'Learning about each other’s struggles can help us chase our dreams.'
This is how Marita Canedo, co-coordinator of the US-based dairy worker organization Migrant Justice summarized the essence of the recent ISS workshop 'Resistance for Migrant Justice 3.0 | Advocacy Across the Atlantic'.
The rising repression that migrants encounter on both sides of the Atlantic contrasts starkly with the essential role that they play in our economies and societies: Migrant workers harvest our food and supply our supermarkets. They take care of our homes, children and elderly. In their workplaces, they experience a lack of respect and guarantee of their rights.
Their work is a structural necessity to keep the economy and society afloat, yet it is often organized as permanent temporariness. It is invaluable - but often not even paid the minimum wage. While migrants’ work often makes our homes more cosy, they themselves are offered sub-standard housing.
'... building a different world in which migrants receive their due rights and respect.'
The event’s goals went beyond awareness-raising about these conditions in the USA and the Netherlands. It also sought to equip participants with tools and materials that migrant workers and their organizations have used to advocate for their rights, for building a different world in which migrants receive their due rights and respect different world in which migrants receive their due rights and respect.
Sharing lived experiences
Very experienced activists joined the workshop as speakers. Participants later shared that hearing about the panelists’ lived experiences was very powerful.
Kevin Davis Victor single-handedly sued his former employer, one of the largest temporary employment agencies in the Netherlands. His anger about his employer creating shell company after shell company to avoid accountability for indecent working and housing conditions triggered his action. With the help of artificial intelligence, he thoroughly researched his legal situation and proved his employer’s eviction notice from his accommodation illegal. The result of his case potentially changes the way tens of thousands of migrant workers live and work in the Netherlands.
Pawel Rudzki, a shop steward of the Dutch trade union FNV Logistics - also represented by the union’s director Levin Zühlke-van Hulzen - stood up for the rights of his fellow workers employed in temporary employment agencies in Dutch retailer Albert Heijn’s distribution centres.
He shared: 'I saw so many situations where people who worked in evening shifts were told: "Tomorrow, you have to quit because your productivity is really low." That’s why I brought people together to organize the first strike in distribution centres.' As a result, he was intimidated and ultimately dismissed by the company, a decision that the union fought in court – and recently won!
Marion Grace Labasan is the assistant secretary of FNV Migrant Domestic Work and a representative of the Filipina migrant women organization, Gabriela. While being severly marginalized in the Dutch economy and society, migrant domestic workers have been at the forefront of fighting the planned criminalization of undocumented stay.
Last but not least, Marita Canedo and Will Lambek, co-coordinators of the dairy worker organization Migrant Justice in Vermont, USA, shared their experience during the workshop’s panels. They visited the Netherlands for the third time to lobby the largest Dutch retailer to join their innovative Milk with Dignity Program.
Will distiguished defensive from more pro-active advocacy strategies. Across the US border state of Vermont where the organization is based, they train allies to protect Migrant Justice’s mostly undocumented community members from rising repression through the US-American Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency’s detention and deportation drives.
At the same time, through the Milk with Dignity Program that guarantees tangible improvements in migrant dairy workers’ working and living conditions, they build an alternative to the inhumane livelihoods in which most of them are trapped.
Workshop organizers
The workshop was organized by ISS Associate Professor in Labour and Gender Economics, Dr Karin Astrid Siegmann, jointly with ISS Assistant Professors Dr Helena Pérez Niño and Dr Nanneke Winters, the Dutch Agro-ecology Network’s Working Group on Labour and Migration and Migrant Justice.
It was supported by the ISS Research Teams on Migration, Im/mobility and Place, and Agrifood, Water & Technologies.