What Was the Life of This Guest Worker Worth?

[babylonsister]

What Was the Life of This Guest Worker Worth?

While Washington state agencies reduce farmworker pay and find employers faultless for a death in the fields, Trump and congressional Republicans back proposals to turn farmworking into permanent indentured servitude.
David Bacon
August 15, 2018


On Sunday, August 5, a group of 200 farmworkers and supporters began walking at sunrise along the shoulder of Benson Road, heading north from Lynden, Washington, toward Canada. When they reached O Road, the marchers turned right to walk along the border. Unlike the frontier with Mexico, with its walls, floodlights, and patrols, the border line here is no line at all—simply a road on each side of a weed-choked median.

The procession, chanting and holding banners, passed a succession of blueberry fields for the next 14 miles, finally reaching the official border crossing at Sumas. Pausing for a protest in front of the local immigrant detention center, it then continued on until it reached its objective one mile further on—the 1,500-acre spread of Sarbanand Farms. There, in front of the ranch’s packing and warehouse facilities, participants staged a tribunal.

“We are here to assign responsibility for the death of Honesto Silva,” announced Rosalinda Guillen, director of Community2Community, one of the march’s main organizers. A year before the march, Silva, an H-2A guest worker brought from Mexico to harvest the farm’s blueberries, collapsed and later died.

Walking past the fields, one of Silva’s coworkers, Raymond Escobedo (his name has been changed to protect his identity) remembers the day he died. “I could see he wasn’t feeling well, and he asked to leave work. They wouldn’t give him permission, but he went back to the barracks to rest anyway. Then the supervisor went and got him out and forced him back to work. Honesto continued to feel bad, and finally had to pay someone to take him to the clinic. When he got to the clinic he was feeling even worse, and they took him to the hospital in Seattle. And so he died.”

more...

http://prospect.org/article/what-was-life-guest-worker-worth

[McCamy Taylor]

1. Note that the GOP plans to take away funds for housing for low income citizens and give it to

employers of immigrants to pay for their housing. This is the same party that says it does not want any immigrant "deadbeats" to have health care or education for their US citizen children.

See the writing on the wall, Trump working class supporters. The GOP wants to starve you to death--and replace you with a bunch of indenture servants/serfs from other countries.