At the Fall 2011 Issues Workshop, the Immigration Task Force agreed to take on the issue of Wage Theft this year, and to support A-3948 and S-3068.
Many workers in New Jersey, including undocumented workers, are being exploited by unscrupulous employers who fail to follow Wage and Hour Laws. The Wage Protection Act, which is being introduced in the NJ Assembly (A 3948) by Annette Quijano, (D-20) and in the NJ Senate (S-3068) by Senator Loretta Weinberg (D-37), would strengthen the penalties for violating wage and hour laws and thereby discourage wage theft. About 85-90% of immigrant workers report having not been paid what they were promised. This directly impacts all workers by bringing down wage levels. Recommended resources were They Take Our Jobs, a Beacon Press book, which tells the history of “wage theft,” starting with slaves and showing how each generation has a pool of such workers (http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=1855). Another text, Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants, by David Bacon, shows that the issue is one of global migration of labor, related to trade policies (http://dbacon.igc.org/IndexPS/news.htm).
The task force also focused on the issue of Detention at the Issues Workshop. ChiaChia Wang, from the American Friends Service Committee, gave a detailed presentation on detention. Detention has been a major “solution” since 1950 and has recently expanded. In 2001, the U.S. detained approximately 95,000 individuals, and by 2009 the number had grown to approximately 380,000. The stated goal of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (I.C.E.) is to deport 400,000 non-citizens this year. Items related to detention include whether the system encourages racial profiling, the immorality of the policy in general, and employers’ policies and practices.
In New Jersey there are five detention centers, four of them county jails, and one federal prison, in Elizabeth. County jails receive approximately $100/day/detainee from the federal government, often more than double the cost of holding ordinary criminals. The Essex County Detention Center in Newark is proposing a major expansion, which is being opposed by immigration reform activists. A portion of the proposed expansion would be privately operated; privatization of the prison/jail industry is growing, costing taxpayers billions of dollars and enriching individual owners at our expense.
An important resource for understanding the detention system is the Detention Watch Network (www.detentionwatchnetwork.org). The UUA has a six-week curriculum, “Immigration as a Moral Issue,” available online. The Ridgewood congregation used an earlier UUA publication, “Welcoming the Stranger,” which is also useful.