Sponsored by Jobs with Justice (JWJ), Grassroots Global Justice (GGJ), National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (NNIRR), and South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT), together with the Indian Workers' Congress, Alliance of Guestworkers for Dignity and the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice - www.neworleansworkerjustice.org
 
Indian guest workers trafficked to the Gulf Coast to work for Signal International have been on hunger strike since May 14 demanding dignity and justice.  The workers were charged $20,000 apiece for false promises of permanent residency but instead were given temporary H2B visas that bound them to their employer, allowing the company to impose deplorable conditions and threaten workers with deportation. When they organized, Signal sent armed guards to detain the organizers and fired the leaders.  The intimidation hasn't stopped their organizing, and the hunger strike now enters its fourth week.  The workers have already won their first demand - Congress will hold a hearing later this year to investigate Signal International and the use of the guest-worker program. 
 
Help the workers win their second, key demand - that they be granted "continued presence" - so they can end their hunger strike.  The workers must be released from the terror of deportation and granted this legal status as authorized by the U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act so they may safely participate in the federal government's investigation.
 
TO HELP WIN THE HUNGER STRIKE:
 
1) PRESSURE YOUR CONGRESSIONAL REPRESENTATIVE TO SIGN THE LETTER TO THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE BEFORE JUNE 11.  

Representative Dennis Kucinich is circulating a sign-on letter to the Attorney General Michael Mukasey calling for continued presence for the workers.  Call your member of Congress through the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask them to sign onto the letter.
 
2) ORGANIZE A SOLIDARITY ACTION ON JUNE 11 AT THE FEDERAL BUILDING IN YOUR CITY.
 
Actions should be focused on public education, media visibility, and pressure on the Attorney General.  Local solidarity actions can:  
Through these actions we will demonstrate to the Department of Justice that workers' rights activists around the country are paying attention and calling for justice in this case.  In Washington DC, the workers and their allies will be holding a massive rally at the Department of Justice in conjunction with the events around the country.
 
3) DONATE TO THE HUNGER STRIKE SUPPORT FUND, on their web site at www.neworleansworkerjustice.org

For Immediate Release
May 30, 2008
Contact: Kat Rodriguez, Stephanie Dernek: 520.561.2427


Tucson-  An international group participating in the fifth annual Migrant Trail Walk from Sásabe, Sonora to Tucson, Arizona will arrive on Sunday, June 1st.  The 75-mile Walk will culminate in a press conference, followed by a community gathering at Kennedy Park in Tucson, Arizona.  The Migrant Trail, a Walk through the most traveled corridor on the Arizona-Sonora border, sponsored by a coalition of nineteen organizations, bears witness to the thousands of women, men and children who have lost their lives in an attempt to provide a better future for themselves and their families.
 
"The deaths of more than 5,000 women, men and children are the direct result of our failed and unconscionable U.S. border policies," says Jodi Read of Mennonite Central Committee.  "We, as people of faith and conscience, are called to make this journey together as witnesses, to be the voices that our migrant brothers and sisters no longer have."
 
For the last five years, this collaborative effort has joined friends and allies from across the country and from international backgrounds for a one-week experience through the Sásabe corridor, where most crossings occur and the vast majority of bodies are recovered along the Arizona-Sonora border.  An act of solidarity, the Walk is a means of bearing witness to the death and devastation that has resulted from the violence, division, and xenophobia in response to the mass migration that has resulted from failed border and trade policies.
 
"I recently returned from Juarez/El Paso where the militarization, violence and death toll increase daily. I am impelled to action for those I met and for the migrant community in Chicago, Illinois," says Stephanie Dernek of 8th Day Center for Justice and Chicago New Sanctuary Coalition, who has made the journey for the last three years to the Arizona border. "I walk the Migrant Trail to be a witness to the human rights violations, unjust and racist border/immigration policies. I walk in remembrance of those who died in the journey and to recommit myself and my community to work to bring about justice and peace for the migrant."
 
The Migrant Trail Walk will begin the final 6.7 miles of their journey at 9am at the BLM campsite on Ajo Way and San Joaquin Road.  Participants will be welcomed home at Kennedy Park with speakers, music, food, and testimonies from participants and supporters.  This event is free and open to the public.
 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                    
May 25, 2008

Contact:  Hamid Khan, South Asian Network, (562) 230-4578
Alexis Mazón, Coalición de Derechos Humanos, (520) 390-1604


(Tucson, AZ and Los Angeles, CA) – The Coalición de Derechos Humanos (DH) and the South Asian Network (SAN) joined hundreds of immigrant rights, human rights and labor organizations across the country in expressing resounding support for immigrant workers from India currently on a hunger strike in front of the White House. They called on the U.S. Congress and state legislatures to investigate the slave-like conditions to which employers routinely subject guest workers and to immediately halt the expansion of all guest worker visa programs.

Now on the 12th day of their hunger strike, these guest workers were lured from India by Signal International, a Northrop-Grumman subcontractor, which promised them green cards and decent wages only to subsequently force them into indentured servitude, effectively imprisoning them at a Gulf Coast shipyard. The workers escaped the Signal labor camp in March 2008 and recently won an important victory in getting the U.S. Department of Justice to open an investigation into Signal’s involvement in an international labor trafficking ring. However, the workers are now having to fight to stay in the country to participate in the investigation. Since beginning their hunger strike on May 14, four of the hunger strikers have been hospitalized. (Video, photos and updates of the hunger strike are available at http://www.neworleansworkerjustice.org/).

“We are proud to stand with these courageous hunger strikers who have marched in the footsteps of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. from Mississippi to the White House, placing themselves and their families at great risk, to tell Congress the terrible truth about the U.S. guest worker program,” said Violeta Domínguez, a board member of DH, based in Tucson, AZ, and former organizer of Mexican ex-Braceros, or guest workers, who are still awaiting payment of their back wages more than four decades after the U.S. Bracero program ended, in 1965. Violations of the most basic worker protections and corrupt labor recruitment practices have been widespread in both past and current guest worker programs. Guest workers who report serious injuries on the job, or speak out when they go unpaid are often threatened with firing and deportation by employers.

“Instead of continuing to blindly support guest worker programs, members of Congress and state legislators from both political parties have a responsibility to hear directly from the experts on this issue -- the Signal hunger strikers and the hundreds of thousands of other guest workers who have survived incredible brutality on the job,” Domínguez added.

The groups condemned two proposals currently in the Arizona legislature that would create the first-ever state-run guest worker program. Earlier this year, Arizona became the first state to enact an employer sanctions law, which effectively makes holding a job a criminal act, and has erected the country’s toughest state-run policing apparatus to arrest immigrants. Consequently, many immigrant workers have fled Arizona, leaving crops unharvested and jobs unfilled. Pointing out the irony in Arizona now attempting to attract immigrant workers, the groups called the state guest worker bills “exceptionally hypocritical.”

Hamid Khan, director of SAN, based in Los Angeles, CA, declared, “Like the sweeping ICE raids terrorizing immigrant families across the country, guest worker programs are intended to keep immigrant workers disempowered. Guest workers face relentless intimidation, surveillance and policing by their corporate employers under these programs, whether they are from India or Latin America, whether they build ships or pick strawberries.”

Khan continued, “The millions of immigrants who bravely marched in the streets during the last two years demanded full worker rights and human rights and real legalization, not corporate-led schemes to crush wages and bodies. The only thing guest worker programs legalize is modern-day slavery.”

The groups further called attention to the fact that Northrop Grumman has recently won numerous lucrative contracts from the Department of Homeland Security under SBInet, a multi-billion dollar government-corporate partnership to privatize all border enforcement operations.

“Our compañeros on hunger strike in front of the White House, together with their family members who are fasting back in India, have set an extraordinary example for workers everywhere by standing up to Signal and Northrop Grumman, one of the biggest military contractors in the world. We know Northrop Grumman here on the border well since they are part of the gang of corporate profiteers building up the surveillance and policing infrastructure in our communities to round up and imprison immigrants on a massive scale,” said Isabel García, co-chair of DH. “Be it here in Tucson, or on the Gulf Coast, or in Iraq, U.S. policy on guest worker programs, immigration and military intervention are allowing these corporations to make billions of dollars off of human suffering.”  

 

To make a donation to the hunger strikers and to learn more about the Alliance of Guest Workers for Dignity, an affiliate of the New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice, visit: www.neworleansworkerjustice.org and http://nolaworkerscenter.wordpress.com

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Press Release

Comunicado de Prensa