lives of sharecroppers in the American South, published in 1941.

"There's a photo in the book of a pair of migrant's shoes, and it connected directly in my mind with a shot I had of a dozen pair of shoes, representing the shoes of people sharing one bedroom," he says. "It was an 'aha' moment," carrying the message that not a lot had changed for migrant workers in 70 or 80 years and that the symbols of their backbreaking labor were eerily identical.

But Nahmias also began to see how his work might be different from that of photographers who had gone before. "I found gay farmworkers, farmworkers with HIV, women and children, reflecting issues in our current society."

Though the issue of immigration is a popular backdrop for images of Latino laborers today, Nahmias tried to avoid that in "The Migrant Project." "I wanted to capture more intimate moments," he says, "that might help the mainstream Middle American identify with these human beings."

The cover of the book that accompanies the exhibit is a shot of buckets of tomatoes carried by a line of workers who disappear out of the frame and remain faceless. Another favorite shot of the author's is of a small white cross marking the grave of an unidentified worker. It's one of dozens in a bare dirt field, stenciled with the words No Olvidado (Not Forgotten). In another photo, a man stands beside towering stacks of strawberry flats, evoking the legend that workers fill between 30 and 120 flats a day.

Nahmias started with a single contact in Oxnard and made his own way behind the scenes and into the lives of the migrants. "One person led to the next," he says. Over the six months he made eight trips in all, three to five days at a time, to the Central Valley, the Coachella Valley and the Imperial Valley. "I slept at Motel 6s, stayed with family and friends," he says. Farmworkers also invited him to share their modest, crowded quarters.

He carried only black-and-white film (Kodak Tri-X and Ilford), used available light and tried not to be limited by what he didn't know. "There was a certain naivete that kept me more open to what I was doing. I didn't come to this as an expert. But I did come with my own sensibility. Experts in photography could criticize some of these images from a technical point of view -- the lighting certainly."

One thing he did know and felt strongly about was that he wanted to shoot with film rather than with a digital camera, as well as in black and white. "There's a purity to black and white that gets to the essence of a composition, clearing everything else away. The faces might not be as strong if not in black and white. If you use color, you have to know the whole palette and how every element is going to reflect on the others."

As for preferring film, he says, "There's a certain disposability with a digital frame that is endemic of our society. Every time you click that shutter, a statement is being made or should be made. There's a texture to the human face that I see in film more clearly."

Drawing attention

Before he was through, Nahmias did win some grants. Libraries and public schools helped support his work. Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers, wrote an introduction for his book. And he went on to get paying jobs as a professional photographer, documenting, in one project, a liver transplant at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

And the Museum of Tolerance booked his show. "The theme of the migrant workers touches on human dignity and human rights which resonate in our museum every day," says Director Liebe Geft, explaining why she decided to display "The Migrant Project" in a museum devoted chiefly to memories of the Holocaust. "These faceless, nameless people, we are the beneficiaries of their labor."

"I don't think 40 images is going to change anything," Nahmias says, "but I hope it might invite a conversation, drop something into the head of a 12-year-old that resurfaces 10 years later in a way you can't foresee."

The biggest payoff for him, he says, was witnessing the reactions of farmworkers and their families standing in front of his framed photos, some of them crying, simply because "it was the first time, they told me, they had seen themselves represented with dignity. I didn't know what to do with that. It was a gift, humbling."

Protesters Step Out against Exploitation

This is an issue that committed activists in SC have been trying battle for years. My good friend and fellow activist Tony Madrigal gets a LOT of backlash from politicians and city officials for being outspoken and committed to fighting these types of inequality. Adelante! -Patricia

By Cody-Leigh Mullin
City on the Hill Press

“They said it couldn’t be done. They said that the workers in UC Santa Cruz would not come out. They said that the students would not come out, and we are here!”

Jose La Luz was one of roughly 2,700 protesters UC-wide who demonstrated against the university’s long-running contract negotiations with American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). La Luz, an international labor-rights activist and keynote speaker for Saturday’s Labor Studies conference in Santa Cruz, addressed UCSC workers and students Jan. 31 at a rally in front of Kerr Hall:

“This is not an accident—we have been working hard to make this moment happen and we are getting ready for the big moment when we say, ‘We are going to stop this University!’”

On January 31, AFSCME’s contract with the UC came to an end, which prompted the march at UCSC from Quarry Plaza to Kerr Hall last week. Protesters gathered to support the union, as the new contract will affect roughly 9,000 UC workers statewide. The protest followed a meeting between AFSCME and the UC Jan. 30, when the two parties discussed the UC’s newest contract proposal.

According to an economic analysis impact model, if UC workers employed at UC-run schools and medical centers earned the same wages as those who do the same work at state hospitals and California Community Colleges, they would receive, on average, a 25 percent raise.

At one point during the UCSC protest, Santa Cruz City Councilmember Tony Madrigal addressed the crowd of workers and students: “I’m very proud to get out here with every single one of you. A fight against you is a fight against me—we’re in this together. Are you guys gonna back down?”

UC employee Maria Padilla knows that AFSCME is up against a fierce contender, but she said that the union’s demands are not extreme. “We’re just asking for normal things, to be able to live everyday, especially since it’s an expensive city,” she said from within the crowd of protesters. “[Our] wages aren’t enough to live in Santa Cruz.”

Organizers created a list of New Years Resolutions to give to Chancellor Blumenthal. The list was sent to all 10 campus Chancellors, as well as to the UC medical centers’ CEOs. The list, created by AFSCME members, their relatives and UC students, outlined steps for the UC system to take in order to fulfill its duty to its employees.

Protesters demanded a written response from the Chancellor.

They also demanded that the UC draft a fair contract to cover affordable health care premiums, yearly bonuses and higher wages, urging the UC to take better care of all its workers.

Tony Madrigal believes the university needs to step up. “These workers live in Santa Cruz, they shop in Santa Cruz, they pay rent in Santa Cruz, they donate in Santa Cruz, and their children go to school in Santa Cruz,” he said. “The University needs to [support] the people with the same commitment that it shows when it invests in its projects up on campus.”

AFSCME and the UC system have been bargaining for a fair contract with market rate standards and benefits protections since October 2007. Since then, the AFSCME local chapter 3299 — composed of over 500 UCSC workers — has organized multiple demonstrations on campus.

During the Wednesday meeting between AFSCME members and the UC, Human Resources Communications Coordinator Nicole Savickas said that AFSCME presented the university with a proposal to extend the contract by five months and pass wage increases for a number of service workers in the union, which would total about $2.8 million. “The union rejected that proposal and they let us know of their intent to file for impasse—which is the next step in bargaining—with the Public Employment Relationship Board (PERB),” Savickas said. “To declare impasse is saying that the two parties can not reach any further progress.”

If PERB declares impasse, it will appoint a third party mediator to meet with the union.

Savickas continued, “Both parties have passed a number of proposals and we have discussed our demands back and forth. So I believe both parties have a pretty good idea of where we stand.”

As of now, the contract issue has no definite solution. Yet after witnessing and participating in the rally, Padilla said with confidence, “We’re going to keep fighting no matter what.”