I owe my soul

August 27, 2004

It’s always interesting to compare “how people view the condition of illegal aliens”:http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/08/27/dairy_farms/index.html to “what those conditions actually are”:http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/08/27/dairy_farms/index.html:

bq. By and by,
I got plenty money,
Thanks to you,
American dummy.
Write to friends
in motherland,
Tell them ‘come
fast as you can.’ [from _Illegal Immigrant's Poem_]

bq. For six years, Ramirez’s duties included maintaining a pump that sprayed liquid dung onto the fields as fertilizer. To get to the pump, he had to walk waist deep in manure across a pit as long as a swimming pool…as he waded through the waste of 380 cows, it slid into his knee-high boots. Because it’s impossible to completely scrub away the bacteria from manure, Ramirez passed a skin infection on to his wife and her two daughters. “I felt like a slave; it was like my boss had a whip,” says Ramirez, 27, who relocated to this lush rural valley from the desert of central Mexico.

Of course, one could argue that it’s his own fault for coming here illegally, which pretty much makes him inelligible for the legal protections a documented worker or citizen would have. But then, “documented workers are getting fewer rights”:http://www.thirdlayer.org/archives/000075.html, too.

bq. According to the New York Times report: “Verette Richardson, a former Wal-Mart cashier in Kansas City, Mo., said it was sometimes so hard to get a break that some cashiers urinated on themselves. Bella Blaubergs, a diabetic who worked at a Wal-Mart in Washington State, said she sometimes nearly fainted from low blood sugar because managers often would not give breaks.

There’s a temptation to blame these working conditions on Americans who want to have everything cheap. Of course, if you’re like most Americans, it’s not so much a want as it is a need… probably because the people for whom you work don’t pay you any money.

Posted in Politics