Katrina: Six Months Later
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ADVOCATES FOR IMMIGRANT WORKERS CELEBRATE A VICTORY AND CONTINUE THE FIGHT
For a group of immigrant workers on the Gulf Coast, Thursday was a day of celebration: Nearly $142,000 in unpaid wages finally made it into their pockets.
The payments are the latest victory for the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance, or MIRA, in its fight to protect thousands of workers from unscrupulous employers. And it is part of a patchwork of efforts across the south to marshal support for immigrants and their families who are facing hardship and abuse as a result of the last hurricane season.
The Farmworkers Association of Florida, or FWAF, was one of two organizations recently to file suit against the Federal Emergency Management Agency challenging its practice of denying post-storm assistance to undocumented workers.
Both MIRA and FWAF are organizations Oxfam helps support with grants.
On Thursday, workers gathered at the MIRA office in Biloxi, Mississippi, to receive checks from the US Department of Labor ranging from $400 to $2,600. The distribution capped months of legwork to track down the delinquent employer—a subcontractor of Halliburton—and recover the unpaid wages.
Wage theft has been rampant on the Gulf Coast since hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit, said MIRA President Bill Chandler, and right from the start the alliance has taken a determined approach to fighting it.
“Other organizations that advocate for workers haven’t been this aggressive,” said Chandler. “Our effort has been to respond quickly to confront the employers. It proves that organizing and sheer guts pay off.”
MIRA has about 20 other cases pending with the labor department, Chandler added, and through a variety of methods has helped workers to recover a total of $214,000 in unpaid wages. Thursday’s $142,000 distribution represents MIRA’s largest recovery yet.
Vicky Cintra, MIRA’s organizing coordinator for the Gulf Coast, stumbled on the case last fall when she learned about a group of 35 workers crowded into a three trailers in Gulfport, Mississippi.
“When we found them, they had not eaten in over three days,” said Cintra, adding that the trailers had no water, cooking facilities, or furniture. Probing a little further, Cintra quickly learned the men’s work history: They had been hired by KTC Services of Seven Springs, North Carolina, to remove debris from the Naval Construction Battalion Center in Gulfport following Hurricane Katrina. She also learned that more than 100 workers had been left in the lurch.
Following the chain of subcontractors up the line, Cintra traced the connections all the way to KBR, a division of Halliburton contracting,
“I handed everything I had to the Department of Labor and they started doing their investigative work,” said Cintra. In the end, the department was able to recover back wages for 106 employees of KTC Services.
But for MIRA, the battle doesn’t end there. For every worker the Department of Labor helps, there are untold others snared in the murky world of Gulf Coast subcontracting.
“You get tired of being complacent and nothing getting done,” said Cintra, who employs a number of tactics to force employers to pay the wages their workers are due. Through demand letters and direct confrontation with contractors, MIRA has recovered an additional $60,000 for other workers.
“I’ll threaten people with shaming campaigns. I had a guy who owed people $2,000 and he didn’t want to pay,” said Cintra, who told him she planned to sit in front of his beachfront hotel with signs alerting the public to his illegal labor practices. “He paid up.”
Sleeping in Cars While Trailers Stand Empty
Tirso Moreno, executive director of the Farmworkers Association of Florida, is hoping for some similar relief for the immigrant laborers he works with. He has his sights set on the FEMA suit filed in the US District Court in early February.
“We’re always looking for how we can support people affected by the hurricanes. The main two things are housing and income. We found out that undocumented workers had a right to emergency housing. FEMA always discouraged people from applying,” said Moreno.
“We’re challenging FEMA’s practice of not giving trailers to people who don’t meet immigration document requirements,” said Chuck Elsesser, a lawyer with Florida Legal Services working on behalf of FWAF. “We’re saying the law that FEMA is relying on has an exception for short-term non-cash emergency disaster relief—and that’s exactly what the trailers are.”
In its complaint against FEMA, FWAF cited examples of trailers being delivered to sites in Florida, but going unused while immigrant farmworkers slept in their cars because they didn’t meet the FEMA requirements.
“We hope the case gets decided soon,” said Moreno, “so we can still help some of the people living in bad conditions here. We still have big issues with housing.”
