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Alma, 21, lost the tips of her fingers on a punch press at a factory she’d been assigned to work at by a day-labor agency. Dan Giloth, an organizer of day laborers for the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, says day-labor agencies put workers at risk daily. “Oftentimes employers will specifically request ‘Spanish-only’ workers because they’re putting them in work conditions where they’re likely to have their rights to a safe workplace violated in some way. The thinking is that people without documents are less likely to raise a protest about sweatshop conditions.”
The overall effect, he says, is lower wages and bad working conditions across the board. “As long as you’ve got a group of people who are vulnerable, it’s going to lower the standards for everybody.”
Not everyone planning to attend the rally needs papers. Deloris Mena recently lost her job of 17 years for missing two days of work–the first unexcused absences she’d ever had. She says most workers in the chicken-packing plant where she worked in the Fulton Market district are now contracted from day-labor agencies. Mena, who’s lived in the U.S. for 22 years and got her papers under the last amnesty, was making $7.95 per hour before she was fired. Baltazar Enriquez, a recent graduate of Farragut High School, says he’ll be at the march because he has family members and friends who have graduated from high school but can’t continue their studies due to their immigration status. Enriquez claims a recent valedictorian at Farragut had to turn down a scholarship because she didn’t have a valid social security number.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Peter Barreras.
