Every day, average Americans drive to their jobs, work for about four hours and then take a legally mandated lunch break for 30 minutes to an hour. After about four more hours of work, they go home.

But Gina Cano and Lowlee Urquia’s workdays were nothing like that. Gina and Lowlee were Honduran sweatshop workers, and they worked as long as it took to make their quota with unpaid overtime, a 15-minute lunch break and medical deductions from their $40 weekly paychecks that amounted to a lack of decent medical services. But as horrific as that sounds to students in the U.S., this job provided them with the few resources that they needed to keep their families alive.

Now that they’ve lost even that, Gina and Lowlee no longer have the chance of giving their children an education or any hopes of owning their own houses.

Lowlee, a single mother of four, can no longer afford to pay for her children’s transportation to school, so she was forced to discontinue their education, Lowlee said in Spanish, alongside Gina, at a presentation translated to English. She also had to suspend the medical treatments that her mother was receiving, as she can no longer afford it.

Gina had a big dream of owning a small house for her family to call its own, but now those dreams are long gone along with her job, Gina said at the presentation.

These two women are not alone. Gina and Lowlee are just two of the 1,656 workers who lost their factory jobs at Hugger and Vision Tex, two Honduran sweatshops, in January 2009, leaving them with no resources to sustain their families.

Many people in Honduras have no other choice but to work under such conditions if they want keep their families afloat, Gina said.

But Gina and Lowlee are not like most people in Honduras; they have decided to take a stand for their rights in order to stop the inhumane treatment of sweatshop workers. These two women are traveling around the U.S. in a 30-state tour starting in Florida and ending in Washington, funded by United Students Against Sweatshops, hoping to find people interested in their message who will take a stand beside them.

“We are in this journey knowing that we will be put on the black list, but we just don’t care anymore,” Gina said. “We just want to fight for what is fair because if these conditions keep going, they will get worse, and we fear that they might even lead us to a state of slavery.”

To kick off their tour, Gina and Lowlee spoke at UF last month about their struggles in the sweatshops and their problems without it.
They explained that after they were fired, the workers from both of these factories were negleted and denied their severance pay.
An estimated $2.1 million was owed to these workers in severance pay.

To date, Gina and the unemployed workers from Hugger have been able to recover 21.5 percent of the money owed to them by selling the leftover machinery from the factory. Lowlee and the workers from Vision Tex have been able to recover 26.5 percent of the money owed to them using this same method.

The women explained how important it is for people to be aware of where their clothes are being made and who is making them. Everyone can make a difference just by being informed and buying clothes that are not made in sweatshops.

“Many people think that protesting against sweatshops won’t help us because they think that any job is better than no job,” Gina said. “But while having a job is better than not having one at all, continuing on this path will lead to worse things.”

But protest can do much more than one can imagine. It brings to light problems that were sitting in the dark before given attention. Those problems, in this case, are the ones that Gina and Lowlee are going through.

“By bringing these former Nike workers, we are hoping to make our campaign stronger by educating people on what is going on,” said Rama Issa-Ibrahim, president of Human Rights Awareness on Campus. “I think people can draw a closer connection to the cause if they meet people who have suffered or gone through the hardships of working under precarious conditions that are presented in sweatshops.”

It is for the rights of individuals, like Gina and Lowlee, that organizations like Human Rights Awareness on Campus and UF Amnesty International work for.

These two UF student organizations partnered to form the Gators for a Sweatshop Free Campus, a campaign they’ve led with the support of many other campus groups over the last year.

The purpose of this campaign is to make UF apparel sweatshop-free, said Elena Quiroz, executive officer of UF Amnesty International. Furthermore, Gators for a Sweatshop Free Campus wants the university to adhere to the standards set by the Workers Rights Consortium, a labor rights organization led by university faculty, students and labor rights experts who work to regulate fair wages and the treatment of garment employees, especially in the factories that produce college-affiliated clothing.

The WRC gives workers a voice by putting them in contact with universities who are willing to speak up for them. Universities that are affiliated with the WRC give companies a code of conduct by which they must abide, and if a company breaks this code, they are then penalized by law.

“Already, more than a hundred universities have affiliated themselves with WRC because of student opposition to sweatshops. This includes Florida State University, Arizona State University, Washington State and of course a huge number of other public universities, as well as private ones,” said Rafiya Javed, vice president of external affairs for Human Rights Awareness on Campus. “UF currently abides by the standards set by the Fair Labor Association, but these aren’t comprehensive enough and do not ensure that subcontractors are actually even treating their workers fairly.”

The problem is that the FLA receives much of its funding from the apparel industry itself, so it encourages the companies to set their own rules. It also does not require that workers be paid a living wage, which is essential to live a poverty-free life.

Campus activist organizations believe that the switch to the WRC would make a tremendous difference in the lives of individuals like Gina and Lowlee.

For the same $50,000 that UF spends annually on its FLA membership, it could join the WRC, which exposed the injustice in Honduras. Joining WRC would also allow UF to require the companies who sell the licensed apparel that UF students buy to pay their workers a living wage.

“Joining the WRC would ensure that UF-licensed clothes would not come from sweatshop factories,” Issa-Ibrahim said.

The Gators for a Sweatshop Free Campus campaign has already had some success among administration.

On the morning Gina and Lowlee spoke at UF, representatives from both of these groups met with administration officials to discuss the possibility of a change to the WRC standards, and they were told that the university would start to move forward in the process, said Emily Flynn, president of UF Amnesty International. About a week later, the University Athletic Department signed off on the preposition.

A letter of intent has been signed by the university saying that it intends to join the WRC. As of now, the university is working on drawing up a code of conduct and when to begin enforcement.

UF joining the WRC is expected to have a great impact on the sweatshop industry and the companies who buy from it.

It would put pressure on the companies to follow the rules put out by the WRC and give power to the universities in terms of being able to regulate and penalize the companies for misconduct, said Rod Palmquist, national organizer for United Students Against Sweatshops. UF ranks No. 2 in sports apparel sales by the Collegiate Licensing Company, so joining the WRC will have a tremendous influence on athletic apparel companies, as well as other universities.

“UF kind of taking the lead will hopefully make universities think twice about joining as well,” Palmquist said.

The three-day Harvest of Hope Foundation Music and Arts Fest is back for its second year, March 12

The Harvest of Hope Foundation, a “non-profit organization that provides financial, educational, and service-oriented aid to migrant farm workers all over the country,” according to its web site, was founded by Phillip Kellerman in 1997.

Kellerman’s initial exposure to issues concerning migrant farm workers came from his involvement in 1989 with the ESCORT Migrant Education Program at the State University of New York in Oneonta, where he answered phone calls for the National Migrant Education Hotline. Kellerman says he received hundreds of calls from about 25 states, including Florida, from migrant farm workers seeking emergency aid for “vehicle repairs, housing, utilities, clothing, food, medical services and helping their children in schools.”

“I soon discovered there was not much federal, state or local help in these states. There was no help out there,” Kellerman said. “That’s what led me to set up the Harvest of Hope Foundation.”

In 2004, Kellerman moved to Gainesville.

“Before I left, a good friend of mine I worked with in Oneonta contacted her friend, Ryan Murphy,” Kellerman said. “He really liked the foundation and what I was doing.”

Murphy, who was getting his master’s degree in bilingual education at UF, worked in an afterschool literacy program called Libros de Familia, which promoted literacy to migrant children in Alachua County. The program received funding from the HOH Foundation to buy books, fund afterschool workshops and get UF students involved.

“I met with Phil, and I was excited about what he did [with the Foundation] and asked what I could do to help raise funds,” Murphy said. “I worked at No Idea Records going to school, and once I got involved with Phil, I wanted to bring the two worlds together. Knowing Harvest of Hope needed money, the most immediate thing I could do was to put on benefit shows.”

Murphy thought some bands he knew would be interested because “their politics would fall in line with helping workers and social justice issues.” Murphy asked his friends in Against Me! to play a benefit show, and “they took the ball and ran with it,” he said.

“They did a series of shows around the country and raised $18,000. It got us motivated and inspired Phil to realize other avenues of fundraising.”

“We just thought there was a really good connection between grassroots, alternative and progressive musicians and the grassroots work the Harvest of Hope Foundation was doing,” Kellerman said.

While setting up a benefit show for Against Me! and some other local bands with Ryan Detera of Café Eleven in St. Augustine, Detera mentioned he had “just become the general manager of the Fairgrounds and why don’t we do three days. I laughed because it seemed ridiculous compared to what I wanted to do.  He said, ‘You do the Fest in Gainesville. I think you would have the ability to do it here,’” Murphy said.

As a non-profit organizing an event of that size, HOH was eligible for a grant from the county. They applied and received $50,000, the largest grant ever awarded. The money comes from tax revenue received through tourism, which is then allocated to aid organizations seeking to do special events in the county.

“Once I got together with everybody who works on the Fest and motivated everyone and got them on my team, we couldn’t look back,” Murphy said.

Through both Detera and Murphy’s connections, they began to assemble the 2009 line-up for the first HOH Fest.

“I know a lot of bands, punk bands, through No Idea, and Ryan [Detera] knows smaller indie bands through Café Eleven. He was also booking through the Fairgrounds, so he was working with agents [of national bands] as well,” Murphy said.

They came up with a diverse selection of punk, indie, hip-hop, folk and acoustic.

Last year, although 7,800 tickets were sold and 17,000 people came through the gates, nothing was raised. Kellerman explains it was a first-year test, and “most first-year tests lose a ton of money.”

But Kellerman is not disappointed with last year’s turnout.

“Even though we didn’t make money, the off-shoots from the fest were wonderful. We had a lot of bands, subsequent to the fest, doing their own benefits for the Foundation, locally and around the country. Was it worth our effort? Yes!”

This year Kellerman hopes to see double the attendance of last year and give a stronger focus to the HOH Foundation cause.

“The first year we just wanted to create a general awareness of what it was all about.  This year there will be a much stronger focus on what HOH is about, with a strong emphasis at tables and the non-profit section that works with the migrant farm workers.  There will be a double CD of last year’s event available, as well as a documentary of the first year that incorporates the music and the message” on sale at the festival.

The CD is currently available now at fail-saferecords.com and interpunk.com. Three-day passes to the HOH Festival are available at harvestofhopefest.com for $49.50.

Photos courtesy of Morgan Bellinger – www.movephotography.com/ – and Celia Roberts – www.celiaroberts.com

I think about these things every day when I clock in at mi trabajo.

For students, restaurant work is usually a temporary excursion into what they see as a “fun” and shockingly unprofessional work environment.

But what isn’t seen is that these “fun” jobs take a tremendous toll on the people who work them. Some of these people who prepare, cook or serve your food have no recourse but to work for low pay and long hours without benefits. And others just get caught up in it, crushed by a dehumanizing routine that forces them to create a commodity they are alienated from and will not enjoy.

The most widely used language in American kitchens is Spanish, which is a result of the standard operating procedure of U.S. power players in Washington and on Wall Street to systematically destroy the working economies of Latin America. By forcing privatization of former public industries in exchange for World Bank and IMF loans (which then further destabilize these economies by placing them in a position of financial servitude to “el norte,” which causes waves of people to emigrate in search of work), the American ruling class has successfully created a massive amount of undocumented immigrant laborers who, out of necessity, compete for low wage jobs in the service industry.

Socialists call this the “reserve army of labor,” which is an appropriate metaphor, if you think about it.

There is a particularly sick irony in that globalization has created a permanent class of immigrant restaurant workers who are schooled in the production of food they’d never be able to afford: foie gras, coq au vin, lobster bisque. In the kitchens of large, famous restaurants in any major city, rest assured you will find Carlos or Juanito cooking your classic Mediterranean fare, rather than Matteo or Jacques.

In short, if a person defies international borders to find work to support themselves and their family, it’s a lot harder to stand up for themselves and their coworkers. When the spouse and kids live in Ciudad Juarez or Oaxaca and they’re waiting for Friday afternoon for you to go down to a Western Union office to wire money south of the border, it’s not easy to tell your boss to shove it and move on to the next job or organize a picket outside your work when you get screwed out of overtime. Bosses know this, and they love it.

In Gainesville, they also like student employees for very similar reasons. Students are notorious for moving from job to job and never demanding more for their work because they see restaurant work as a temporary cash fix. That is, until they graduate in the midst of the Great Recession and come to the ugly and expensive truth that most of their degrees aren’t worth more than $8 or $9 an hour at dead-end jobs.

Of course, students are also notorious for not knowing a damn thing about a real day’s work. They work for cheap, but you generally get what you pay for. The very presence of students in this town serves the function of driving down wages a few dollars below what the same job in a town like Ocala, Jacksonville or Panama City would pay.

It’s a simple principle: The larger the supply of labor, the lower the wages will go until they level off at the minimum to live (generally about $8 an hour). I’m not saying that student workers should feel guilty about the role they play in the labor market. Lots of people need paying work, and as a socialist, I would never argue that one group of workers deserves different treatment than another.

To the contrary, I think students should be in the forefront of the struggle for decent working conditions while using their beneficial position to take a stand when others can’t. But at the same time, adult workers in Gainesville usually make about the same as student workers because bosses know if they start causing trouble at work, there’s always another sheltered suburban kid looking for a few shifts a week to pay for a weed habit. What restaurant workers need is unity.

Many people in restaurants turn to drugs and booze to relax or escape reality. It’s probably one of the biggest obstacles to restaurant worker unity and the possibility of improved working conditions. But then again, it’s hard times right now. Real hard.

So the next time you’re sneaking a smoke while making a garbage run or cleaning out a grease barrel, think about who is really responsible for how and why your restaurant job sucks. Chances are it’s probably not the person next to you on the line who gives you a hard time or the servers (who you shit-talk) or the cooks (who you shit-talk). It’s probably the owners who understaff and overwork you. They pay you less for your work than you earn. They pit you against each other.

And ultimately, it’s this goddamn, dirty-rotten system known as capitalism.

The thick packet of literature included stories like “Immokalee family sentenced for slavery,” “Apartheid in America” and “A more-complete definition of ‘sustainable.’” By the time we arrived in the desolate town, just after midnight, we felt confident in our school-child ability to recite the labor history of this town and felt briefed on the ultimate reason for our visit.

After becoming fed up with the impoverished condition that enslaved them, migrant workers started a grassroots organization called the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) in 1993. These workers, mostly immigrants from Honduras, Guatemala and Haiti, had already experienced both verbal and physical abuse since their arrival in the U.S. Most of them could remember a time when, back in their own countries, they survived as subsistence farmers — selling crops and living on corn, squash, beans and, most importantly, their own autonomy. They weren’t rich, but they were dignified.

But after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was established between the U.S., Canada and Mexico, these small-time farmers could not compete with subsidized crops from the States. Before, Mexico was a major wheat exporter. Now, Mexico only exports cheap labor.

“I think of myself as a son of NAFTA,” CIW staff member Lucas Benitez said. Poverty and exploitation forced these people north, where they hoped conditions would improve. But in Immokalee, the reality was much different.

As we pulled up to the CIW headquarters, a man whom we only knew through e-mails warmly greeted us. Marc Rodriguez, the national coordinator of the Student/Farmworker Alliance (SFA), directed us to our sleeping quarters — the Immokalee Non-Profit Housing children’s care center, about two miles away. Finally settling down among baby toys and children’s books in Spanish, it dawned on us that we had barely scratched the surface of this town.

The next morning, about 150 people convened in an old church for the official start of the fifth annual CIW/SFA Encuentro. “The meeting,” aimed at campaign strategy for the upcoming year, brought together students and activists from across the U.S. with the like-minded goal of working in solidarity to bring positive change to the lives of migrant farmworkers in Immokalee. After an introduction to the Student/Farmworker Alliance, Benitez and several other members of the CIW filled in a few more gaps in our knowledge of the coalition’s history.

In 1995, the CIW held its first major action. After Pacific Tomato Growers threatened to cut workers’ pay from the minimum wage $4.25 an hour to $3.85 an hour, more than 3,000 farmworkers went on strike for one week without compensation, including nearby citrus workers acting in solidarity, and built alliances with local church groups, schools and universities. The pressure was so great that the company announced it would instead increase the hourly wage to $5.25.

Unfortunately, not all growers were as responsive as Pacific Tomato Growers. In fact, after this first event, it became frustratingly difficult to convince growers to yield to the CIW’s demands of a wage increase of one penny more per pound of tomatoes and to follow a human rights code of conduct.

So the coalition began to research every link in the food supply chain and noticed a striking trend. No matter who the players were, the line of succession was always the same — the food suppliers pull all the strings from the top; the growers act as the strings being pulled; and the farmworkers dangle like marionettes at the bottom.

This system is apparent within the makeup of UF’s own food supplier, Aramark Ltd.

“We strive to offer clients and customers fresh whole foods that are raised, grown, harvested, and produced locally and in a sustainable manner whenever possible. And we partner with suppliers to increase the availability of such foods,” Aramark states on its web site.

However, Aramark is constantly being ridiculed for not living up to its self-mandated standards of ensuring a sustainable supply chain of workers at the ends of its own puppet cabaret: workers like those in Florida who pick roughly 90 percent of the country’s tomato supply while reaping little, if any, of its profits.

On Martin Luther King Day in 2001, the CIW took a bold step to bring farmworkers a little closer to their suppliers. They officially threatened a nationwide Taco Bell boycott outside of the Mexican fast-food chain in Ft. Myers. Three months later, they presented a list of demands to Taco Bell: meet with the CIW and tomato growers to discuss possible solutions to farmworkers’ problems, contribute to an immediate wage increase per pound of tomatoes picked, and join the CIW to draft wage and working conditions standards to be required of all Taco Bell tomato suppliers.

Three years and thousands of protest signs later, Taco Bell folded. The “Boot the Bell” campaign by students and farmworkers was so successful that the victory received Mother Jones’ “Campus Activism Victory of the Year” award.

Taco Bell set the bar, and the rest dropped like flies. McDonald’s, Burger King and eventually all of Yum Brands (Burger King’s supplier), Whole Foods, Subway, and Bon Appétit agreed to pay the people who pick their tomatoes one penny more per pound, as well as agreeing to follow a code of conduct for growers and suppliers.

These victories created an astounding precedent, proving that a group of farmworkers with little to no legal protection could organize, take on huge corporations and actually see a response to their demands.

Back at the Encuentro, everyone prepared for a walking tour, filling their water bottles and gathering big-brimmed hats and sunglasses. We trudged down the sad, steamy roads of the migrant housing neighborhood, stopping in the shaded areas in front of various points. The first site was a small trailer park stuffed with dinky green trailers with bright “for rent” signs shining through their dusty window panes. Our guides Silvia Perez and Melody Gonzalez explained that the dilapidated trailers — most of them lacking basic amenities like AC and hot water — were owned by tomato growers in the area and rented out to migrants for a going rate of $60 per person per week. The growers have the ability to charge outlandish prices for several reasons, including proximity to pick-up points for work and the lack of a housing market demand by residents other than the workers.

A few blocks away, we stopped across the street of the next site — a nonchalant house that looked like its inhabitants had been gone for several weeks. Our guides, apprehensive about getting any closer to the house, began to unfold the tale of its history:

Just one year ago, the owner of this house and several others were arrested and charged with modern-day slavery. Gonzalez, in her rustic Spanish accent, explained that about a year and a half ago a large U-haul was nestled in the driveway. The chain lock around the U-haul was not to keep people out, but to keep them in.

In a fashion similar to the years just after the American Civil War, tomato growers were holding immigrants hostage as indentured servants, working to pay off their “debt” to the growers for bringing them to the U.S. In essence, the growers were smuggling people from Latin America into the States and then enslaving them — making them work long, stringent hours for little or no pay and charging outlandish prices like $5 to shower outside with a hose and bucket and even more obscene amounts for food and water.

And all this was happening within an afternoon’s drive from Gainesville.

In 2008, one enslaved worker escaped and informed the CIW of his condition. The coalition created an uproar, attracting media outlets from across the country and bringing the growers to trial. The tomato farmers were sentenced to 50 years in prison by a federal court for practicing modern-day slavery.

Now, the CIW is turning its attention back to the penny-per-pound campaign. After the coalition forced so many corporations to come to the table, they were ready for something larger: the overarching food service providers, like Aramark, that organize and manage food courts and dining services on campuses, workplaces, tourist destinations and even prisons nationwide. This newest campaign, aptly named “Dine with Dignity,” is in full swing across the country, focusing not only on Aramark, but also Sodexo and Compass food service providers, as well as corporate grocers like Publix and Kroger.

Already Compass has come to the table.

UF just renewed a 10-year contract with Aramark in June of this year while many students were away for the summer, allowing it to pass without protest. But several groups, including the Students for a Democratic Society, The Fine Print and the newly formed Gainesville Student/Farmworker Alliance are not allowing it to go unnoticed.

Concerned students presented a resolution at the UF Student Senate meeting on Sept. 22, which, if signed, would have strongly urged Aramark representatives at UF to enter into negotiations with the CIW. That same night, a different resolution concerning Aramark’s purchase of sweatshop-made clothing was also presented.

It passed with flying colors, but the CIW resolution was not so lucky.

But this hasn’t killed the campaign. In fact, “Dine with Dignity” is swiftly making its presence known on UF’s campus through fliers, petitions and collaboration with student groups on campus, as well as a number of fiery letters to the editor of The Independent Florida Alligator.

In addition, the CIW will be hosting a popular education rally in Gainesville on Saturday, Oct. 23, fully outfitted with the elaborate display of street theater and activist artwork that has made the coalition so well-received around the country. The rally will begin on UF’s campus to protest Aramark and then will head to the Publix at 125 S.W. 34th St. Later, there will be a presentation at the Civic Media Center at 433 S. Main St.

Students and community members looking to get involved are asked to send an e-mail to GainesvilleSFA@googlegroups.com, and sign the petition.

By the Numbers:
- 53 percent of farmworkers in the U.S. are undocumented, according to a 2005 survey by the U.S. Department of Labor.

- 2 million farmworkers have been driven out of business since the enactment of NAFTA in 1994.

- 40 cents is the amount paid to workers in Immokalee for every 32-pound bucket of tomatoes they harvest, which equals $.0125 per pound. Workers can pick between 15 and 27 buckets per hour, according to a UF study.

- Farmworkers have not received a raise per bucket since 1980:

Year                Minimum Wage                    buckets/hour (to receive min. wage)

1980                $3.10/hour                            8
1997                $5.15                                    13
2007                $6.67                                    17
2008                $7.25                                    18

• With a 1 penny-per-pound increase:

future                $7.25                                    10