[GPSCC-chat] "Political Correctness" About MALDEF

[alexcathy at aol.com]

Dear Green Friends, 

I know some of my "Lefty" friends think I'm a little crazy with my emphatic rejection of our idiotic "race" politics. Some Greens have recently been scolded here as "racist" in some over-the-top E-mails being circulated for "politically incorrectness" regarding the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. But thanks to my personal experience with similar African-American groups, I'm not surprised by Harold Meyerson's commentary below. 

This is the same MALDEF that has posted slanderous stuff on its web site denouncing the Green Party for "racially motivated" attacks.  I guess if you are the 1% like the Big Boys at Wal-Mart, then you are free to be as much of a union-busting, polluting, sweat-shop operating, sexist, and racist scoundrel as you want to be.  Dear friends, I've seen this kind of double-dealing crap from African-American groups like the NAACP, SCLC, and even Jesse Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH for twenty years.  That's a big reason why this is one African-American "Lefty" who detests "race" politics.  

Alex Walker

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Published by The Los Angeles Times, November 15, 2011
MALDEF's misstep
By Harold Meyerson

On Tuesday, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or MALDEF, will hold its annual awards gala and fundraiser in downtown Los Angeles. The awardees include such indisputable worthies as Linda Ronstadt and former MALDEF leader Antonia Hernandez. The real awardee, though, should be MALDEF itself, whose decades of civil rights litigation have yielded significant gains for Latinos. I haven't always agreed with all of its actions, but I generally find myself cheering it on (as I do its current campaign to create a second Latino-majority district on the L.A. County Board of Supervisors).

There's just one problem with this gala. Front and center on the invitation are the words: "Gala Chair: Wal-Mart."

Wal-Mart may be giving money to MALDEF, but it isn't a friend to Latinos, and most definitely not here in Southern California. In weighing the advisability of MALDEF's taking Wal-Mart's money and granting the corporation Latino street cred (or if not that, suite cred) in return, consider what happened on Oct. 12 in Riverside County, about an hour east of Tuesday night's dinner.

On that day, inspectors from California's Division of Labor Standards Enforcement paid an unannounced visit to one of the mega-warehouses in Riverside County to which trucks bring a huge amount of Asian (chiefly Chinese) imports from the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports. None of these warehouses has any signage, but each does the work of a specific retail chain, and the one that the state inspectors checked out was one of many in the area that is a Wal-Mart warehouse.

Not that Wal-Mart directly owns or runs its Inland Empire warehouses. They're all run by logistics companies with which Wal-Mart contracts to move its stuff, which also allows Wal-Mart to avoid any responsibility for what actually goes on inside.

Here's what the inspectors found: The logistics company (Impact) and the employment agencies from which it hired the workers in its warehouse failed to document the hours and wages of its workers. The workers are paid "piece rate" based on the number of containers they load and unload, but the pay rates remain a mystery to them, as they are not spelled out on their paychecks. The company apparently had no records of its own either.

The inspectors fined Impact $499,000 for violations of wage and hour laws. The following week, six of the warehouse workers filed a suit in federal court for back pay and additional remedies, and U.S. District Court Judge Christina Snyder on Oct. 31 issued a preliminary injunction compelling the temp agencies to alter the way they paid workers to end the immediate harm that the existing pay system was causing them.

The men and women who work in these warehouses — they number roughly 100,000 in the Inland Empire — are overwhelmingly Latino. An official of Warehouse Workers United, an organization of those workers, told me that he's "never seen a non-Latino worker at the warehouse, other than managers." All these Latino workers are at the very bottom of a labor system that Wal-Mart has erected — a system that keeps the wages of the workers in its supply chain at rock bottom, and also keeps any responsibility for those workers' mistreatment as distanced as possible from Wal-Mart itself....


Read the Original Text of the Full Article at:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-meyerson-maldef-20111115,0,7508035.story 


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