The Pilipino Association of Workers and Immigrants, Silicon Valley, CA

My mom, my brother, and I moved here from the Philippines when I was six years old. My mom was always working a couple jobs at once. She worked as a caregiver for some time. I also worked as a caregiver for the elderly and disabled after high school before going to college. Something that I experienced was, when I first came into the care home, the care home owner or my employer had me get blankets and pillows. I was on the graveyard shift to make sure people weren't trying to escape the house or getting in fights in the middle of the night or having seizures or anything like that. She told me that I could sleep. I said, "No, it's okay. I don't need to sleep because I just slept for eight hours so that I could work this job." So, when I got my paycheck a few weeks later, I think I was supposed to get five hundred dollars, and I got two hundred or something way below what I was supposed to get. When I asked her about it, she said that it was because I was taking naps during the night, so I wasn't entitled to all of the hours I was working. So that's 'a relatively small case. Unlike many immigrant workers, I wasn't depending on that paycheck for survival. That's what really brought me into this work. A lot of people face these conditions. A lot of people might not know the law and how to defend themselves. They might not know their rights.

That brings me to my work with PAWIS.² PAWIS is the Pilipino Association of Workers and Immigrants, based in Silicon Valley. We started in 2002. After 9/11, there was a lot of discrimination against immigrant airport screeners throughout California and probably nationwide.³ They were having them take tests on Microsoft Office, English tests, things that didn't have to do with their work. If they didn't pass those tests, that became grounds for the airport to fire them. There was a lot of discrimination, and they launched a campaign. They were successful. Most of the workers were able to keep their jobs. PAWIS does provide services to folks that come to us with issues. For example, we have a quarterly free legal clinic where we work with lawyers in the county—in the local area—to provide services to workers in different fields of law. Aside from the individual cases we encounter, there are many other cases of people whose wages are being stolen from them or who are going to be deported. So, beyond providing those services, we really try to prioritize launching campaigns and organizing workers. The flow of people with issues is never going to stop until actual law is changed or, even on a larger level, the way that the global economic system is designed changes.

Something that we try to do in PAWIS and NAFCON (the National Alliance for Filipino Concerns)⁴ is to connect the work that we're doing here and the issues that Filipinos and other migrant workers are facing in the United States to the issues that have forced them to migrate in the first place from the Philippines and other migrant-sending countries. The Philippines' Labor Export Policy facilitates massive labor migration from the Philippines to migrant-receiving countries like the United States. Rather than prioritizing national industrialization in places like the Philippines, rather than implementing genuine land reform so that the farmers actually working the land are able to own the land they're tilling instead of paying 600 percent interest—usury—on the land they're tilling, the Philippine state instead sends workers to other countries to try to curb unemployment and joblessness in the Philippines, which obviously is a band-aid solution. We see the same thing in Mexico; we see the same thing in India and Indonesia. And it's not the long-term solution.

PAWIS is a member organization of NAFCON. [NAFCON has] over thirty...