Huffington Post: American Labor Laws Fall Short of American Values

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/77369/

By Rebecca Smith, Huffington Post. Posted February 21, 2008.

Through exclusions, exemptions and lax enforcement, our labor laws deny basic protections to millions of Latino and African-American workers.

As Americans, we like to think of ourselves as a society that has transcended racism to elevate principles of fairness, equality and opportunity over skin color. Sure, we recognize racial implications in our government's mishandling of Hurricane Katrina and the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast. But overall, we see ourselves as a society that has moved beyond race.

This conviction of color-blindness is especially true in our attitude towards work: We have laws against race discrimination at work, so we think everyone has an equal chance to prosper. This view overlooks, however, an unfortunate reality: Our system of workplace protections is riddled with holes that have a decidedly harmful racial undertone. Through exclusions, exemptions and lax enforcement, our labor laws deny basic protections to millions of Latino and African-American immigrant workers.

Because we believe we have eschewed racism, we refuse to examine the reality of a 2.4 million strong mostly-Latino agricultural workforce, that is exempted from core labor protections like overtime pay and the right to collectively bargain. We are blissfully unaware that home health care workers, largely women of color, are not entitled to even the federal minimum wage. We don't see the immigrant dishwashers at our favorite restaurants whose employers may pay them as little as $2.13 an hour under a sub-minimum wage that has been frozen since 1991. We don't even see the workers who clean our offices and hotel rooms, members of a burgeoning service sector where a majority of employers violate wage and hour laws. And while we do notice day laborers congregated on our street corners looking for work, few of us realize that about half of them will be cheated of their wages at the end of their workday.

We simply don't see the strands of racism that tear at our worker protection safety net. Most Americans would be shocked to know the unfortunate role that race has played throughout the history of our immigration and labor laws. How, not so long ago, official governmental policy was to build the United States as a "white nation." How the exclusions from core minimum wage and overtime protections of domestic workers and agricultural workers, jobs that largely employed African Americans in the 1930's, was a trade-off to get the votes of Southern "Dixiecrat" Congressmembers to support the minimum wage laws.

FULL story at link.

[valerief]

1. The laws were exported with the jobs. nt