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AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
So poor they couldn't pay for their child's milk and diapers, Maria Duque and her family left their impoverished Mexico for the United States, hoping for something -- anything -- better. They learned that life here was much more difficult than they could have imagined.
"There were many hurdles to overcome," said Duque, describing on Tuesday a host of problems she encountered in the workplace: verbal abuse, discrimination, 10- to 12-hour workdays for little pay and no benefits or, worse, the indignity of not being paid for her work at all.
When Duque had emergency surgery, her employer wanted her to report to work anyway. When she couldn't, she was fired and the employer didn't pay her the wages she was owed, Duque said.
Duque joined a handful of Austin working people -- immigrants, natives, maintenance and dry cleaning workers and bus drivers -- who recounted emotional and sometimes tearful personal stories of labor abuses to an international panel of human rights and labor rights experts and activists.
The event at the University of Texas law school, billed as the "Workers' Rights are Human Rights" forum, was part of a national tour seeking to call attention to abuses in the workplace by reframing abuses as a human rights issue.
"Our mission is to restore, to guarantee and to promote the human and constitutional right of working people to organize and collectively bargain," said David Bonior, a former Michigan congressman who chairs American Rights at Work, a nonprofit advocacy group that is sponsoring the national tour.
The former Democratic minority whip said that over the past 10 years, an average of 23,000 workers a year were fired illegally or discriminated against for their support of a union. "Last year, it was 30,000," Bonior said. "In the 1970s, it was 6,000 a year." "Most people work at will in America. They can be fired like that," he said.
Julius Getman, a University of Texas professor and labor law expert, said the stories workers told Tuesday show “the law doesn’t work well in terms of remedying, and it doesn’t work well in union organizing.”
The worker rights’ tour launched in Atlanta last week and heads to Boston next. Bonior said it will restart this winter.
On Monday night, the same panel of experts and activists heard form other Austin workers in a forum attended by about 140 people at University Presbyterian Church in Austin, local organizers said. Local sponsors included the Central Texas Immigrant Workers’ Rights Center and the Religion and Labor Network of Austin.
Bonior said American Rights at Work will compile the testimony and present it to bodies such as the International Labor Organization.
jcasttilo@statesman.com 445-3635
Compiled from print and web editions http://www.statesman.com/metrostate/content/auto/epaper/editions/wednesday/metro_state_34550f3d934e02531021.html
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