Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
Risha Foulkes, Women's Rights Project
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Posts by Risha Foulkes, Women's Rights Project
No Choice: Immigrant Workers’ Health and Safety
01 year ago
Kavita is a manicurist in a nail salon. She’s worried because some of the salon products she uses on clients have been giving her frequent headaches and asthma attacks. Should she:
- Tell her supervisor so that her employer can provide better training on chemical safety, improve the salon’s ventilation, and try to purchase less toxic products;
- Remain silent because she is an undocumented immigrant and will likely be fired if she makes any trouble at work; or
- Quit her job because she is pregnant and her employer routinely fires pregnant women anyway, making it useless to ask for better working conditions.
The obvious answer in this hypothetical multiple choice question is A. But in reality, the options for low-wage immigrant workers are usually limited to B and C. This past weekend, I joined members of the Nepali community organization Adhikaar at a conference on immigrant workers’ health and safety in New York. It was clear from the presentations by Adhikaar and other workers’ organizations that immigrant workers face pervasive intimidation and discrimination in the workplace.
It is shocking that a country that values "justice for all" would allow two de facto classes of workers to exist—those who can avail themselves of laws and regulations on workplace safety, and those whose immigration status makes such protections meaningless. In 2002, the Supreme Court decided the Hoffman Plastic case, prohibiting legal remedies to undocumented immigrants who were fired due to union organizing activities. Not surprisingly, the already-tenuous position of immigrant workers in the American workforce plummeted after the Hoffman decision. Some courts have extended the Hoffman ruling to prevent undocumented immigrants from successfully bringing other labor rights claims, and even claims based on sexual harassment and pregnancy discrimination.
Workers and organizers at the New York conference painted a disturbing picture of how such forced silence affects low-income immigrant women’s health, safety, and dignity at work. Nail salon workers, for example, work long hours in poorly-ventilated environments, handling a variety of chemicals that have been linked to short- and long-term health problems that include cancer. Many members of Adhikaar are nail salon workers who work alongside other Chinese, Korean, and Latina immigrant women in New York’s nail salons. Something they all have in common is a high rate of respiratory issues, headaches, nausea, and reproductive health problems.
The ACLU is working to end this two-tiered system of labor rights. Our strategies to improve nail salon workers’ rights have included administrative advocacy and community outreach to advocates and workers. As advocates for equality, we must ensure that immigrant workers’ voices are heard, so that women like Kavita don’t have to risk their health and lives in order to make a living.
Sorry, Charlie.
01 year ago
But you’re just not playing by the rules. Today, the ACLU and North Carolina Justice Center filed a lawsuit against Captain Charlie’s Seafood, Inc., for unlawfully discriminating against female employees by restricting them to certain work solely because they’re women.
The phrase “equal pay for equal work” is a familiar refrain in the United States. But Captain Charlie’s recruited our three plaintiffs in Mexico, inviting them to process seafood in North Carolina as guestworkers under the H-2B visa program. Migrant workers like our Spanish-speaking plaintiffs tend to be linguistically isolated, housed in remote, rural areas, and unaware of U.S. labor laws and the resources available to underpaid workers. And women often face additional exploitation because employers believe they don’t need to earn as much money as men, or that they’re not capable of performing the same work. For these workers, sex discrimination is an everyday occurrence, whether it’s in the form of job restrictions, pregnancy discrimination, or sexual harassment on the job.
But our clients are speaking up. They knew when they arrived at Captain Charlie’s that it wasn’t fair they were only allowed to do “crab picking” work, which entails removing and cleaning the meat from the cooked crabs. The men they worked with were allowed to cook the crabs, carry them to the tables, and handle the crab traps—all jobs that the women were physically capable of doing too. There was more of the “men’s work” available, and the women sometimes had to sit around with nothing to do, passing up opportunities to earn money they had counted on making for their families and themselves. After several months of this discrimination, Captain Charlie’s laid off approximately 20 women.
To add insult to injury, Captain Charlie’s refused to reimburse the women for visa fees and the cost of travel from Mexico. (The company is required under the Fair Labor Standards Act to cover these fees and costs when workers’ expenses are high enough that their net earnings fall below the minimum wage.)
Today’s lawsuit charges that Captain Charlie’s discriminated against the women on the basis of sex by restricting them to certain work, in violation of North Carolina public policy, which prohibits such gender-based employment decisions. The lawsuit also charges that the company violated the Fair Labor Standards Act and the North Carolina Wage and Hour Act (PDF) in underpaying workers and failing to reimburse them for travel and visa expenses. The women have also filed charges of unlawful discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, claiming that the gender-based job restrictions violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
We hope that our plaintiffs’ demand for equal pay and equal work will echo throughout North Carolina’s seafood processing industry, and beyond.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this post stated that Captain Charlie’s is required by the U.S. Department of Labor and the North Carolina Employment Security Commission to cover the cost to bring the women to North Carolina from Mexico. That was incorrect. The Fair Labor Standards Act requires the company to cover these fees and costs when workers’ expenses are high enough that their net earnings fall below the minimum wage.