Welcome urged for immigrants
Pat Schneider
February 5, 2008

Local communities must find a way to publicly welcome immigrant workers, a national workers rights leader challenged a Madison group today.

"We have to figure out how to push our communities to welcome immigrants and not push immigrants out," said Kim Bobo, founder and executive director of Interfaith Worker Justice, a national organization started in Chicago.

It is important that local communities take action because, at the national level, political impasse has devolved into chaos, she said.

Bobo spoke this morning to an annual gathering of local clergy and workers rights advocates, sponsored by the Interfaith Coalition of Worker Justice of South Central Wisconsin. That group founded the Workers Rights Center as a program that was spun off a separate organization in 2007.

Many people tend to label some as the "other," Bobo said in an interview. To overcome that, people need opportunities to come together with newcomers and learn about their common ground, she said.

Because faith-based groups often reach past the economic boundaries that define other groups, they are well suited to offer common ground, Bobo said.

To her audience today, Bobo cited biblical admonitions to be "hospitable" to others. Hospitality, she said, consists of three parts: welcoming someone different, sharing the best of resources and developing new ways of operating that best serve the new community.

Most workers filing complaints against employers speak first about feeling disrespected, Bobo said. "They talk about how they are treated, not about money," she said. "That disrespect plays out in poor wages and benefits."

Ordinances guaranteeing living wages and paid sick time for wage workers are an important way that communities share resources, Bobo said. Madison and Dane County have living wage ordinances, while the city's pioneering efforts to pass a paid sick time measure were defeated. But the city served as inspiration to other communities and Bobo expects a dozen local sick pay ordinances to be approved this year.

New strategies include Austin's use of a state statute outlawing theft of services against employers who don't pay wages, Bobo said.

She encouraged local activists to work for the passage of the federal Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for workers to organize. "It's the most significant labor law reform in decades," she said.

Bobo also called for a federal Department of Labor more responsive to the needs of workers, rather than business. With labor department offices often located in government buildings where state IDs are required to enter, "workers literally cannot even get in the door," she said.

Renee Bauer, director of the Interfaith Coalition of Worker Justice, spoke of the group's continuing labor campaign, outreach and education programs. Patrick Hickey, past director of the coalition and the Workers' Rights Center, now heads up the Workers Rights Center.