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NEWS & LETTERS, October - November 2008
Terror and daily abuse for workers
Oakland, Cal.--Rinku Sen, the director of Applied Research Center, and Fekkak Mamdouh, co-founder of the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York (ROC-NY) and co-director of Restaurant Opportunities Center United, came to Oakland on a speaking tour for their book, The Accidental American, Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization (Berrett-Koehler Publishing, Inc., San Francisco, 2008).
Rinku Sen pointed out that globalization is incomplete, it exists for corporations only, not for workers. The "free trade" agreements assure the free movement of commodities, but workers face militarized borders, various countries' laws, and visa restrictions to prevent their movement.
Thus while capital flow is supposed to create jobs, workers are prevented from moving to where job opportunities arise. She bemoaned the fact that most of the debate around immigration assumes that interests of U.S. residents are opposed to immigrants' interests.
Fekkak Mamdouh is an immigrant from Morocco. The book describes a little of his life in Morocco, the poverty that forced him as well as his brother to seek jobs abroad; his first immigration to Saudi Arabia, where he worked for a Saudi family as a "guest worker," and then the Saudi family's visit to Florida, which gave him his first taste of life here. But most of the book is about the life and organizing in New York City restaurants. Mamdouh started as a delivery boy, then a bus boy and then a waiter. He explained how lucky he was to make the transition from bus boy to waiter. Many immigrants work for 20-plus years as bus boys.
In 1996 Mamdouh started working at Windows of the World restaurant on top of the World Trade Center. The restaurant had the reputation for being one of the best restaurants in NYC. It had a union contract, although with a no-strike clause. Despite that, the staff got together and refused to work on a Thanksgiving Day, successfully demanding the firing of an abusive manager. Part of this success was due to the staff getting together and breaking down the divisions between the kitchen staff, mostly non-white immigrants, and the waiters, who are mostly white.
On 9/11/01, 73 workers, mostly the kitchen staff doing the prep work and cleaning, died in the attack. All the rest, 350, lost their jobs. The union could not support them when all were out of work. When the owner of Windows of the World opened a new restaurant after 9/11/01, he refused to hire any of the former employees.
A huge protest in front of the new restaurant changed his mind in the end. Both kitchen and waiter staff as well as customers were outraged that people victimized by 9/11/01 were so badly treated by the restaurant owner. The action attracted media attention. Once the name of the organization, ROC-NY, and contact information were published, lots of people started calling, reporting abuses in restaurants where they worked.
ROC-NY does lots of research to find out what is really happening. Some workers don't get any wages at all, just their share of tips, which is illegal. ROC surveyed 1,000 restaurants and published three reports based on those surveys of kitchen workers. The reports document the discrimination faced in the best of the restaurants. ROC focuses on 4-star restaurants, because they set the tone for others.
ROC wants customers to help, too: if workers don't get sick-time, they have to come in when sick and their germs get into the food being prepared and served. If workers are stressed, worked too hard, they cut their fingers and that gets into the food. ROC's theme is, if we all get together, we can do it, we can change the world.
--Urszula Wislanka
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