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August 22, 2005 The power of
shame pays off
Page A1 On a steamy night in June, 50 people with candles and banners marched through a quiet East Austin neighborhood on their way to shame a man. "Los pueblos unidos en Dios jamas seran vencidos," they chanted, not loudly, but with determination. ("People united in God will never be defeated.") They went to a looming house on East Ninth Street, the kind built so tall that the first floor might as well be the second, with awnings on the windows and a bolted wooden gate at the street. It was the home of patron Jesse Alba, a homebuilding contractor who for months had refused to pay two of his workers their promised wages.
While the crowd stood below, a contingent including the two workers, two pastors and a member of a nonprofit group ascended the stairs to confront a man who had rebuffed all other entreaties.
It had the feel of a small revolution, but also the calm that comes with right and numbers on your side. More than that, the demonstration showed the practically tribal sway a group can have over a single member -- no matter how powerful -- through public shame.
Three weeks, no pay
Juan Quintanilla lives only a few minutes' walk from Alba, in a one-story home by the railroad tracks with bars over the door and windows and cars parked in the front yard. A television is perpetually on, a microwave sits on a stool, and one of his housemates, a youngish man with a big grin, walks around barefoot and shirtless. Rent is $550 total for the four housemates, all recent immigrants who met at Casa Marianella, a shelter for refugees new to Austin.
Quintanilla, 31, tumbled into Austin 2 1/2 years ago with not a friend, not a relative, not even a name to go on. He had left his native Copan, a cobblestoned town little bigger than a pueblo in a forested region of Honduras where the biggest tourist draw is the nearby Mayan ruins. He was the third-youngest of eight sibilings, all of whom lived in the same small house with their parents, and had been earning about 50 pesos -- about $3 -- a day as a runner for a coffee grower.
"Life is very hard over there," he says.
He journeyed for two months on foot and on train, sometimes going days without food, making the dangerous trip across Central America to northern Mexico. He spent eight months there, finding some work and plotting his crossing into the United States. Finally, following a coyote who was shepherding another group of migrants, he hopped on a northbound train in Nuevo Laredo. He leapt off in Austin and wandered into a nearby tire shop, by the corner of Oltorf Street and Lamar Boulevard.
He was directed to Casa Marianella, and soon was hired for some construction work. Now he wakes at 5 a.m. to do landscaping and maintenance work for a couple of bosses, and he sends as much as $300 each month to Honduras to support his family. At the end of a workday you can find him at his place, his blue denim Dell shirt unbuttoned nearly to his belly, his moustache a little droopy, his black jeans grubbed up and a pair of leather sandals on his weary feet.
Early last year Alba hired Quintanilla at $9 an hour to do painting work on some East Austin home projects. "I worked for three weeks for Jesse Alba," Quintanilla says, "and in those three weeks I didn't receive a penny."
Spiritual justice
"You shall not withhold the wages of poor and needy laborers, whether of other Israelites or strangers who reside in your land," reads a quote from the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy included in a newsletter of the Religion and Labor Network.
The network and other Austin nonprofit groups that offer aid and support to immigrant workers say the problem of unpaid wages is rampant. In Austin, from August 2002 through March 2003, Project Wage Claim (El Proyecto de Reclamar Salarios no Pagados), a program run by Casa Marianella, unearthed 119 wage-claim requests totaling more than $100,000, about 70 percent in the construction industry. Since August 2002, the Equal Justice Center's Central Texas Immigrant Workers' Rights Project, which grew out of Project Wage Claim, has recovered $360,000 for about 340 workers.
The workers frequently lack the documents, standing or command of English to have any footing in negotiations.
The Equal Justice Center stepped in to help Quintanilla and Esteban Calderon, who between them were owed $1,781.50 by Alba.
Alba met with center activists and the aggrieved workers and promised to pay, but did not. The workers approached the police, and a warrant was issued for Alba's arrest in April 2004, charging him with theft, a Class A misdemeanor, for not paying Quintanilla. In February two more warrants were issued, again charging Alba with misdemeanors in the cases of Calderon and another man. Alba has been arrested at least once in connection with the charges, but had not paid restitution. The Texas Workforce Commission froze Alba's assets earlier this year, but managed to squeeze out only some of the money owed the men.
So the Justice Center partnered with the Religion and Labor Network to appeal to a sense of spiritual, rather than legal, justice.
As it usually does, the Equal Justice Center first tried other shaming tactics before opting for a vigil. Fliers were handed out and stapled to telephone poles in Alba's neighborhood. "BE CAREFUL !!!" read one, in English and Spanish, on bright orange paper. "Jesse J. Alba of Alba's Remodeling and Construction DOESN'T PAY WORKER WAGES." In smaller print, the flier outlined judgments levied against him that he had refused to pay.
The vigil was the last step.
'Higher moral ground'
The power of the vigils lies, in part, in what Australian criminologist John Braithwaite calls "re-integrative shaming." Most people obey the law not because of official punishments, he has found, but because they fear disgrace in the eyes of others, especially those who matter most to them.
"They don't care about paying their workers," said Julien Ross, who runs the Central Texas Immigrant Workers' Rights Project. "They care about the neighborhood knowing they don't pay."
While the very public nature of the vigil is critical to its success, there is also a religious element.
"We're calling employers to higher moral ground," said Kristi Sanford, organizing director of Interfaith Worker Justice, a Chicago group that began the vigil tactic in the mid-1990s and has watched its spread to 60 grass-roots partners across the country, including the Religion and Labor Network here. Labor experts say the number of such vigils across the country is growing as the labor movement becomes more emboldened to represent groups that for a long time have had little voice.
"There is a clearly a movement ongoing throughout the country, where people in the progressive, social justice movements are rediscovering the power of community values, moral suasion and spiritual belief," said Bill Beardall, the Equal Justice Center's executive director.
The fight for immigrant workers, almost always Latinos, is a Texan version of a long tradition of religion translating into social justice.
"Justice is a spiritual value," said Rev. Tom VandeStadt, a pastor at the Congregational Church of Austin. "Woe to the man who builds his house with unrighteousness and does not pay his workers."
Los Pueblos Unidos
As dusk settled on East Austin, the marchers headed toward Alba's house with banners that said, "Los Pueblos Unidos." They were a mixed crew -- children, clerics in stiff collars, moms, union reps, social activists and a dozen Latino workers, some of whom had benefited from the center's help before.
Gloria Cancino, 23, in a hot pink T-shirt and carrying her son Michael, 2, wasn't paid her nurse's wages until the center intervened. She and other laborers, including Calderon, now participate in leadership courses at the center designed to help immigrant workers organize themselves.
"They say that organized labor and religious leaders and immigrant labor don't come together," said Conrad Masters, a member of a local carpenters' union. "We're a new community, one that can move hearts."
An old woman, too weak to walk, got a lift to the house.
They picked up spectators along the way. A tall black man with a transistor radio rasping in his hand loped his way over to take a look. Beneath a veranda fan a small family peered at the bold protesters. A white guy on a bicycle interested in buying a house in the neighborhood grabbed a flier.
"I feel a little nervous," Quintanilla said.
At Alba's address, the small contingent found a way around the gate and started up the steps to his front door. The marchers stopped walking and turned to face his house.
Shining a light
Alba was home.
He came to the door and asked what it was all about. A Christian fish medallion was affixed near the front door. A Texas Democrat sticker was plastered to a wall. One of the clerics gestured beyond the balcony to the faces of all the people far below, illuminated, in the dying light, by their flickering candles.
"It was awesome, really, breathtaking, to look down from that balcony and see you all standing there," Ross told them later.
Alba began to cry and prayed with the cleric. And he promised, again, to pay. He said he would show up at the center at noon the next day to deliver a couple of checks.
As the contingent retreated from the balcony to tell the supporters the good news, Ross said he was skeptical Alba would keep his word.
Late the next morning, however, Alba called and instructed Ross to pick up the checks at a Wells Fargo bank in East Austin.
Alba declined to talk for this story, except to say the religious pressure had little to do with his decision to pay. "It was just money owed," he said. "The whole thing is buried."
As the group disbanded, Thad Crouch, the coordinator of the Religion and Labor Network, asked for the candles back.
"We will still need to shine light on the injustice of the world," he said.
http://www.statesman.com/metrostate/content/metro/stories/08/22vigil.html
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