Workers Killed Themselves Making iPads

Chinese immigrants and Chinese-Americans in San Francisco protest the long hours and bad conditions at the Foxconn factory in southern China, where the Apple iPad is manufactured. They lined up in front of Apple's flagship store in San Francisco, holding signs with the names of workers at the factory who have committed suicide because of the conditions.

Those conditions include 80 hours of overtime a month, according to the Chinese media. Chinese law limits overtime to 36 hours per month. No one is allowed to talk on the production line, and workers complain of constant high line speed and speedup. Most workers live in huge dormitories, where often 12 people share a room.

The suicides include a man who jumped from a dormitory. He'd worked there for two years. Another man, recently hired, slit his wrists and was taken to a hospital. A woman hanged herself in the bathroom, and a man drowned in a company swimming pool. The latest person committed suicide right after Foxconn's head, Terry Guo, had visited the factory and taken journalists on a tour.

Apple Corporation was embarrassed by the disclosure of the conditions for the people who make iPhones, iPods and iPads. The company, which has pushed for extra production of the newly unveiled iPad, said it would compensate workers by increasing the money it was paying Foxconn from 2.3% to 3% of the final price it charges for an iPad. That's the equivalent of the amount Apple spends for the device's aluminium back.

The protest and memorial was organized by San Francisco's Chinese Progressive Association.

Article was written by David Bacon on June 17, 2010.
Copyright PoliticalAffairs.net 2010

In Los Angeles: Working Families Brace for 20% Bus Fare Hike

The MTA has scheduled a 20% increase of bus fare starting July 1.

Eduardo Garcia takes advantage of the time he spends waiting at his regular bus stop to look for extra work in nearby businesses.

Garcia doesn't have much choice these days, and an increase in bus fares of approximately 20%, scheduled to take effect on July 1, means he'll have to work harder than ever.

Garcia says he buys two monthly passes at $62 apiece, one for himself and one for his wife. He also spends $60 a month on student passes for the couple's two children.

"If I add them all, I can say that a big chunk of my salary goes to transportation," Garcia says. "Now you can imagine with the increases. I'm already very tight with our monthly expenses. I don't know how I'm going to do it. I'm not a quitter, so I'm looking to work overtime to cover the costs. The problem is that the economy is bad at all levels and nobody's hiring."

Eduardo Garcia (with his family) purchases two monthly passes for himself and his wife, and two student passes for their children.

Garcia isn't the only one upset with the increase by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which oversees a regional system of bus and train routes. Members of the Bus Riders Union (BRU) — a non-profit advocacy group that has long been at odds with the MTA over service levels, the cost of fares and the ongoing expansion of the agency's rail system — recently staged a hunger strike that went on for eight days in protest of the recent fare hikes.

BRU members followed up the hunger strike with acts of civil disobedience to protest the fare hikes and proposes cuts in service, disrupting the proceedings for more than two hours during a recent MTA board meeting. Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department deputies eventually escorted dozens of BRU members from the room, and arrested two of them.

"The rise in urban transportation rates is the last straw in users' lives," said Manuel Criollo, a BRU member. "Those increases affect the poorest, the most beaten by the economic crisis and discrimination, and we want to represent them.

Members of the Bus Riders Union (BRU) link together prior to their ejection from the MTA boardroom.

Bus rider Nicolas Martinez told the MTA board members that he's especially upset that the increase in fares does not mean better service. The MTA is planning a reduction in service as part of a plan to balance the budget of the transportation agency.

"We're going to pay more and we're going to waste more time waiting for buses — time we could use to work — because they're going to cut bus routes," Martinez said.

Rosa Miranda, who participated in the eight-day hunger strike, said that the $26-a-month increase in transportation costs her family will see because of the fare hike cuts into the basic household budget.

Protesting the increase in urban transportation fares with an eight-day hunger strike.

"For you it's a tip in a fancy restaurant," Miranda said. "For me and many of us it's three days of food."

The BRU's Criollo said the recent eight-day hunger strike and demonstration in the MTA board room are only the beginning of a campaign to roll back the fare increases, with everything from legal challenges to efforts to mobilize demonstrations against the hikes under consideration.

Nora Alicia Estrada is a writer for Impulso.

Photos by Michelle Lopez and Impulso.

Copyright 2010 Impulso Magazine

Blacks And Gulf Disaster

Blacks may be disproportionately affected by Gulf disaster
by Badili Jones

I do love oysters. I like them raw on the half shell with some horseradish and cocktail sauce. I like them fried. Some oysters are cultivated for their pearls, but I couldn’t care less about that.

Human beings have been eating oysters along with other sea food for thousands of years. I was getting all nostalgic about this as I sat down recently to eat a dish of fried oysters with some fries, and it painfully dawned on me that this might be the last plate of luscious oysters I ever eat.

British Petroleum (BP) has been letting millions of gallons of oil flow into the Gulf of Mexico for over a month now. Many are calling this a spill. I think of a spill as something that happens in my kitchen, with milk, maybe a gallon of it. But millions of gallons of crude spewing from the belly of the earth into the Gulf, that starts to hit the level of disaster.

In the wake of this disaster, the very existence of millions of fish and wildlife are in the balance. Louisiana produces over 250 million pounds of oysters a year, and tons of oysters are harvested off the coast of Florida. A major hit on the fishing industry would also mean the loss of jobs in the midst of an economy already reeling from high levels of unemployment.

What we know is that the April 20 explosion happened because BP managers were in a hurry to seal off the well so they could move the rig (which BP leased from Transocean for $500,000 per day) to another drilling location.

To speed up the move, BP's managers evidently approved the risky exit procedure that led to the lethal explosion. At one level, then, responsibility can be laid at the feet of the managers involved in that decision as well as of Cameron International, the manufacturer of the rig's blowout preventer, which appears to have been defective. These managers operated in a corporate culture that favored productivity and profit over safety and environmental protection.

The spill has already caused the loss of 11 lives, 17 injuries. The “blow out” is spewing 100,000 barrels or 4,200,000 gallons a day. Some experts estimate the flow as being even much higher than that. BP and even the U.S. government are being very evasive about the extent of damage that this disaster has caused. In fact, BP continues to block scientists and reporters from being able to deeply investigate the damage suffered by the Gulf Coast.

BP stands for British Petroleum, but it should stand for Big Profits. In this past quarter, BP reported $5.6 billion in profits (BP is the tenth-largest corporation in the world, with an economy that rivals some nations).

The cost of repairing the damage may eat a little bit into their profits. But at the rate things are going, the cost of repairing the damage will fall on the backs of citizens as the government moves in to clean up the damage.

This disaster has significance for the black community in a number of ways. In the Gulf region, many African Americans make their livelihood from fishing and tourism. In the state of Louisiana, 12 percent of all business are black-owned. In Baton Rouge, 17 percent of all businesses are black-owned. In Mobile, Alabama 14.8 percent of businesses are black-owned, compared to 8 percent for the entire state of Alabama. Many of these small, family-owned businesses are in danger of going under for good.

BP has also been cited for a pattern of discrimination in communities of color. BP is part of a tight-knit network that has generally kept African-American entrepreneurs out of its distribution networks.

Finally, low-income communities of color are the most vulnerable when it comes to the fluctuations of the price of energy. African Americans are also more likely to live in energy-inefficient homes. All of this is hitting African-American households. With everything else being equal, African Americans spend more on fuel and utilities in comparison to other populations.

As is often the case, African Americans may be disproportionately impacted by the disaster in the Gulf. This disaster compounds another disaster in the Gulf (Hurricane Katrina) along with the disaster that is the economic conditions within our communities.

It is time that we consider solutions to the economic disaster. We need targeted relief in our communities. We need to rebuild our communities to be more energy efficient and sustainable to end our dependence on big oil.

We need cheap or even free mass transit to get to work. We need green jobs. We need to use our power and our voice to put an end to systems driven to exploit and destroy our natural resources in favor of systems that prioritize human need and respect for the environment.

Badili Jones is the political and alliance officer at the Miami Workers Center, a grassroots strategy and action center that works for racial and economic justice in Miami and beyond.

Sexual Abuse of Immigration Detainees Underscores Need for Oversight

For months, a male officer at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center, an immigration detention facility in Texas, sexually assaulted women in his custody. The assailant had access to the female detainees while transporting them by himself, in blatant violation of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) policies.

At first none of the women reported the sexual abuse, likely fearing retaliation or doubting they would be believed. Finally, one of the victims contacted local law enforcement, which in turn alerted Hutto officials.

Shortly after learning about this abuse, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) placed the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the private company that runs Hutto, “on probation.”

DHS has developed a list of changes that the company must implement at Hutto and eight other CCA-run facilities holding immigration detainees. The list includes increased training for staff and audits of CCA detention centers by DHS-selected experts.

These are important steps, but the DHS needs to do more to prevent sexual abuse in the future. A good start would be to make it easier for detainees to report sexual abuse and to re-examine how DHS monitors its contracts with private prison companies.

Violence Flourishes Without Scrutiny

Sexual abuse in detention is not unique to Hutto. This type of violence flourishes whenever detention facilities are closed to outside scrutiny, allowing officials to act with impunity. Immigration detainees are particularly vulnerable to sexual abuse due to language barriers, fear of deportation, and isolation from culturally relevant avenues of support.

Numerous federal studies of victimization behind bars have found that those who are gay or have previously been abused are at especially likely to be targeted for abuse. The research also shows that staff members of the opposite sex commit a significant percentage of sexual assaults – in both men’s and women’s facilities. For example, a 2010 report from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics showed that incarcerated youth in the United States are frequent victims of sexual abuse.

Despite such data, however, few prisons, jails, or other detention facilities limit cross-gender supervision (even in areas where prisoners are nude or performing bodily functions) or prohibit officers from being alone with inmates of the opposite sex.

Policies alone are not enough, of course. In fact, protocols in place at Hutto explicitly prohibited male officers from being alone with female detainees, and the blatant neglect of this policy points to a lack of leadership. External oversight is necessary to close the gaps between policy and practice. And external scrutiny can helps identify systemic problems, offer effective solutions and ensure accountability.

A DHS official was stationed at Hutto to verify the facility’s adherence to government protocols, but nothing was done about the policy violations until police contacted the facility regarding the resulting abuse. Clearly, the DHS’s monitoring efforts were ineffective.

National Standards Needed

The U.S. Department of Justice is currently reviewing proposed national standards addressing sexual abuse in detention, including a recommendation for external, independent oversight. The standards call for independent audits of facilities every three years. They also contain explicit provisions limiting cross-gender supervision.

Corrections officials opposed to the standards have focused their criticism on these particular measures. But the abuses at Hutto underscore the need for Attorney General Eric Holder to issue final standards that include strong limitations on cross-gender supervision and a meaningful oversight mechanism.

Sexual abuse of detainees is a crime and a violation of essential values of our nation. Government officials – the U.S. Attorney General, DHS leaders, and local corrections administrators – must eliminate this horrific violence. When the government removes someone’s liberty, it takes on the absolute responsibility to protect that person from abuse. No matter the reason for a person’s detention, rape must never be part of the penalty.

This article was written by Lovisa Stannow is the executive director of Just Detention International, an international human rights organization that seeks to end sexual abuse in all forms of detention.

Copyright New America Media 2010

Children as Weapons in Immigration War

Yesterday I went to visit a community-based organization in one of the neighborhoods in this Texas border region. The group was celebrating six young people – its “grupo de jóvenes” -- who had just graduated from high school. There were pictures, smiles, tears and a grand meal featuring roast turkey and cake.

Sandra (her name has been changed) was one of the graduates expected to be there. But she was missing. I learned that Sandra and her family had been arrested two weeks earlier and deported to Mexico. One of the community leaders offered to take me to Matamoros to hear her story so we finished up our turkey, grabbed our passports and headed across the bridge to the Republic of Mexico.

Sandra is a quiet young woman with intense eyes. She was dressed simply and neatly, with her hair pulled back.

I congratulated her on her graduation and asked her what she planned to do with her life. She sat forward in her chair and told me that she had always wanted to be a doctor. “Not just a doctor,” she said, smiling, “but a surgeon.” I told her that I thought that that was an impressive dream and wished her the best.

Thank you,” she said, and sighed. “Yes, it is a beautiful dream, but it is not to be. For me, it looks like I am never going to get out of the fields.”

She went on to tell me that two weeks prior, just after high school graduation, she and her family had gotten up early, piled into the family car and headed out to the tomato fields to pick. Sandra, her mom, dad and older sister would make $50 each for a day’s work weeding tomatoes in the blazing south Texas sun. On that Monday morning, however, as they headed toward the farm, a border patrol vehicle pulled them over.

As Sandra tells the story, the officer came up to the car asked to see their immigration documents. The family, although they have lived and worked in Texas for more than 10 years, remain undocumented, and so, apart from the 2- and 3-year-old babies, no one could produce any paperwork.

The officer ordered them out of the car. He called for backup and began searching the family for weapons and drugs. All he found, of course, were some hoes and spare diapers.

In short order, another border patrol agent arrived. She asked the arresting officer what made him pull the family over. Sandra recalled, “The guy pointed at my face and screamed, ‘Because they are brown! Don’t you know a Mexican when you see one?’”

Sandra told me that the family was then taken to a “processing center.” After a while, other officers brought them some papers to sign. “Just sign right here, where it says, ‘voluntary deportation,’” they said. But the family, with more than a decade in the U.S. and two small children who are citizens, wanted a hearing on their case from an immigration judge.

Sandra said: “We saw this little box at the top of the page where you can ask for a hearing, so we checked ‘yes,’ but then this official came in and saw that we had checked that box, so he tore up the piece of paper and said, ‘No, you are not going to request a hearing. You are going to ask for voluntary deportation.’ He laid a new form on the table, and walked out.”

The family held out for nearly five hours, as one officer after another came in demanding their signatures. Finally, just after noon, a border patrol official came into the holding cell. He looked at the family and said, “You will sign this document, or your family will be separated. The adults go to the detention center, and your children go someplace else. You will be lucky to see them again.”

Sandra looked down at the floor, and then she said to me, “Up until then, we had been strong. My mother had told us, ‘You will not cry! We are not criminals. We are a family.’ But when the border patrol went to pick up the little ones, they started to cry and so did we, so we signed the paper and were deported to Matamoros.”

The family knew no one there. But community members began making phone calls and gathering funds. By that very evening, they found a smuggler and along with 42 other people, crossed the Rio Grande in a rubber boat. They walked for five hours through the brush and made it home by midnight.

The smuggler charged Sandra’s family $550 apiece. So instead of earning $200 cleaning tomatoes, they had lost nearly $2,000.

Later, I asked Sandra why they had come back. She looked at me as if I was crazy. “Why, this is our home,” she said. “We have no place in Mexico. We have no place.”

This post is by Michael Seifert, of the Equal Voice network in the Rio Grande Valley

Could Your Child Live on $8 a Day?

While we wring our hands about oil belching from the ocean’s depths and ethnic bile spewing from Arizona, a long-term crisis is quietly unfolding within millions of American homes. New data shows that the recession has left about 7 million children in extreme poverty – meaning that they live on less than $8 a day.

In “The Worst of Times,” the latest report from the Southern Education Foundation, researchers make their case: In 2008, as the recession was beginning, 5.7 million kids lived in extreme poverty. Calculating rates of foreclosure, unemployment, and auto loan defaults into 2010, the authors posit that another 1.5 million youths have since fallen to this level – that is, they live in families subsisting at half the official poverty rate. For a family of four, that means living on $11,025 a year.

Every state in the nation suffers with extreme child poverty but the highest rates are in the South, with Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, Alabama and West Virginia posting the highest rates.

This is likely to have a significant impact, most immediately in children’s education. Researchers found that in school districts with high rates of extreme child poverty, students scored 15 percentage points lower on state-mandated math tests.

But extrapolate that out to performance on college entrance exams, or the attainment of academic scholarships, and you begin to get a sense of the potential long-term effect.

Yet with millions of young people struggling, schools have failed to specifically identify children in extreme poverty for any particular intervention. “No educational policy at any level today acknowledges America’s large population of children in extreme poverty and the extraordinary challenges they face in education,” the authors say, calling for greater federal attention to this troubling trend.

“In truth, children in extreme poverty represent a fundamental test of America and its enduring values,” they add. “Their progress in our midst will be the lasting measure of our true worth as a people and as a nation in the worst of times, no less than the best.”

Arizona Goddam

By Sandip Roy | New American Media

Where is Nina Simone when you need her? Arizona needs her.

First there was Sheriff Joe Arpaio, shackling the undocumented, and marching them to camps down the baking streets of Phoenix.

Then came SB 1070 which requires the police to stop anyone who “looks” like they might be illegal and demand papers.

Then came word that ethnic studies programs were being targeted for being divisive. HB 2281 banned classes for particular ethnic groups or any courses that promoted ethnic solidarity instead of treating people as individuals.

If that wasn’t enough teachers with heavy accents were singled out. The Department of Education wants to reassign teachers whose accents are too heavy. The goal, apparently is to make sure there are no teachers with “faulty English” in Arizona. Let’s hope former President George W. Bush never goes looking for a teaching job in that state.

And now Sen. Russell Pearce, the man behind SB 1070 is revealing his true aim – the Fourteenth Amendment. A story in Time Magazine says buoyed by poll numbers for his illegal immigration crackdown Pearce wants to deny birth certificates to children born in Arizona of parents are here illegally.


Pearce says democracy supports him – 58% of Americans polled by Rasmussen think that children of illegal immigrants should not receive citizenship.

Friends say is the Grand Canyon state going off the deep end?

When four young black girls were killed in the Baptist church bombing in 1963, the story goes Nina Simone locked herself in her room and said she wanted to build her own gun.

In her book I Got Thunder – Lashonda Barnett who interviewed Simone, says her then husband dissuaded Simone telling her “Music is your weapon.” Four hours later she emerged with Mississippi Goddamn.

No church has been bombed in Arizona. And Gov. Jan Brewer assures the public that SB 1070 will be implemented without racial profiling. How? Don’t worry everyone is getting training. Hopefully. That will make former Arizona Governor Raul Castro, a Mexican American, relieved. He has been picked up by the police when he was a superior court judge and asked for his papers. He didn’t have them on him and they almost took him into custody. What he was doing was that most suspicious of activities, the “illegal dead giveaway” – painting a fence. (Oh, Tom Sawyer, where are you now?)

Constitutional experts say that if Arizona really goes after “anchor babies”, the courts will quickly strike it down.

But that’s not the point. The point is, Arizona will have moved the needle so far to the extreme on the issue of immigration SB1070 will start looking fair and balanced. Activists and politicians will think they have scored a victory because they beat back the attack on the Fourteenth Amendment, while SB 1070 remains in place.

Already in post-SB 1070 days, you hear less about all those other agreements already existing between sheriffs departments and ICE, where sheriff deputies can act as ICE agents. At least they are just checking once they pick up someone for some crime, we think, they aren’t just demanding papers because you look illegal.

It’s just like how John Ashcroft suddenly became a portrayed as a brave hospital-bed defender of our civil liberties, once Antonio Gonzalez came on the Attorney General scene.

As Arizona turns up the heat, pushing the rhetoric to even more ludicrous heights, SB 1070 will start sounding more mainstream.

Can't you see it
Can't you feel it
It's all in the air

Lord have mercy on this land of mine
We all gonna get it in due time
I don't belong here
I don't belong there
I've even stopped believing in prayer

Arizona Goddam.

Word From the Streets: The State of Hate

Looking toward Arizona through the smoky haze of hate coming from that state’s legislature, I, as an African American, must stand with those who oppose the new, racist laws in the border state.

I stand up because I know that the history of African Americans in this country is intertwined with the history of immigration in this country. My ancestors were brought to this country (“legally,” I might add) to do the kind of back-breaking labor that set the foundation for this country to become the richest in the world.
My family traces its roots back to the early 18th century. As far back as we can remember, both sides of my family worked in the tobacco fields, cut timber, and worked as skilled laborers in Virginia.

My great grandfather, Pompy Scott, was born in 1781. The year 1790 saw the first immigration law in our young country, stating that only free “white” immigrants were eligible to be naturalized as citizens.

My ancestors at that time were not citizens. No black man or woman, slave or free, could be a citizen then. The native people, whose land was being stolen along with our labor, were not citizens. In fact, no person of color who immigrated to the U.S. could be naturalized as a citizen until 1952.

Instead, there were laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which regulated and limited the immigration of Asians into the U.S. Our country started drawing borders right through native land in the Southwest, and later claimed that those on the other side of the border were immigrants if they crossed it.

At the same time, certain states – like Oregon – excluded black people from 1859 to 1926. In other words, if you were black and in Oregon during that time, you were “illegal.” And we all know that before 1964, we were prevented from getting jobs, buying homes, or just eating in a restaurant because we were black. Many of us are not so old that we can’t remember that.

The intent of these laws, and the new slew of laws in Arizona – from the racial profiling law SB 1070 to the ethnic studies ban – is exclusion. At the base of that exclusion is exploitation. Black people and people of color have been and still are exploited for cheap labor and for land. In this case, the rule of law is not justice.
The only time we get justice is when we fight for it.

I agree with Martin Luther King Jr.’s statement that, “There are certain things in our nation and in the world which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I hope all men of goodwill will be maladjusted until the good societies realize. I say very honestly that I never intend to become adjusted to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry.”

When I heard about Arizona’s new law, I, like many black people, was upset. More upsetting is hearing that legislators in other states, including Florida, want to pass similar legislation. These laws are a diversion from the fact that the banks and corporations have spent decades ripping off working people like us.

While being exploited for cheap labor, we are fed the line that immigrants take our jobs. True, undocumented immigrants tend to work at low-wage jobs historically filled by African-American workers. But do we need or want to claim low-wage jobs as black jobs? Do we want to race others to the bottom, or do we want to see all of us lifted up? Do we want to see all jobs offer a fair wage? Do we want to see businesses that are based in and grow the wealth of our communities? These are our priorities as a community, not figuring out how to keep others down so we don’t seem so low.

There is not a limited amount of work to be done, if we look at the state of our neighborhoods: the crumbling sidewalks, the lack of affordable housing, the absence of safe and reliable transportation, the crumbling of our infrastructure, etc.

We know that there is plenty of work to be done. What we as black people face more than anything is the lack of access to appropriate education and training, biased and inappropriate credit and background checks, high levels of incarceration where we, along with Latinos, are often used as cheap labor.

The extension of laws that prevent the exploitation of undocumented people would benefit all working people.

I stand against the new law in Arizona because I am black in America, and if I ever hope to see justice for my family, for my people, then I must oppose injustice in all its forms.

This piece was written by Badili Jones. Jones is the political and alliance officer at the Miami Workers Center, a grassroots strategy and action center that works for racial and economic justice in Miami and beyond.