On September 22

On this day in ...

... 1919, as detailed in this month's ABA Journal, began "The Great Steel Strike," in which upwards of 365,600 workers U.S. workers walked away from their jobs "at steel mills and furnaces." The strike would last till January 8 of the following year, though it was crippled early on by opposition from law enforcement, judges, and legislatures, all supported by "a hostile public unsympathetic to their demands for an eight-hour day, a six-day workweek and the right to organize without being harassed." Unrest in the steel mills had been kindling for years; among the events that appears to have touched off the strike at that time was the killing of a colleague of the better-known Mother Jones: 47-year-old Fannie Sellins (above right). Born Fannie Mooney in 1872 in New Orleans, she'd become a union organizer after marriage, when she went to work in a St. Louis clothing factory to help support her family. She was shot to death during a union-management conflict in western Pennsylvania. The ABA Journal reports that "within days, her blood-soaked picture was a fixture in union halls," and thus intensified the calls to strike. (Years later, 2 men charged with Sellins' murder would be acquitted.)

(Prior September 22 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

The sweetest place on Earth?

Many readers likely followed the news in mid-August of an unusual labor action a Hershey plant in Pennsylvania: a strike by foreign students, many in engineering and medicine, visiting the U.S. on the J-1 summer student work-travel visa program. Recruited with the promise of cultural exchange and lucrative employment, many of these students were forced to work the night shift at a chocolate factory under back-breaking and unsafe conditions -- not exactly the "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" scenario that one foreign student had envisioned.
Last week, the August 2011 Human Rights Delegation to Hershey, Pennsylvania released a comprehensive report situating the experience of these students in an international human rights framework. The delegation was composed of a clinical teaching fellow, a labor professor, and two law professors, Colleen Breslin, Stephanie Luce, Beth Lyon (pictured near right), and Sarah Paoletti (pictured far right), who interviewed several students and reviewed background materials relating to their work situation. Though the U.S. Department of Labor and the U.S. Department of State are also investigating the treatment of these foreign students, this "shadow" report seems a creative and powerful use of human rights law in the domestic context.
The Human Rights Delegation report contextualizes the ill-treatment of the foreign students, linking their situation with that of domestic laborers. The authors describe a "national narrative in which employers are increasingly relying on layers of contracting and subcontracting to shield themselves from their moral and legal obligations to their workforce" and "increasingly treat workers as disposable labor commodities" rather than human beings possessing fundamental human rights. The parallels with the treatment of undocumented migrant workers in the United States are difficult to dismiss.
The report describes various violations of human rights law, including the right to freedom of association awarded to "everyone", without regard to nationality or immigration status, under Article 22 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
At every turn, by the student exchange program that brought them over, by their employer in the United States, and by agencies from their home countries, the students were told that they could not participate in a strike or other activity at the worksite. Varying sanctions were threatened, ranging from termination from the program to deportation and a bar from returning to the US for five years.
The report exposes the dangerous potential for abusive labor practices under the J-1 visa. The program creates a highly unequal relationship between the students and their employers. The students are far from home, in a new cultural and social context, and have been brought in to work for just a few months. Many students and their families take on significant debt in order to participate in a J-1 program. The employer has the power to single-handedly terminate the student's immigration status, which would in turn make it impossible for the student to repay these debts. Given that there are no avenues offering students independent information about their rights, it would be unsurprising if many suffer exploitative work situations in silence.
Indeed, the surprising part of the story is that these students, from countries as varied as China, Kazahkstan, Moldova, Mongolia, Poland, Romania, Turkey, and the Ukraine, had the courage to stand up against the treatment to which they were subjected.
Sadly, the story of the J-1 visa -- of excessive discretion around immigration status given to individuals with incentives to abuse that power -- is one that appears throughout the immigration realm.
Apart from the need to fix the structural flaws of the program as the report recommends, this story demonstrates how the creation of a human rights culture in the immigration bureaucracy and beyond is vital when it comes to protecting immigrants in America today.

On March 1

On this day in ...
... 1780 (230 years ago today), amid the American Revolution, the legislature of the one-time British colony of Pennsyvania became the 1st in history to move to abolish slavery. Pennsylvania's Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery banned importation of slaves, guaranteed the children of slaves born in Pennsylvania would be born free, and provided that domestic slaves of citizens from other states would have the right to manumission after the household resided 6 months in Pennsylvania; however, U.S. Congress members were exempted from the last provision.

(Prior March 1 posts are here, here, and here)

On June 23

On this day in ...
… 1683, William Penn signed the “Great Treaty” with the chiefs of the Lenni Lenape tribe to guarantee the peace among them. The area of land they where sharing was given to Penn by England's King Charles II. Penn later named this land Pennsylvania. On that day, William Penn reportedly said:

'We meet on the broad pathway of good faith and good-will; no advantage shall be taken on either side, but all shall be openness and love. We are the same as if one man’s body was to be divided into two parts; we are of one flesh and one blood.'

Tamanend, one of the chiefs, is said to have replied:

“We will live in love with William Penn and his children as long as the creeks and rivers run, and while the sun, moon, and stars endure.”

The Great Treaty was not broken until the Penn’s Creek Massacre of October 16, 1755. (credit for Penn's Treaty with the Indians, by Benjamin West, 1771)
… 1889 (120 years ago today), Anna Akhmatova (right), a poet credited with a large influence on Russian poetry, was born Anna Gorenko in Odessa, Ukraine. Her most accomplished works, Requiem, which was not published in its entirety in Russia until 1987, and Poem Without a Hero, are reactions to the horror of the Stalinist Terror, a period during which she endured artistic repression as well as tremendous personal loss. She was awarded the Etna-Taormina prize in 1964 and an honorary doctorate from Oxford University in 1965. Two years before her death at the age of 76, Akhmatova was chosen president of the Writers' Union. Akhmatova died in Leningrad, where she had spent most of life, in 1966. (credit for 1922 portrait of Anna Akhmatova by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin)

(Prior June 23 posts are here and here.)