Just Work: Unjust End

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-louis/just-work-unjust-_b_66320.html

Posted September 28, 2007 | 12:30 PM (EST)

On September 12, Elirose Pierre-Louis died of a heart attack at the age of 56. Eli was not only my friend, she was also the best co-worker I ever had. Her obituary might read:This may not sound like anything significant. It seems that these days, there are a lot of untimely deaths we could talk about. But Eli died from an illness that could have been managed and from a working situation that should have been avoided. In my community, we know Eli died because she was poor.

I met Eli more than 20 years ago while packing tomatoes in a warehouse in Florida City. It was the kind of back-breaking, minimum-wage work that nearly every Haitian immigrant in Florida has done. It's a life of flat wages and irregular hours. Sickness means a bad day at work or facing unemployment, which rolls around at the end of the season anyway.

Eli played by all the rules: she was always on time, always positive, and always the hardest worker on the line. We jokingly called Eli "the Champion" because she kept our spirits up and always volunteered to help out a fellow worker who was sick or out of money. She talked about her sons often: one excelled in math; one volunteered at his church in Port-au-Prince, one was on his way to college, one had found a job in Canada.

Like many of our friends, Eli suffered from diabetes and high blood pressure, but she was always pushing off her own treatment for another day. It's hard to get the care one needs without health insurance, and Eli was always more concerned for her kids' welfare than her own. She was ready to sacrifice today for a better life tomorrow.

The thing is that tomorrow never came for Eli.

Three years ago, we both found steady janitorial jobs working the 6:00 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. shift at Nova Southeastern University in Davie, FL. It was still a minimum wage job without health insurance, but Eli and I were getting older and our work options were narrowing. After years of grueling work at poverty pay, we decided it was time to stand up for ourselves. That's when Eli and I started organizing with other workers to form a union.

FULL story at link.