David Bacon : Who's to Blame for the Bangladesh Fire?

Black Friday demonstrations: Service Employees International Union (SEIU) President Mary Kay Henry pickets at a Walmart store in Richmond, CA, in support of better wages and benefits for workers. Photo by David Bacon.
Who's responsible?
Deadly fire in Bangladesh

The Bangladesh fire that killed 112 workers tells us a lot about the conditions under which the garments consumers bought this Black Friday were made.

By David Bacon / The Rag Blog / December 6, 2012

The day after Black Friday demonstrations of workers and supporters in front of hundreds of Walmart stores across the U.S., a fire killed 112 workers making clothes for Walmart at the Tazreen Fashions factory in Bangladesh. This was the most recent of several such factory fires, leading to the deaths of another 500 young women.

These fires are industrial homicides. They can be avoided. The fact that they're not is a consequence of a production system that places the profits of multinational clothing manufacturers and their contractors above the lives of people. The same profit-at-any-cost philosophy is leading to growing protest among workers who sell those garments in U.S. stores over their own wages and conditions, especially at Walmart.

The Bangladesh fire tells us a lot about the conditions under which the garments consumers bought this Black Friday were made. Reports from the scene say there were no fire escapes. Several young women jumped from the windows to get away from the flames, as their sisters did a century ago in New York City, in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Most Tazreen workers were trapped inside and burned to death.

Walmart has a grading system for its contractors, and had put the Tazreen factory on "orange" status (green for good, yellow for not so good, orange for a warning, and red for a contractor whose orders are cut off). Yet the company's inspectors must have seen that there were no fire escapes, and kept giving Tazreen orders.

The reason is clear. Wages are 21 cents an hour. Contractors like Tazreen compete against each other to get the orders. In a garment factory, the main way they cut costs is by cutting wages and expenses like safety.

Workers have been trying to win the right to organize militant unions to raise those wages and improve working conditions. If workers had been successful, they would have had the power to force the company to build fire escapes and make the factory safe.

But police in Bangladesh have been putting down demonstrations by workers in this region for months. One worker activist, Aminul Islam, was tortured and killed this year. The government uses low wages to attract manufacturers like Walmart. It does not enforce safety regulations, as the fires clearly show. Walmart then uses the labor of the women to boost its profits, and has the same attitude towards their efforts to organize unions that it does towards the efforts of its employees in the U.S. Total opposition.

This is not just Bangladesh's problem, however. The system for garment production worldwide has nations competing in the same way -- Bangladesh vs. China, for instance. Factory fires are the logical result because safety, unions, and higher wages are costs that will make a country uncompetitive. It's also a U.S. problem. According to the Economic Policy Institute, Wal-Mart's trade deficit with China alone cost 200,000 U.S. jobs between 2001 and 2006. Garment manufacturing in the U.S. has practically disappeared.

Manufacturers claim that if wages and safety costs rise, so will the prices of garments in U.S. stores. Yet if wages of 21 cents an hour were doubled, it would add only a few pennies to the cost of even a cheap teeshirt.

Walmart customers on Black Friday spoke out in favor of higher wages and more rights for Walmart's store workers. They would support the same for factory workers in Bangladesh. The obstacle is the contractor system, competition between contractors and countries, and a policy of suppressing unions. The system of self-policing hailed by Walmart and large manufacturers does not change this situation. It is a fig leaf.

Instead, countries like Bangladesh and the U.S. should implement the international accords that, on paper, guarantee workers the right to organize unions. Consumers also have power. They can refuse to purchase garments made in factories like the one that killed 112 young women, or that are sold in stores that deny workers the right to organize.

Whether at a sewing machine in Bangladesh or at a cash register in California, workers have the right to a safe job, a decent standard of living, and to organize. We need a system for producing and selling clothing that reinforces those rights, not one that works against them.

David Bacon wrote this article for the Progressive Media Project and crossposted it to The Rag Blog.

[David Bacon, a former union organizer, is a California-based writer and photographer. He is the author of Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants, published by Beacon Press. His photographs and stories can be found at dbacon.igc.org. Read more of David Bacon's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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David Bacon : How the Anti-Immigrant Tide Was Turned in Mississippi

Members of the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance at a rally at the Capitol in Jackson, Miss., Jan. 12, 2011. Photo by Rogelio V. Solis / AP.
How Mississippi's black/brown strategy
beat the South's anti-immigrant wave

By David Bacon / The Rag Blog / April 24, 2012

"We worked on the conscience of people night and day, and built coalition after coalition. Over time, people have come around. The way people think about immigration in Mississippi today is nothing like the way they thought when we started." -- Mississippi State Rep. Jim Evans

JACKSON, Mississippi -- In early April, an anti-immigrant bill like those that swept through legislatures in Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina was stopped cold in Mississippi. That wasn't supposed to happen.
Tea Party Republicans were confident they'd roll over any opposition. They'd brought Kris Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State who co-authored Arizona's SB 1070, into Jackson, to push for the Mississippi bill. He was seen huddled with the state representative from Brookhaven, Becky Currie, who introduced it.

The American Legislative Exchange Council, which designs and introduces similar bills into legislatures across the country, had its agents on the scene.

Their timing seemed unbeatable. Last November Republicans took control of the state House of Representatives for the first time since Reconstruction. Mississippi was one of the last Southern states in which Democrats controlled the legislature, and the turnover was a final triumph for Reagan and Nixon's Southern Strategy.

And the Republicans who took power weren't just any Republicans. Haley Barbour, now ironically considered a "moderate Republican," had stepped down as governor. Voters replaced him with an anti-immigrant successor, Phil Bryant, whose venom toward the foreign-born rivals Lou Dobbs.

Yet the seemingly inevitable didn't happen.

Instead, from the opening of the legislative session just after New Years, the state's Legislative Black Caucus fought a dogged rearguard war in the House. Over the last decade the caucus acquired a hard-won expertise on immigration, defeating over 200 anti-immigrant measures. After New Year's, though, they lost the crucial committee chairmanships that made it possible for them to kill those earlier bills. But they did not lose their voice.

"We forced a great debate in the House, until 1:30 in the morning," says State Representative Jim Evans, caucus leader and AFL-CIO staff member in Mississippi. "When you have a prolonged debate like that, it shows the widespread concern and disagreement. People began to see the ugliness in this measure."

Like all of Kobach's and ALEC's bills, HB 488 stated its intent in its first section: "to make attrition through enforcement the public policy of all state agencies and local governments." In other words, to make life so difficult and unpleasant for undocumented people that they'd leave the state.

And to that end, it said people without papers wouldn't be able to get as much as a bicycle license or library card, and that schools had to inform on the immigration status of their students. It mandated that police verify the immigration status of anyone they arrest, an open invitation to racial profiling.

"The night HB 488 came to the floor, many black legislators spoke against it," reports Bill Chandler, director of the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance, "including some who'd never spoken out on immigration before. One objected to the use of the term 'illegal alien' in its language, while others said it justified breaking up families and ethnic cleansing." Even many white legislators were inspired to speak against it.

Nevertheless, the bill was rammed through the House. Then it reached the Senate, controlled by Republicans for some years, and presided over by a more moderate Republican, Lieutenant Governor Tate Reeves. Reeves could see the widespread opposition to the bill, even among employers, and was less in lock step with the Tea Party's anti-immigrant agenda than other Republicans.

Although Democrats had just lost all their committee chairmanships in the house, Reeves appointed a rural Democrat to chair one of the Senate's two judiciary committees. He then sent that bill to that committee, chaired by Hob Bryan. And Bryan killed it.

On the surface, it appears that fissures inside the Republican Party facilitated the bill's defeat. But they were not that defeat's cause. As the debate and maneuvering played out in the capitol building, its halls were filled with angry protests, while noisy demonstrations went on for days until the bill's final hour.

That grassroots upsurge produced political alliances that cut deeply into the bill's support, including calls for rejection by the state's sheriffs' and county supervisors associations, the Mississippi Economic Council (its chamber of commerce), and employer groups from farms to poultry packers.

That upsurge was not spontaneous, nor the last minute product of emergency mobilizations. "We wouldn't have had a chance against this without 12 years of organizing work," Evans explains.

"We worked on the conscience of people night and day, and built coalition after coalition. Over time, people have come around. The way people think about immigration in Mississippi today is nothing like the way they thought when we started."

Evans, Chandler, attorney Patricia Ice, Father Jerry Tobin, activist Kathy Sykes, union organizer Frank Curiel, and other veterans of Mississippi's social movements came together at the end of the 1990s not to stop a bill 12 years later but to build political power. Their vehicle was the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance, and a partnership with the Legislative Black Caucus and other coalitions fighting on most of the progressive issues facing the state.

Their strategy has been based on the state's changing demographics. Over the last two decades, the percentage of African-Americans in Mississippi's population has been rising. Black families driven from jobs by factory closings and unemployment in the north have been moving back south, reversing the movement of the decades of the Great Migration. Today at least 37 percent of Mississippi's people are African-Americans, the highest percentage of any state in the country.

Then, starting with the boom in casino construction in the early 1990s, immigrants from Mexico and Central America, displaced by NAFTA and CAFTA, began migrating into the state as well. Poultry plants, farms, and factories hired them. Guest workers were brought to work in Gulf Coast reconstruction and shipyards. "Today we have established Latino communities," Chandler explains. "The children of the first immigrants are now arriving at voting age."

In MIRA's political calculation, blacks and immigrants, plus unions, are the potential pillars of a powerful political coalition. HB 488's intent to drive immigrants from Mississippi is an effort to make that coalition impossible.

MIRA is not just focused on defeating bad bills, however. It built a grassroots base by fighting immigration raids at the Howard Industries plant in Laurel in 2008, and in other worksites as well. Its activist staff helped families survive sweeps in apartment houses and trailer parks. They brought together black workers suspicious of the Latino influx, and immigrant families worried about settling in a hostile community. Political unity, based in neighborhoods, protects both groups, they said.

For unions organizing poultry plants, factories, and casinos MIRA became a resource helping to win over immigrant workers. It brought labor violation cases against Gulf employers in the wake of Katrina. Yet despite being on opposing sides, employers and MIRA recognized they had a mutual interest in fighting HB 488. Both opposed workplace immigration raids and enforcement, which are based on the same "attrition through enforcement" idea.

Since 1986 U.S. immigration law has forbidden undocumented people from working by making it illegal for employers to hire them. Called "employer sanctions," the enforcement of this law (part of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986), especially under the Bush and Obama administrations, has caused the firing of thousands of workers.

Yet over the last decade, Congressional proposals for comprehensive immigration reform have called for strengthening sanctions, and increasing raids and firings. "That's why we didn't support those bills," Chandler says.

"They violate the human rights of working people to feed their families. For employers, that opposition was a meeting point. They didn't like workplace enforcement either. All their associations claimed they didn't hire undocumented workers, but we all know who's working in the plants. We want people to stay as much as the employers do. Forcing people from their jobs forces them to leave -- an ethnic cleansing tactic."

During the protests Ice, Sykes, and others underlined the point by handing legislators sweet potatoes with labels saying, "I was picked by immigrant workers who together contribute $82 million to the state's economy."

MIRA, however, also fought guest worker programs used by Mississippi casinos and shipyards to recruit workers with few labor rights. "When it came to HB 488 employers were tactical allies," Chandler cautions. Unions, on the other hand, are members of the MIRA coalition.

While MIRA and employers saw a mutual interest in opposing the bill, MIRA helps unions when they try to organize the workers of those same employers, and helps workers defend themselves when employers violate their rights. MIRA, in fact, was started by activists like Chandler, Evans, and Curiel, who all have a long history of labor activity in Mississippi.

When HB 488 hit, busses brought in members of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1529 from poultry plants in Scott County, Laborers from Laurel, Retail, Wholesale union members from Carthage. Black catfish workers from Indianola, and electrical union members from Crystal Spring. The black labor mobilization was largely organized by new pro-immigrant leadership of the state chapter of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, the AFL-CIO constituency group for black union members.

Catholic congregations, Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Evangelical Lutherans, Muslims, and Jews also brought people to protest HB 488, as did the Mississippi Human Services Coalition -- a result of a long history working on immigrant issues.

And groups around MIRA and the Black Caucus not only fought that bill, but others introduced by Tea Party Republicans as well. One would ban abortions if a fetal heartbeat is detected. Another promotes charter schools. A third would restrict access to workers compensation benefits, while another would strip civil service protection from state employees.

Dr. Ivory Phillips, a MIRA director and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Jackson Public Schools, explains that charter school proposals, voter ID bills, and anti-immigrant measures are all linked. "Because white supremacists fear losing their status as the dominant group in this country, there is a war against brown people today, just as there has long been a war against black people," he says.

"In all three cases -- charter schools, 'immigration reform' and voter ID -- what we are witnessing is an anti-democratic surge, a rise in overt racism, and a refusal to provide opportunities to all."

Tea Party supporters also saw these issues linked together. In the wake of the charter school debate during the same period the immigration bill was defeated, a crowd gathered around Representative Reecy Dickson, a leading Black Caucus member, in which she was shoved and called racist epithets.

"Because of our history we had a relationship with our allies," Chandler concludes. "We need political alliances that mean something in the long term -- permanent alliances, and a strategy for winning political power. That includes targeted voter registration that focuses on specific towns, neighborhoods, and precincts."

Despite the national importance of stopping the Southern march of the anti-immigrant bills, however, the resources for the effort were almost all local. MIRA emptied its bank account fighting HB 488. Additional money came mostly from local units of organizations like the UAW, UNITE HERE, and the Muslim Association.

"The resources of the national immigrant rights movement should prioritize preventing bills from passing as much as fighting them after the fact," Chandler warns.

On the surface, the fight in Jackson was a defensive battle waged in the wake of the Republican legislative takeover of the legislature. And the Tea Party still threatens to bring HB 488 back until it passes.

Yet Evans, who also chairs MIRA's board, believes that time is on the side of social change. "These Republicans still have tricks up their sleeves," he cautions. "We're worried about redistricting, and a Texas-style stacking of the deck. But in the end, we still believe our same strategy will build power in Mississippi. We don't see last November as a defeat but as the last stand of the Confederacy."

[David Bacon is a California-based writer and photographer. His latest book, Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants, was published by Beacon Press. His photographs and stories can be found at dbacon.igc.org. This article was published at web edition of The Nation and was crossposted to The Rag Blog. Read more of David Bacon's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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INTERVIEW / Jonah Raskin : Judy Gumbo Albert, Yippie Girl

Judy Gumbo Albert. Photo illustrations by James Retherford / The Rag Blog.
Yippie Girl:
A Rag Blog interview
with Judy Gumbo Albert

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / April 17, 2012

After all these years, she still calls herself “Yippie Girl.” Long, long ago in a world far away, she really was a feisty Yippie and a fiery girl. In many ways, she still is the same young feisty, fiery Yippie Girl she once was, though she’s also older and in many ways wiser about girls and boys, and the revolution.

After all these years, and not losing faith in the Yippie myth, she has as much of a right to the moniker, Yippie Girl, as anyone else. She was there then big time, full-time, and never one of those weekend protesters. She’s here now big time, full time, and not wallowing in 1960s nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake.

Judy Gumbo Albert is a survivor. Many of the founding fathers and mothers -- Abbie and Anita Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Stew Albert -- have gone on to Yippie Heaven. Only a few, such as Paul Krassner and Nancy Kurshan, are still around.

Born Judith Clavir in Canada, Judy became “Gumbo” thanks to Eldridge Cleaver. That was in California in the 1960s, a time and a place that shaped her irrevocably. I must confess, I have always thought of her as a California Girl. I still do, though I didn’t meet her until she moved to New York.

By then everyone in the movement called her Gumbo, including her boy friend and husband-to-be, Stew Albert, a blond-haired Brooklyn-born Jewish intellectual and long-time sidekick of Jerry Rubin.

I met Gumbo soon after I met Stew. I have known her for 42 years, whether she’s lived in Manhattan, the Catskill Mountains in Upstate New York State, in Portland, Oregon, or in Berkeley. For a brief time, I belonged with her, Stew, and a few other friends to a group called “The Catskill Mountain Liberation Front,” a back-to-the-land spin-off from the urban Yippies.

It still exists in the Catskill’s, along with Legends of Sleepy Hollow and that sleepy, subversive Dutchman, Rip Van Winkle who refuses to march in lockstep with his patriotic, hard-working, church-going neighbors.

Ever since I first met her 42 years ago, Judy Gumbo has been a Yippie Girl, a wife, a mother, a college teacher, fundraiser for Planned Parenthood, anti-war organizer, writer, activist, and more. Along with Stew, she edited The Sixties Papers (1984), an anthology that contains essential writings from the era that shaped her and Stew, and that they also played a part in shaping.

Not long ago, she went back to her memories of the Sixties and to the historical record, salvaging Yippie treasures for the book that she’s writing.

She also went back to Berkeley, where she spent some of the happiest and most engaged, enraged times of her life, in the city’s streets and parks, and in the offices of the Berkeley Barb, one of the earliest underground newspapers of the 1960s.

After Stew’s death, she married again, and with her husband, David Dobkin, settled into the unsettled life of newlyweds. Meanwhile, Gumbo’s and Stew’s daughter, Jessica, a real enfant terrible, had grown into an awesome, and awe-inspiring lawyer.

Judy Gumbo’s work has appeared in The Rag Blog and on her website, www.YippieGirl.com. Though I have been talking with her for more than four decades, this is the first formal interview I have ever done with her.


Jonah Raskin: What’s the story about your longtime nickname and moniker “Gumbo”?

Judy Gumbo Albert: One evening in 1968, Eldridge, Stew, and I were cruising San Francisco in Eldridge’s Pontiac. Eldridge kept calling me “Mrs. Stew” and I was pissed. I told him “I am not Mrs. Stew. I am not Mrs. Anybody. I’m me. I’m Judy. Judy Clavir.” I hated using my father’s last name, but I felt I had no choice. “Alright then,” Eldridge said, “I’ll call you Gumbo.” From that day on, in the world of 1960s activists, Stew and Gumbo were a couple.

You were born in Canada and came to the USA in the early 1960s. Are you still Canadian in some way?

I’m still a Canadian citizen. I have a green card. When people ask me to register to vote or sign a petition, I tell them, “I’m an alien.” Born Canadian and growing up as a subject of the British Empire made me hate colonialism. Plus I have a Canadian love of nature and commitment to universal healthcare.

If you had to pick one moment in the 1960s in which you became a new person with a new identity when and where would that be?

When I broke up with Stew as we were driving up the New Jersey Turnpike in September 1970 in my royal blue VW bug. We’d been together for two-and-a-half years. After our break-up I went from calling myself Gumbo to Judy Gumbo.

You lived with and were married to Stew Albert for many years, how did that relationship shape you?

Stew taught me to rebel theatrically, to think outside the box, and to reach for the impossible. He taught me not to look for approval from my parents and not act like a trained seal. Above all, Stew taught me not to tolerate passive aggressiveness in myself or in others but to dig down and be honest with myself.

How did you shape Stew?

I civilized him. That’s what women do to men.

Why did you become a Yippie?

I like to be where the action is. Still do. Stew was the White Rabbit who led me into Yippieland. Because of Stew I met and got involved with Abbie and Anita Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Nancy Kurshan and all the Yippies. Yippie gave me the freedom to be theatrical and political, fun-loving and non-serious, a revolutionary who refused to accept restrictions.

In what ways was Yippie sexist?

Yippie was no different from any other movement group. Women were ignored. We did menial tasks; we were not groomed for leadership. Yippie men loved the media spotlight; women were given access to the media at the men’s discretion. I learned by observing Abbie, Jerry, and Stew not as an equal partner. Here’s something I wrote about Stew toward the end of the Chicago Conspiracy Trial in early 1970:

I felt like my formerly mild-mannered lover was taking on Abbie and Jerry’s mantle of self-centered celebrity arrogance that had spread in the trial environment like a pot plant on steroids. I felt invisible to Stew and his friends.

After a bomb was placed in the U.S. Capitol and the Weather Underground claimed credit you and Stew were suspects. You held a press conference and said, “We didn’t do it but we dug it.” How would you modify that comment now?

I still didn’t do it. And I won’t pass judgment on the 27-year-old Judy Gumbo who said she “dug” it. I made that statement 30 years, five months, and 15 days before 9/11. In 1970, the bombing felt to me like a necessary act of theatrical retaliation made legitimate by an impossible war.

Weather Underground bombs damaged property. Not people. I’m a widow. I know the searing pain you go through when your loved one dies. In my opinion, conflating destruction of property with loss of life disrespects the dead. My daughter, Jessica, has asked me the same question about the bombing. I have no good answer beyond: “I dig Occupy.”

If you had to name names -- as I’m asking you to do now -- who would you name as the all-time most brilliant, insightful individuals in the 1960s?

Of the people I knew personally, I’d say Abbie, Bill Kunstler, and, of course, Stew. Jerry had great insights but I found him more of an entrepreneurial propagandist. Some of Eldridge’s insights were terrific, though his advocacy of rape as a revolutionary act was horrific.

I’d start with Bob Dylan and move on to Aretha Franklin. I’d include Madame Binh and General Vo Nguyen Giap, Malcolm X and Rosa Parks, Franz Fanon and C. Wright Mills. Among my personal faves for insightful feminists are Ti-Grace Atkinson and Shulamith Firestone. Margaret Atwood was and still is my number one favorite author. And that’s not just because we’re both Canadian. She’s a brilliant writer.


Who are your Sixties all-time villains?

Villains: J. Edgar Hoover and his successor Acting FBI Director L. Patrick Grey. Richard Nixon, although compared to George Bush, Nixon was a pussycat. John Mitchell, Nelson Rockefeller, Nguyen Cao Ky, Pol Pot. Henry Kissinger, Mayor Richard M. Daley, and the Chicago cops -- especially those who murdered Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.

I used to consider the FBI agents who burglarized my house and put a homing device on my car to be villains but their villainy has faded. Same for Guy Goodwin, the federal prosecutor who subpoenaed me and Stew to a grand jury. If I compare how Goodwin harassed me, Stew, Leslie Bacon, and perhaps 400 others to how civil liberties have been decimated today, I feel more outrage now than I ever felt back then.

When did the Sixties begin and end for you?

They began in 1965 when I came home and found my first husband (not Stew) in bed with another woman. That trauma motivated me to move to Berkeley in late 1967. The rest is history. In some ways the 1960s have never ended for me. I’m an idealist (now tempered by life) and a romantic. I remain committed to the values of progressive activism, which led me to work for Planned Parenthood for close to 20 years. And, now I’m writing my memoir, I spend many hours each day in the 1960s.

You have been a college teacher, a fundraiser, a feminist, and more. How many identities or roles have you played and do you like all of them equally?

It would be difficult to quantify. Daughter, mother, wife, lover, widow are some of them. My roles have felt appropriate to each phase of my life: a Yippie in my 20s, a mother and college professor in my 30s, a fundraiser during my professional career and now a writer. All my roles are challenging and for the most part fun.

I loved being an activist. I loved raising money for Planned Parenthood. I enjoy being a writer. Being a mother is terrific. Being a widow sucks, but I’ve learned a lot.

You have a daughter, Jessica, who is a lawyer. Does she carry on your values and or rebel against them?

Both. Jessica retains the progressive values she grew up with. But she works for electoral candidates and inside the Democratic Party. Admittedly, she is more of a liberal Democrat than a leftist. She has formed her own political beliefs, and has chosen her values as a self-conscious and self-determining human being.

What do you think now about the slogan, “Don’t trust anyone over the age of 60”?

Is 60 the new 30? Every decade seems to add 10 years to the age beyond which you shouldn’t trust people. It has become a liquid and fluid mantra. I think every new generation should look on their elders with skepticism. How else will they learn to trust themselves and make their own decisions about their lives?

What is the most important contribution from the feminist agenda from say 1968 to 1978?

The capacity to control our reproductive lives, especially access to abortion, contraception, and women’s healthcare services.

If you could go back to the past and change one thing about yourself what might it be?

Back in the day, Stew would, on occasion, call me a facile optimist. He meant I assumed everything I did would have a positive outcome and I would jump into things too quickly without covering my ass. If I had a time machine, I’d like to give myself more wisdom and less superficiality. I’d also like to be able to bring my Judy Gumbo energy back to the present.

What do you have to say to the Occupy Movement now?

I love your passion. I admire your commitment to non-hierarchy, collectivity, decision making by consensus and insurrection as performance art. Keep on Truckin’ and Do It!

[Jonah Raskin is the author of For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman and a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : David Bacon on U.S. Policies and the Great Mexican Migration

Journalist, author, and long-time labor organizer David Bacon.
Rag Radio:
David Bacon discusses how U.S. policies
fueled the great Mexican migration

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / March 21, 2012

Noted journalist, author, documentary photographer, and long-time labor organizer David Bacon was Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, March 16, 2012, on Austin community radio station KOOP-FM and streamed live on the Internet.

You can listen to the show here:


Bacon discussed the issues raised in his provocative and heavily-researched article, "How U.S. Policies Fueled the Great Mexican Migration," which was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation and the Puffin Foundation and which was also published on The Rag Blog.

On Rag Radio, Bacon discussed the role of companies like Smithfield Foods in immigrant displacement, environmental abuse, and the struggle of oppressed workers fighting to overcome intolerable conditions -- especially in the Perote Valley of the Mexican state of Veracruz, and in Smithfield's plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina, the world's largest pork slaughterhouse. And he shows how the struggles in Veracruz and North Carolina are critically interrelated.

Bacon wrote that "the experience of Veracruz migrants reveals a close connection between U.S. investment and trade deals in Mexico [especially through NAFTA] and the displacement and migration of its people."

Now based in California, David Bacon was a union organizer for two decades, and today documents the changing conditions in the workforce, the impact of the global economy, war and migration, and the struggle for human rights. His books include Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants, The Children of NAFTA, and Communities Without Borders.

He belongs to the Pacific Media Workers Guild and the CWA, was an organizer of the Free South Africa Labor Committee and the Labor Immigrant Organizers Network, and was board chair of the Northern California Coalition for Immigrant Rights.

David Bacon previously appeared on Rag Radio on September 7, 2010, and you can listen to the podcast of our earlier interview here.

Rag Radio is hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer. You can listen to podcasts of all Rag Radio shows at the Internet Archive.

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David Bacon : How U.S. Policies Fueled the Great Mexican Migration

So many migrants from Veracruz have settled in North Carolina and the South that they name markets for their home state. Because of ferocious anti-immigrant laws, however, many businesses have lost customers as immigrants flee the state. Photo © David Bacon.

How U.S. policies fueled
Mexico's great migration

By David Bacon / The Rag Blog / March 15, 2012

David Bacon will discuss the issues raised in this article on Rag Radio with Thorne Dreyer, on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin on Friday, March 16, 2012, from 2-3 p.m. (CDT). The show will be streamed live here. Rag Radio is rebroadcast -- and streamed live -- every Sunday at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE-FM in Mt. Cobb and Scranton, PA. After broadcast, all shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive and can be listened to here.

[This article was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute and the Puffin Foundation. It was originally published by The Nation on January 23, 2012. Some names of the people profiled in this article have been changed.]
 
Roberto Ortega tried to make a living slaughtering pigs in Veracruz, Mexico. “In my town, Las Choapas, after I killed a pig, I would cut it up to sell the meat,” he recalls.

But in the late 1990s, after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) opened up Mexican markets to massive pork imports from U.S. companies like Smithfield Foods, Ortega and other small-scale butchers in Mexico were devastated by the drop in prices. “Whatever I could do to make money, I did,” Ortega explains. “But I could never make enough for us to survive.”

In 1999 he came to the United States, where he again slaughtered pigs for a living. This time, though, he did it as a worker in the world’s largest pork slaughterhouse, in Tar Heel, North Carolina.

His new employer? Smithfield -- the same company whose imports helped to drive small butchers like him out of business in Mexico.

David Ceja, another immigrant from Veracruz who wound up in Tar Heel, recalls, “Sometimes the price of a pig was enough to buy what we needed, but then it wasn’t. Farm prices were always going down. We couldn’t pay for electricity, so we’d just use candles. Everyone was hurting almost all the time.”

Ceja remembers that his family had 10 cows, as well as pigs and chickens, when he was growing up. Even then, he still had to work, and they sometimes went hungry. “But we could give milk to people who came asking for it. There were people even worse off than us,” he recalls.

In 1999, when Ceja was 18, he left his family’s farm in Martinez de la Torre, in northern Veracruz. His parents sold four cows and two hectares of land, and came up with enough money to get him to the border. There he found a coyote who took him across for $1,200. “I didn’t really want to leave, but I felt I had to,” he remembers. “I was afraid, but our need was so great.”

He arrived in Texas, still owing for the passage. “I couldn’t find work for three months. I was desperate,” he says. He feared the consequences if he couldn’t pay, and took whatever work he could find until he finally reached North Carolina. There friends helped him get a real job at Smithfield’s Tar Heel packinghouse. “The boys I played with as a kid are all in the U.S.,” he says. “I’d see many of them working in the plant.”

North Carolina became the number-one U.S. destination for Veracruz’s displaced farmers. Many got jobs at Smithfield, and some, like Ortega and Ceja, helped lead the 16-year fight that finally brought in a union there. But they paid a high price. Asserting their rights also made them the targets of harsh immigration enforcement and a growing wave of hostility toward Mexicans in the American South.

The experience of Veracruz migrants reveals a close connection between U.S. investment and trade deals in Mexico and the displacement and migration of its people. For nearly two decades, Smithfield has used NAFTA and the forces it unleashed to become the world’s largest packer and processor of hogs and pork. But the conditions in Veracruz that helped Smithfield make high profits plunged thousands of rural residents into poverty. Tens of thousands left Mexico, many eventually helping Smithfield’s bottom line once again by working for low wages on its U.S. meatpacking lines. “The free trade agreement was the cause of our problems,” Ceja says.


Smithfield goes to Mexico -- and migrants come here

In 1993 Carroll Foods, a giant hog-raising corporation, partnered with a Mexican agribusiness enterprise to set up a huge pig farm known as Granjas Carroll de Mexico (GCM) in Veracruz’s Perote Valley. Smithfield, which had a longtime partnership with Carroll Foods, bought the company out in 1999.

By 2008 the Perote operation was sending close to a million pigs to slaughter every year -- 85 percent to Mexico City and the rest to surrounding Mexican states. Because of its location in the mountains above the city of Veracruz, Mexico’s largest port, the operation could easily receive imported corn for feed, which makes up two-thirds of the cost of raising hogs.

NAFTA lifted the barriers on Smithfield’s ability to import feed. This gave it an enormous advantage over Mexican producers, as U.S. corn, heavily subsidized by U.S. farm bills, was much cheaper. “After NAFTA,” says Timothy Wise, of the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University, U.S. corn “was priced 19 percent below the cost of production.”

But Smithfield didn’t just import feed into Mexico. NAFTA allowed it to import pork as well.

According to Alejandro Ramírez, general director of the Confederation of Mexican Pork Producers, Mexico imported 30,000 tons of pork in 1995, the year after NAFTA took effect. By 2010 pork imports, almost all from the United States, had grown more than 25 times, to 811,000 tons. As a result, pork prices received by Mexican producers dropped 56 percent. U.S. pork exports are dominated by the largest companies. Wise estimates that Smithfield’s share of this export market is significantly greater than its 27 percent share of U.S. production.

Imported pork had a dramatic effect on Mexican jobs. “We lost 4,000 pig farms,” Ramírez estimates, based on reports received by the confederation from its members. “On Mexican farms, each 100 animals produce five jobs, so we lost 20,000 farm jobs directly from imports. Counting the five indirect jobs dependent on each direct job, we lost over 120,000 jobs in total.”

“That produces migration to the U.S. or to Mexican cities,” Ramírez charges.

Corn imports also rose, from 2 million to 10.3 million tons from 1992 to 2008. “Small Mexican farmers got hit with a double whammy,” Wise explains. “On the one hand, competitors were importing pork. On the other, they were producing cheaper hogs.” Smithfield was both producer and importer. Wise estimates that this one company supplies 25 percent of all the pork sold in Mexico.

The increases in pork and corn imports were among many economic changes brought about by NAFTA and concurrent neoliberal reforms to the Mexican economy, such as ending land reform. Companies like Smithfield benefited from these changes, but poverty increased also, especially in the countryside.

In a 2005 study for the Mexican government, the World Bank found that the extreme rural poverty rate of 35 percent in 1992-94, before NAFTA, jumped to 55 percent in 1996-98, after NAFTA took effect -- the years when Ortega and Ceja left Mexico. This could be explained, the report said, “mainly by the 1995 economic crisis, the sluggish performance of agriculture, stagnant rural wages, and falling real agricultural prices.”

By 2010, according to the Monterrey Institute of Technology, 53 million Mexicans were living in poverty -- half the country’s population. About 20 percent live in extreme poverty, almost all in rural areas.

The growth of poverty, in turn, fueled migration. In 1990, 4.5 million Mexican-born people lived in the United States. A decade later, that population had more than doubled to 9.75 million, and in 2008 it peaked at 12.67 million. About 5.7 million were able to get some kind of visa; another 7 million couldn’t but came nevertheless.

As an agricultural state, Veracruz suffered from Mexico’s abandonment of two important policies, which also helped fuel migration. First, neoliberal reforms did away with Tabamex, a national marketing program for small tobacco farmers. A similar program for coffee growers ended just as world coffee prices plunged to record lows. Second, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the country’s corrupt president, pushed through changes to Article 27 of the Constitution in 1992, dismantling land reform and allowing the sale of ejidos, or common lands, as private property.

Fausto Limon looks at his bean plants, knowing they need more fertilizer, but lacking the money to buy it. Photo © David Bacon.
Waves of tobacco and coffee farmers sold their land because they could no longer make a living on it. Many became migrants. But allowing the sale of ejidos to foreigners made it possible for Carroll Foods to buy land for its swine sheds. Displaced farmers then went to work in those sheds at low wages.

Simultaneous changes in the United States also accelerated migration. The Immigration Reform and Control Act, passed by Congress in 1986, expanded the existing H2-A visa program, creating the current H2-A program, which allows U.S. agricultural employers to bring in workers from Mexico and other countries, giving them temporary visas tied to employment contracts.

Growers in North Carolina became large users of the program, especially through the North Carolina Growers Association. Landless tobacco farmers from Veracruz became migrant tobacco workers in the Carolinas.

“Many Veracruzanos came because we were offered work in the tobacco fields, where we had experience,” remembers Miguel Huerta. “Then people who’d been contracted just stayed, because they didn’t have anything in Mexico to go back to. After the tobacco harvest, workers spread out to other industries.”

From Huerta’s perspective, “these companies are very powerful. They can go to Mexico and bring as many employees as they want and replace them when they want.” Poverty, though, was the real recruiter. It created, as Ceja says, the need. “We all had to leave Veracruz because of it,” he emphasizes. “Otherwise, we wouldn’t do something so hard.”


Exporting the hazards of corporate hog raising
 
Hog raising is a dirty business -- and the environmental damage it creates has provoked rising opposition to Smithfield’s operations within U.S. borders. In Virginia in 1997, federal judge Rebecca Smith imposed the largest federal pollution fine to that date -- 
$12.6 million -- on the company for dumping pig excrement into the Pagan River, which runs into Chesapeake Bay. That year the state of North Carolina went further, passing a moratorium on the creation of any new open-air hog waste lagoons and a cap on production at its Tar Heel plant.

In 2000, then-State Attorney General Mike Easley forced Smithfield to fund research by North Carolina State University to develop treatment methods for hog waste that are more effective than open lagoons. Despite North Carolina’s well-known hostility to regulating business, in 2007 Easley (by then governor) made the moratorium permanent. In the face of public outcry over stench and flies, even the anti-regulation industry association, the North Carolina Pork Council, supported it.
 
In Mexico’s Perote Valley, however -- a high, arid, volcano-rimmed basin straddling the states of Veracruz and Puebla -- Smithfield could operate unburdened by the environmental restrictions that increasingly hampered its expansion in the United States.

Mexico has environmental standards, and NAFTA supposedly has a procedure for requiring their enforcement, but no complaint was ever filed against GCM or Smithfield under NAFTA’s environmental side agreement. Carolina Ramirez, who heads the women’s department of the Veracruz Human Rights Commission, concluded bitterly that “the company can do here what it can’t do at home.”

For local farmers like Fausto Limon, the hog operation was devastating. On some warm nights his children would wake up and vomit from the smell. He’d put his wife, two sons, and daughter into his beat-up pickup, and they’d drive away from his farm until they could breathe without getting sick. Then he’d park, and they’d sleep in the truck for the rest of the night.

Limon and his family all had painful kidney ailments for three years. He says they kept taking medicine until finally a doctor told them to stop drinking water from the farm’s well. Last May they began hauling in bottled water. Once they stopped drinking from the well, the infections stopped.

Less than half a mile from his house is one of the many pig farms built by Smithfield’s Mexican hog-raising subsidiary, GCM. “Before the pig farms came, they said they would bring jobs,” Limon remembers. “But then we found out the reality. Yes, there were jobs, but they also brought a lot of contamination.”

David Torres, a Perote native who spent eight years in the operation’s maternity section, estimates that GCM has 80 complexes, each with as many as 20,000 hogs. The sheds look clean and modern. “When I went to work there, I could see the company was completely mechanized,” he says. The Mexican News online business journal explains that “production cost is very low because of the high ratio of pigs to workers... The preparation of food and feeding of the pigs is completely automated, along with temperature control and the elimination of excrement.”

Workers aren’t employed directly by Granjas Carroll, however, according to Torres. “Since we work for a contractor, we’re not entitled to profit-sharing or company benefits,” he says. “Granjas Carroll made millions of dollars in profits, but never distributed a part of them to the workers,” as required under Mexico’s federal labor law. Torres was paid 1,250 pesos ($90) every 15 days; he says the company picked him up at 6:00 every morning and returned him home at 5:30 each evening, often six days a week.

In back of each complex is a large oxidation pond for the hogs’ urine and excrement. A recent drive through the valley revealed that only one of several dozen was covered. “Granjas Carroll doesn’t use concrete or membranes under their ponds,” Torres charges, “so the water table is getting contaminated. People here get their water from wells, which are surrounded by pig farms and oxidation ponds.”

Ruben Lopez, a land commissioner in Chichicuautla, a valley town surrounded by hog farms, also says there is no membrane beneath the pools.

In response to an article published in August in Imagen de Veracruz, a Veracruz newspaper, GCM public relations director Tito Tablada Cortés declared, “Granjas Carroll does not pollute.” And Smithfield spokeswoman Amy Richards says, “Our environmental treatment systems in Mexico strictly comply with local and federal regulations... Mexico encourages, and requires, anaerobic digesters and evaporation ponds.”

Yet despite the 1,200 jobs the pig farms created in a valley where employment is scarce, Limon estimates that a third of the young people have left. “They don’t see a future, and every year it’s harder to live here,” he says.

In 2004 a coalition of local farmers called Pueblos Unidos (United Towns) started collecting signatures for a petition to protest the expansion of the swine sheds. According to teacher Veronica Hernandez, students told her that going to school on the bus was like riding in a toilet. “Some of them fainted or got headaches,” she charges.

When expansion plans moved forward nonetheless, on April 26, 2005, hundreds of people blocked the main highway. That November a construction crew about to build another shed and oxidation pond was met by 1,000 angry farmers. Police had to rescue the crew.

Finally, in 2007 GCM’s Tablada Cortés signed an agreement with local towns blocking any new expansion. That year, however, the company filed criminal complaints against Hernandez and thirteen other leaders, charging them with “defaming” the company. Although the charges were eventually dropped, the farmers were intimidated and the protest movement diminished.

A local farmer declares that the people of the Perote Valley want the hog farms removed to protect the environment and health of the communities there. Photo © David Bacon.
Then, in early 2009, the first confirmed case of swine flu, the AH1N1 virus, was found in a five-year-old boy, Édgar Hernández from La Gloria. Pickup trucks from the local health department began spraying pesticide in the streets to kill the omnipresent flies. Nevertheless, the virus spread to Mexico City. By May, 45 people in Mexico had died. Schools closed, and public events were canceled.

Smithfield denied that the virus came from its Veracruz hogs, and Mexican officials were quick to agree. Tablada’s note to Imagen de Veracruz asserted, “Our company has been totally cleared of any links with the AH1N1 virus,” and “the official position of the Secretary of Health and the World Health Organization leaves no room for doubt.”

By one estimate, fear of the virus had led to losses of $8.4 million per day for the U.S. pork industry for the first two weeks of the global scare. So meatpacking companies breathed a sigh of relief at Smithfield’s exoneration. In the valley, though, “no one believed it,” Limon recalls.

This past August, GCM representatives received a permit from the municipal president of Guadalupe Victoria, the county next to Perote, for building new hog farms. Representatives of 18 town councils have denounced the expansion plans and accuse state authorities of “threatening to use public force (the granaderos) so that the company can continue to expand, against our will.”

“It doesn’t do any good to threaten to kill us,” responds one farmer. “We’re not going to let them build any more sheds. We want GCM to leave the valley.”


Veracruzanos fight for the union in Tar Heel
 
As unrest grew in Veracruz, it was also growing among the company’s workers in North Carolina. When the Tar Heel slaughterhouse opened in 1992, its labor force was made up mostly of African-Americans and local Lumbee Native Americans. Many objected to the high line speed and the injuries that proliferated as a result.

The plant kills and dismembers 32,000 hogs every day. People stand very close together as animal carcasses speed by. They wield extremely sharp knives, slicing through sinews and bone in the same motion, hundreds of times each hour. Repetitive stress and other injuries are endemic to meatpacking, and the faster the line runs, the more injuries there are.

The workers’ frustration with the low wages and brutal working conditions produced one of the longest and bitterest fights to organize a union in modern U.S. labor history. In 1994 and 1997 the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) lost two union representation elections. The 1997 election was thrown out by the labor board, but an administrative law judge ruled that in both, Smithfield “engaged in egregious and pervasive unfair labor practices and objectionable conduct.”

In 1997 police in riot gear lined the walkway into the plant, and workers had to file past them to cast their ballots. At the end of the vote count, union organizer Ray Shawn was beaten up. Security chief Danny Priest and the other guards were later deputized, and Smithfield maintained a holding cell in a trailer on the property, which workers called the company jail.

Even by standards in North Carolina, where union membership and wages are low, Smithfield’s pay scale and reputation for injuries made it hard for the company to attract local workers. In the mid-’90s, Mexicans pushed by the effects of NAFTA to leave the Veracruz countryside began arriving in North Carolina and going to work at the Tar Heel slaughterhouse. All over Veracruz, meatpacking companies were recruiting them, according to Carolina Ramirez.

“There were recruiters in many Veracruz towns,” she remembers. “There were even vans stationed in different places, and a whole system in which people were promised jobs in the packing plants. It was an open secret.”

Richards, the Smithfield spokeswoman, denied that the company recruited workers in Mexico. “With one exception [a management trainee program], Smithfield Foods does not travel to, nor advertise in, other countries or outside of our local communities to actively recruit employees for our various facilities around the country,” she said.

Roberto Ortega remembers that there were hundreds of people from Veracruz in the Tar Heel plant when he worked there in the late ’90s and early 2000s. They’d have community get-togethers, eat seafood and play their state’s famous jarocho music on wooden harps and guitars. “Almost the whole town [of Las Choapas] is here,” he says. “Some are supervisors and mayordomos, and they bring people from the town.”

Keith Ludlum is president of UFCW Local 1208. Photo © David Bacon.
As new migrants, the Veracruzanos were desperate and hungry. Most were undocumented. According to Keith Ludlum, one of the plant’s few white workers, “After Smithfield ran through the workforce around here, you started seeing a lot more immigrants working in the plant. The company thought the undocumented would work cheap, work hard, and they wouldn’t complain.”

Ramirez describes the Veracruz immigrants as “docile at first, because they didn’t have the experience.” For employers, she explains, “these people were a safe workforce. They didn’t understand their rights, but they got the message -- don’t organize. They would work fast for fear of losing their jobs, because there was no alternative.”

“They pressured you so you’d work faster and produce more,” Ortega recalls. “You felt like knifing the foreman. Many wanted to throw their knives at his feet and just leave. But if you are the support of your family, you put up with it. I am not going to leave my work, you’d say to yourself -- who will pay me then?”

Eventually, however, like the locals, the immigrants didn’t put up with it either.

In the early 2000s the UFCW sent in a new group of organizers, who began helping workers find tactics to slow down the lines. They set up a workers’ center in Red Springs, offering English classes after work. In 2003 the night cleaning crew refused to work, keeping the lines from starting the following morning. David Ceja helped organize another work stoppage a year later.

Ortega was fired in 2005. “Perhaps they saw us talking about this [the union] on our meal breaks, and they started to notice there is something going on with these people,” he says. “They never told me and I never knew why I was fired. They just said, As of today there is no more work for you.” He then began making visits to other workers.

By 2006 Mexicans made up about 60 percent of the plant’s 5,000 employees. In April of that year, protests and demonstrations for immigrants’ rights were spreading across the country, culminating in massive May Day rallies in dozens of cities. Hundreds left the Tar Heel plant and marched through the streets of Wilmington. On May Day only a skeleton crew showed up for work.

Abel Cervantes, a worker at the Smithfield pork plant in Tar Heel, was cut by a knife at work. At 20 years old, he can no longer use his hand or work. Photo © David Bacon.
That spring, Smithfield enrolled in the Department of Homeland Security’s IMAGE program, in which the government identifies undocumented workers and employers agree to fire them. The program enforces a provision of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act called employer sanctions, which prohibits employers from hiring undocumented workers. Smithfield spokeswoman Richards says, “We do all that the law requires, and more, in assuring that our workforce is authorized to work in the U.S.”

In October 2006 the company announced that it intended to fire hundreds of workers suspected of being undocumented because they had bad Social Security numbers. When terminations started, 300 workers walked out and stopped production, temporarily forcing the company to rescind the firings.

Ludlum, who had just been rehired after a 12-year legal battle, says, “It was really empowering to see all those workers stand up together -- probably one of the best experiences of my life.” It had an effect on African-American workers too. They collected 4,000 signatures, asking the company for the day off on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. When managers refused, 400 black workers on the kill line didn’t come in. With no hogs on the hooks at the beginning of the lines, no one else could work either. The plant shut down again.

Nine days later, agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained 21 Smithfield workers for deportation, questioning hundreds more in the lunchroom. Fear was so intense that most immigrants didn’t show up for work the following day. A few months later, another raid took place. Some of the detained workers were later charged with federal felonies for using bad Social Security numbers.

Meanwhile, ICE agents swept through Mexican communities, detaining people at home and in the street. Ludlum and union organizer Eduardo Peña followed the ICE agents with video cameras but couldn’t stop the raids. Ludlum, Peña and other union activists believed the company had cooperated in the immigration enforcement because the Veracruzanos were no longer useful. “The workforce that was in the shadows was expecting rights, expecting to be part of the community,” Ludlum says. “That’s not what the company wanted.”


Eventually, the crackdown took its toll, and the immigrant workforce shrank by half, as people left. Union organizing stalled. But then, in 2006, led by activist Terry Slaughter, African-American workers stopped the plant again by sitting all day in the middle of the kill floor. They put union stickers on their hard hats and began collecting signatures demanding union recognition.

Spurred by widespread community support and the threat of lawsuits, the company agreed to an election without its old bare-knuckle tactics. When the ballots were finally counted on December 11 that year, the union had won. Today Ludlum is president of UFCW Local 1208, and Slaughter is secretary-treasurer.

Terry Slaughter is secretary-treasurer of UFCW Local 1208. Photo © David Bacon.
A Veracruzana, Carmen Izquierdo, sits on the union executive board. “In the union it doesn’t matter if you’re undocumented, if you have papers or not,” she says. “All the workers here, whether or not we have papers, have rights.”

Ludlum and Slaughter say line speed is slower now, and workers can rotate from one job to another, reducing injuries. Ceja feels that the union gave workers a tool to change conditions. “I’m glad it came in. We worked hard to get it,” he says. But he was not there to enjoy the union’s victory; he left after he was made a supervisor at the time of the raids.

“They wanted me to send workers to the office, where I was afraid the immigration agents would be waiting for them,” he explains. “I thought it was better for me to leave, so I wouldn’t have to turn in my compañeros.”

Others left because of fear, especially in the intensifying anti-immigrant climate in North Carolina. Roberto Ortega and his wife, Maria, left the state when the hostility got worse and they couldn’t find work. Juvencio Rocha, head of the Network of Veracruzanos in North Carolina, says bitterly that “after we contributed to the economy, they didn’t want us here anymore. They even took our driver’s licenses away.”


Resisting the system on both sides of the border

Smithfield didn’t invent the system of displacement and migration. It took advantage of U.S. trade and immigration policies, and of economic reforms in Mexico. In both countries, however, the company was forced to bend at least slightly in the face of popular resistance.

Farmers in Perote Valley have been able to stop swine shed expansion, at least for a while. Migrant Veracruzanos helped organize a union in Tar Heel. Yet these were defensive battles against a system that needs the land and labor of workers but does its best to keep them powerless.

“From the beginning NAFTA was an instrument of displacement,” says Juan Manuel Sandoval, co-founder of the Mexican Action Network Against Free Trade. “The penetration of capital led to the destruction of the traditional economy, especially in agriculture. People had no alternative but to migrate.”

Sandoval notes that many U.S. industries are dependent on this army of available labor. “Meatpacking especially depends on a constant flow of workers,” he says. “Mexico has become its labor reserve.”

Raul Delgado Wise, a professor at the University of Zacatecas, charges that “rather than a free-trade agreement, NAFTA can be described as... a mechanism for the provision of cheap labor. Since NAFTA came into force, the migrant factory has exported [millions of] Mexicans to the United States.”

About 11 percent of Mexico’s population lives in the United States, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Their remittances, which were less than $4 billion in 1994 when NAFTA took effect, rose to $10 billion in 2002, and then 
$20 billion three years later, according to the Bank of Mexico.

Even in the recession, Mexicans sent home $21.13 billion in 2010. Remittances total 3 percent of Mexico’s gross domestic product, according to Frank Holmes, investment analyst and CEO of U.S. Global Investors. They are now Mexico’s second-largest source of national income, behind oil.

However, Mexico’s debt payments, mostly to U.S. banks, consume the same percentage of the GDP as remittances. Those remittances, therefore, support families and provide services that were formerly the obligation of the Mexican government. This alone gives the government a vested interest in the continuing labor flow.

For Fausto Limon, the situation is stark: his family’s right to stay in Mexico, on his ranch in the Perote Valley, depends on ending the problems caused by the operation of Granjas Carroll. But he has no money for planting, and he shares the poverty created by meat and corn dumping with farmers throughout Mexico. The trade system that allows this situation to continue will inevitably produce more migrants -- if not Limon, then probably his children. The fabric of sustainable rural life at his Rancho del Riego is being pulled apart.

The border wall in the mountains west of Mexicali. Photo © David Bacon.
In both the United States and Mexico, many migrant rights networks believe that rational immigration reform must address issues far beyond immigration law enforcement in the United States: real reform must change the U.S. trade policies that contribute to displacing people.

Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, a professor at UCLA and former head of the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations, a group of indigenous Oaxacans living in Mexico and the United States, believes that in the United States “migrants need the right to work, but with labor rights and benefits.” In Mexico, “we need development that makes migration a choice rather than a necessity -- the right to not migrate. Both rights are part of the same solution.”

There are some constructive proposals on the table. The TRADE Act, proposed in the 110th Congress by Maine Democratic Representative Mike Michaud, received support from many migrant rights groups because it would hold hearings to re-examine the impact of NAFTA, including provisions like the environmental side agreement that did nothing to restrict the impact of Granjas Carroll on Perote Valley.

Another immigration reform proposal, called the Dignity Campaign, goes one step further. It would ban agreements that lead to displacement, like that caused by pork imports or the cross-border investments that created the Perote pig farms. It would also repeal employer sanctions, the immigration law that led to the firing of so many Veracruz migrants at the Tar Heel plant.

“Employer sanctions have little effect on migration,” says Bill Ong Hing, a law professor at the University of San Francisco, “but they have made workers more vulnerable to employer pressure. The rationale has always been that this kind of enforcement will dry up jobs for the undocumented and discourage them from coming. However, they actually become more desperate and take jobs at lower wages -- in effect, a subsidy to employers.”

“When you make someone’s status even more illegal,” Carolina Ramirez adds, “you just make their living and working conditions worse. Jobs become like slavery. And if there are no remittances, kids in Veracruz can’t go to school or to the doctor. All the social problems we already have get worse. And all this just provokes more migration.”

The Dignity Campaign and similar proposals are not viable in a Congress dominated by Tea Party nativists and corporations seeking guest-worker programs. But as it took a civil rights movement to pass the Voting Rights Act, any basic change to establish the rights of immigrants will also require a social upheaval and a fundamental realignment of power.


The walkouts in Smithfield and the marches in the streets in 2006 show a deep desire among migrants for basic changes in their conditions and rights. In Perote Valley, farmers are equally determined to prevent the expansion of pig farms and the destruction of their environment. These organizing efforts are linked not just because they’re carried on by people from the same state, facing the same transnational corporation. They’re trying to change the same system.

“We are fighting because we are being destroyed,” says Roberto Ortega. “That is the reason for the daily fight, to try to change this.”

[David Bacon is a California-based writer and photographer. His latest book, Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants, was published by Beacon Press. His photographs and stories can be found at dbacon.igc.org. This article was published at Truthout and was crossposted to The Rag Blog. Read more of David Bacon's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Bobby Bridger on the Lasting Impact of Native American Culture

Singer/songwriter and author Bobby Bridger at the KOOP studios in Austin, March 9, 2012. Photo by Ken McKenzie-Grant / The Rag Blog.
Rag Radio:
Bobby Bridger discusses the lasting impact
of Native American culture on our society

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / March 15, 2012

Author, historian, singer/songwriter, playwright, artist, actor, and theatrical producer Bobby Bridger was Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, March 9, 2012, on Austin community radio station KOOP-FM.

You can listen to the show here.

Bobby Bridger Discusses the Lasting Impact of Native American
Culture on Rag Radio with Thorne Dreyer, Friday, March 9, 2012

On the show, Bridger discusses the issues raised in his most recent book, Where the Tall Grass Grows: Becoming Indigenous and the Mythological Legacy of the American West, which "explores the impact of Native American culture on the American psyche... and examines the impact of indigenous American mythology on contemporary identity and the development of modern popular entertainment, particularly the Hollywood film industry."

On the show, Bridger contrasts the roles played by iconic figures like Sitting Bull and John Wayne in depicting Indian culture, and the impact of Lakota holy man Black Elk and his book, "Black Elk Speaks." Ken McKenzie-Grant participated in this interview and the show includes live performance by Bridger.

This is our second Rag Radio interview with Bobby Bridger; the first occurred on Nov. 18, 2011, and you can listen to it here.

Bobby Bridger, who lives in Houston, is also the author of A Ballad of the West, and other books about native American culture and the American West. A descendant of legendary "mountain man" Jim Bridger, Bobby was featured in an entire chapter of Jan Reid's classic book, The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock.

Bridger, who is also a trained sculptor, painter, and art educator, has appeared twice on PBS' Austin City Limits, on PBS’s American Experience, and on Good Morning America and other major national media. He is the composer of the anthem of the Kerrville Folk Festival, "Heal in the Wisdom," and London-based Qube Pictures released a boxed set DVD collection of his highly-acclaimed epic theatrical trilogy, A Ballad of the West.


Rag Radio, which has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas, features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about issues of progressive politics, culture, and history.

Hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement, Rag Radio is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP and streamed live on the web. After broadcast, all episodes are posted as podcasts and can be downloaded at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is also rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EST) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. Rag Radio is produced in the KOOP studios, in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Coming up on Rag Radio:

THIS FRIDAY, March 16, 2012: Journalist and labor activist David Bacon on how U.S. policies fueled Mexico's great migration.

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Rock Journalist Margaret Moser and Film Actor Sonny Carl Davis

Margaret Moser and Sonny Carl Davis with Rag Radio host Thorne Dreyer, left, at the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, Friday, March 2, 2012. Photo by Tracey Schulz / Rag Radio.
Rag Radio:
Margaret Moser and Sonny Carl Davis discuss
the film, Roadie, and the Austin cultural scene

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / March 7, 2012

Rock journalist Margaret Moser and film actor Sonny Carl Davis were Thorne Dreyer’s guests on Rag Radio, Friday, March 2, 2012, on Austin community radio station KOOP-FM.

They discussed the making of the classic 1980 Alan Rudolph movie Roadie, which was partly filmed in Austin and which starred Meat Loaf, who is a 2012 inductee into the Texas Music Hall of Fame. They also talked about the upcoming Austin Music Awards, which Moser directs; the 2012 South by Southwest music, film, and interactive festival; and the thriving Austin music and film scenes.

You can listen to the show here.

Music Writer Margaret Moser and Film Actor Sonny Carl Davis
on Rag Radio with Thorne Dreyer, March 2, 2012

An "unabashed former groupie," award-winning rock journalist Margaret Moser is a senior editor and staff writer for the Austin Chronicle, and is also the author of three books including The Edge Guide to Austin and Rock Stars Do the Dumbest Things.

Moser has been a commentator for NPR and has written for Sony Records and MOJO magazine. She has served on the Austin Music Commission, is currently on the Board of the Texas Music Hall of Fame, founded the South Texas Popular Culture Center in San Antonio, and directs the Chronicle’s annual Austin Music Awards show during South by Southwest.

Sonny Carl Davis is a film actor, a musician, and a screenwriter. He played a redneck entrepreneur in Texas filmmaker Eagle Pennell’s The Whole Shootin’ Match and played memorable roles in Last Night at the Alamo and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. He also had featured parts in Thelma and Louise, Melvin and Howard, and Roadie, and a supporting role in Red Headed Stranger with Willie Nelson. Sonny was also a founding member in 1968 of Austin’s legendary Uranium Savages, a theatrical rock group that played Austin’s venerable 60s-70s rock venues.

Both Sonny Davis and Margaret Moser were involved in the production of Roadie, which was written by Austinites Big Boy Medlin and Michael Ventura, with Davis playing a featured role in the film. Roadie, which was filmed in Austin, Los Angeles, and New York, starred Meat Loaf and featured Art Carney, as well as musicians like Blondie, Alice Cooper, Hank Williams, Jr., Roy Orbison, Alvin Crow, Asleep at the Wheel, and the late Soul Train host, Don Cornelius.

Davis and Moser hosted a special screening of the film on March 5 at Austin’s Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar. Meat Loaf is being inducted into the Texas Film Hall of Fame on March 8 at ACL Live at the Moody Theater in Austin.

South by Southwest, with keynote speaker Bruce Springsteen, takes place in Austin, March 9-March 18; and the Austin Music Awards, featuring performances by Tex-Mex great Joe King Carrasco and the Crowns, blues musicians Carolyn Wonderland and Ruthie Foster, and a special Christopher Cross reunion, is on March 14 at the Austin Music Hall.

This episode of Rag Radio was produced during KOOP's spring membership drive; fundraising pitches, underwriting announcements, and recorded music have not been edited out of the podcast.

Rag Radio, which has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas, features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about issues of progressive politics, culture, and history.

Hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement, Rag Radio is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP and streamed live on the web. After broadcast, all episodes are posted as podcasts and can be downloaded at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is also rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EST) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. Rag Radio is produced in the KOOP studios, in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Coming up on Rag Radio:

March 9, 2012: Singer-songwriter & author Bobby Bridger on the lasting impact of Native-American culture on American society.
March 16, 2012: Journalist and labor activist David Bacon on how U.S. policies fueled Mexico's great migration.

The Rag Blog

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