A contingent of Jews will travel this week to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to mark the fifth anniversary of a notorious immigration raid on the nation’s largest kosher meat producer.
That May morning in 2008 when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents swooped down on hundreds of Guatemalan and Mexican immigrants, three-quarters of the Agriprocessors workers were undocumented and, as has been exhaustively reported, conditions at the plant were appalling. Wages were as low as $5 an hour. Female workers were sexually assaulted. A routine disregard for safety resulted in broken bones, eye injuries, hearing loss and even amputations.
The raid resulted in hundreds of deportations, separating families and leaving others with insurmountable debt. As word spread about the fate of these workers and the conditions they endured, it also led to some much-needed soul searching in the Jewish community.
In response to the raid, the Orthodox social justice organization Uri L’Tzedek launched Tav HaYosher, a program to encourage restaurants to certify the ethical pedigree of the food they serve. The Conservative movement created Magen Tzedek, a certification to vouch that food has been produced in keeping with Jewish ethics, including fair treatment of workers.
Those are good and important steps. But there is more that we, as Jews, can do. I would argue that the most meaningful thing Jews must do to improve conditions for workers in the food industry is to throw the weight of our community behind comprehensive immigration reform.
We need to deal with the fact that as long as America is home to millions of undocumented adults with no clear path to legal status, our country also will be home to millions of abused, exploited workers. Just one story from here in the Bay Area illustrates why this is the case.
Rufina Hernandez-Garcia worked as a janitor and in the bakery department of a grocery in San Jose. She was harassed by her supervisor whenever she needed to use the restroom. After a workplace accident injured her back and caused her to lose a pregnancy, she was docked pay for staying home sick.
On another occasion, Rufina was interrogated for hours by three men who accused her of stealing, refused to let her go to the bathroom and threatened her with deportation. Then she was fired, along with a number of her fellow workers, who received similar treatment.
It is precisely the undocumented status of Rufina and her fellow workers that left them — like millions of others — vulnerable to unchecked abuse, intimidation and injury. For millions of our neighbors, this is their daily reality, but it is one we have the power to change.
Months of long, tough negotiations over immigration reform lie ahead in Congress, and Jews must not sit on the sidelines. Too many of our immigrant ancestors
endured abuse and discrimination on the job — but with one big advantage over today’s immigrant workers: As legal residents of the United States, immigrant Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries had the freedom to stand up in the light of day and fight for their rights. And fight they did, tooth and nail, which is how a Jew, Sidney Hillman, came to play a critical role in drafting the Fair Labor Standards Act — the foundation of every labor protection Americans take for granted today.
As Congress hammers out the details of a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented people, immigrant workers must be protected. And we don’t need new labor laws to accomplish this. Simply including in the legislation a mandate that existing wage, safety and nondiscrimination laws must be enforced, regardless of a workers’ immigration status, will send a strong message to employers and honor the Jewish teaching that workers must be treated fairly. Most important, it will encourage undocumented workers who gain new hope under a new law to come out of the shadows, form or join unions, and define and fight for their own interests.
The Agriprocessors raid demanded that we answer the question: Does kosher food reflect Jewish values? Five years later, that question still resonates. It is time for kosher businesses from restaurants to factories to embrace the full range of rights of their employees — including the right to organize and bargain collectively.
It is also time to fix our broken immigration system and protect the millions of immigrant workers who live in fear while contributing millions to our economy and trying to keep their families from being torn apart.
Alan van Capelle is chief executive officer of Bend the Arc: A Jewish Partnership for Justice.