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n 17 CHAPTER 2 Working Here For some employers, having access to a vast pool of workers who have no recourse to legal protection must seem like a godsend, but it’s more like a pact with the devil. It’s unethical, as well as illegal; unfair to companies that would prefer to compete honestly; and unfair to American workers who deserve fair wages. Contractors, restaurants, megafarms, and factories—all are hiring hordes of workers who are often mistreated, underpaid, ill-housed, and placed at risk, afraid to complain for fear of deportation. Those who get even the lowest pay here, however, may find themselves earning in one day what they would receive for a week’s worth of work in Latin America, with the promise of a better future. The lure of a better income has led to the fact that, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, “illegal immigrants make up about a fourth of all drywall and ceiling-tile installers in the United States, about a fourth of all meat and poultry workers and a fourth of all dishwashers.”1 They—and we—pay a heavy price, however. Consider what José Silva has to say: 18 n Chapter Two José’s Story While other teens were coming home from school, José, who had left Ecuador at thirteen with a fifth-grade education, was headed for the Chinese restaurant where, unconcerned about child labor laws, he would work from 4:00 p.m. until 2:00 in the morning, cleaning and setting up the tables after the bar was closed. For this he was paid $350 every two weeks, which, he thinks, “was a lot for my age.” He was grateful for the tips that the other servers gave him for cleaning up the tables. José and his brother, who had come some time before, shared one of the restaurant’s apartments, which also housed Chinese immigrants. After a brief stint at the Chinese restaurant and a fast-food place, the teenager was hired as a dishwasher at one of a chain of family restaurants. There he persuaded his boss to train him as a cook. By then his brother was working at a Mexican restaurant, so when José learned that they needed a cook, he took the job. “When I went there,” he says, “they didn’t pay me what I thought they were going to pay me. They were paying me about $7–$7.50 an hour. The work was hard—it was hot, and the kitchen was very small. I worked there for about a year, and the raises were small, so one time I got mad and I said to my brother, ‘I quit. I don’t like this anymore.’ My brother didn’t want me to quit, so I went and talked to the owners. I said, ‘We want more money.’ They gave us a big raise, from $7.50 up to $12.00! It was a high-level restaurant and the food was expensive, but we weren’t making that much before.” In the meantime, José was lucky. He had met the director of the local middle school, who spoke a little Spanish and who convinced him that he could, and should, attend high school. Having learned how important an education is in America, José enrolled toward the end of the school year and began a full year the following fall. “High school was tough,” he remembers, as he continued to work. He needed the money to send back home to his mother and to repay the loan from his brother to come to America. “The worst part,” he says, “was that I couldn’t understand one word of English.” Jean Wagner, his English as a Second Language teacher, devoted a great deal of extra time to her struggling pupil. Exchange students from Uruguay, Colombia, and Spain were able to communicate with him and help him translate when the going got tough. Slowly he learned, but it took its toll. “I would come home with these big headaches. I told Mrs. Wagner I didn’t want to go back to school, and she’d say, ‘Just come.’ I don’t know how I did it, but I did. The second year Mrs. Wagner said, ‘Just come back one more year. Just come back next year.’ So I went back the second year.” He managed to join a work-study program in which he received credit for work, Working Here n 19 going to...

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