on the second anniversary, locked up

Locked Up in New Orleans

by ROBIN TEMPLETON

[from the September 10, 2007 issue of the Nation]

"I never got paid," Dewitt Solomon tells me. Nine months before the levees broke, Solomon had a minimum-wage job busing tables and washing dishes at Messina's, a popular New Orleans tourist restaurant. But instead of paying him directly, Messina's gave Solomon's paychecks to the Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff's Office. Solomon, who was serving time in the Orleans Parish Prison--the eighth largest penal institution in the country and the largest correctional facility in Louisiana before Hurricane Katrina--was enrolled in the sheriff's work-release program.

The prison was supposed to give him his wages, minus the $500 a month it deducted for room and board, the day it returned to Solomon his freedom. Solomon says that the sheriff still owes him $1,500.

Sitting at the kitchen table at his home in New Orleans's West Bank, Solomon and I are feeding bottles to his twin sons. The babies weighed less than two pounds at birth. Now, at 13 months, they're startlingly small but chugging away at the formula like they're in a race to catch up. Solomon's 5-year-old daughter is prancing around the room with a Dora the Explorer coloring book. She has proclaimed that the cartoon heroine is her twin sister. The resemblance is, actually, striking.

Solomon says he tried for months to recoup his lost earnings and never got a call back from the sheriff's office. He gave up after floodwater washed away his only proof, the pay stubs he'd saved from the restaurant.

Solomon sounds more resigned than bitter. "It's not that I couldn't still use the money," he says. "I'm just glad I got in and out before it got any worse." Solomon describes how his brother-in-law was arrested on trespassing charges when he went to check on storm damage to his father's home. His cousin was also arrested for a nonviolent crime weeks ago, and no one in the family has been able to make contact or even determine where he's being held.

New Orleans has the highest incarceration rate of any major US city--double the national rate. Louisiana also locks up more people in local jails than any state due in part to state laws, unheard of in other parts of the country, that paralyze due process.

District attorneys have sixty days from the time of arrest in a felony case and forty-five days in a misdemeanor case to decide whether to press charges and typically use the full statutory time limit. From there, it takes an average of three months for detainees to get a court date. It can take up to three years to get to trial. According to a recent study by the Vera Institute of Justice, 41 percent of those entering the Orleans Parish Prison would qualify to be released on their own recognizance. Instead, the city opts to lock people up if they can't post bail, which is true of three-quarters of the jail's detainees.

While it was bad before the storm, "now the system is only working to pick people up," says Loyola University law professor Bill Quigley. "It's a vacuum, sucking poor people in and keeping them in. Being arrested now equals being sent to prison."

Nearly a year after Katrina, the city's backlog of cases reached at least 6,000. Judge Arthur Hunter of the Orleans Parish Criminal District Court declared that "it is a pathetic and shameful state of affairs the criminal justice system finds itself in" and said that he would mark the one-year anniversary of the storm by beginning to release poor defendants.

But just as Hunter was declaring a constitutional state of emergency last summer, New Orleans was hit by a devastating crime wave. With half its former population, the city saw its crime rate escalate back to pre-Katrina levels. By the time it was gearing up for its second post-Katrina Mardi Gras celebration, national media were pronouncing New Orleans the murder capital of the United States.

Under the headline "Dysfunction Fuels Cycle of Killing in New Orleans," the New York Times reported in February that a "uniquely poisoned set of circumstances" was fueling the violence, including the destruction of the city's only crime lab, friction between police and prosecutors, community distrust and fear of the police, uncooperative or vanished witnesses and "murderers' brutalized childhoods." The majority of victims and suspects have been young African-American men--many teenagers--caught up in a drug trade that was reinvigorated, reorganized and made more lethal amid turf wars in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The crime crisis is part and parcel of a wider social crisis. Two years after the storm, only one-third of the childcare centers and 45 percent of the public schools in Orleans Parish have reopened. Mental health services for residents suffering from depression, drug addiction or post-traumatic stress disorder are practically nonexistent. The city's Housing Authority has slated thousands of units of public housing for demolition, the majority of which were not damaged by the storm.

Bill Quigley has represented hundreds of families fighting to reclaim their homes and possessions from the Housing Authority. "One of the reasons they say they don't want to reopen public housing is that they don't want to let crime back into the city," Quigley explains. "But crime is already back in. The truth is that there are a lot of young people here without their families. The families don't have housing. So kids are coming back on their own, without their aunts and their mothers and their grandparents. Neighborhoods are breaking down because we don't have the families back. We don't have a lot of the churches. We don't have the infrastructure in poor communities that we had before.

"Some of us in the city think it's a bigger crime to keep thousands of families out of their apartments than to sell drugs," he notes. "But law enforcement doesn't see it that way."

Indeed, city officials responded to the crime wave with a troop surge. The city's police department is nearly staffed back up to its pre-Katrina size and budgeted all the way back up. Local law enforcement has been joined by sixty state troopers and 300 National Guard troops in Humvees and military uniforms--they've christened themselves "Task Force Gator"--at a cost to the state of $35 million.

Police have been making a record number of arrests, now averaging over 1,300 a week. But as the crime problem persists, they don't seem to be getting the bad guys. According to recent exit interviews with detainees leaving the parish jail, conducted by the local criminal justice reform organization Safe Streets/Strong Communities, 80 percent were being held for nonviolent offenses, mostly on low-level drug or alcohol charges. "The city is plagued by violent crime, residents who will never be charged with a crime spend weeks in jail," the Vera Institute recently reported, "and some serious offenders are released with no charges."

Ursula Price, Safe Streets's outreach and investigations coordinator, describes the case of a woman in the jail "who had called 911 about a domestic violence incident. Instead of trying to help her, the police ran her name and ended up arresting her on an outstanding traffic violation."

Safe Streets provides first responders to the city's incarcerated. The group has racked up huge phone bills accepting collect calls from the Orleans Parish Prison and the diaspora of correctional facilities to which arrestees were scattered in the wake of the storm. Some callers just want to know why they're there--it can take days for police, whom one criminal defense lawyer described as "functionally illiterate," to complete a report. Others wonder how long they might be in, whether they have a court date, how they can get legal support or how they can contact their family or boss.

Callers from Orleans Parish Prison also report dungeonlike conditions: twenty-five people held in cells built for ten, so many people sleeping in one area that you can't even see the floor, no fresh or conditioned air, overflowing toilets, inconsistent electricity and iffy plumbing. The prison has yet to regain the accreditation it lost in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, when hundreds of inmates were abandoned in fetid floodwaters in what local writer and criminal defense attorney Billy Sothern described as "the biggest prison crisis since Attica" [see "Left to Die," January 2, 2006].

This summer Glenn Thomas, the 29-year-old son of Rosetta James, a member of Safe Streets/Strong Communities, died in Orleans Parish Prison. James didn't learn of her son's death from the sheriff's office, she says, but by word of mouth: "One of the inmates was able to call his mother and tell her that Glenn had died, and she came and found me. I said, 'Nobody tell me nothing. I'm going to the jail.'" When she got there, the morning of July 4, James was told that her son, who had no known medical problems, had died the night before at 11 pm of "natural causes," and that she could call back in another month for the official report.

Thomas died waiting for his day in court. On May 19, 2004, he was arrested for simple drug possession. He was slated to appear in court about a year later, on August 31, 2005, when the city was uninhabitable. Nonetheless, a warrant was issued for his arrest for failing to appear. In October 2006, Thomas was arrested and detained in the Orleans Parish Prison. His new court date, the one he didn't live to see, was set for August 2007.

Criminal Sheriff Marlin Gusman's public information officer, Renee Lapeyrolerie, said they couldn't provide details about Thomas's death but said, "Well, in his criminal history he had a lot of drug arrests. Those things can be linked to health problems."

"This is the third death there's been in there this year," says Safe Streets co-director Norris Henderson. "It's all the same story. The jail says they don't know why any of these people died. Anything wrong that happens in his facilities the sheriff blames on the inmates or on not having enough money," Henderson says. "But you really can't blame Glenn for his own death, and you can't blame it on the money, because he's got that."

As mandated by a 35-year-old consent decree intended to remedy abusive conditions in the jail, the city pays the Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff's Office a per diem amount for each local inmate, plus $3.2 million annually to provide medical services. In his 2007 budget request to the City Council, Gusman asked for an additional $5 million for medical services, a request that was granted.

Henderson is solemn when asked what it will take to get public officials to pay attention to the crisis. "It's not like I want a Rodney King situation where people burn the city down, because we don't have much of a city left to burn. But we need to do something, a sit-down, a walkout, something. It's getting to the point where we need some drama."

Dana Kaplan of the Center for Constitutional Rights summarizes the essential problem facing reformers. "Right now Gusman's funding is tied to the number of the people in the jail. How are we going to get money for schools and services and jobs programs with so much money tied up in the jail?"

Gusman's recent budget requests make it clear that he is banking on crime. His 2007 "budget request for these payments is based on our expected City inmate population," the sheriff wrote to the City Council. "The inmate population is driven primarily by the number of arrests made by the Police Department. Since the storm, the arrest rate has consistently increased in an attempt to stem the rising crime rate." In his 2005 request, Gusman explained that the depopulation of the jail in the immediate wake of Katrina represented a "90 percent reduction in revenue, but our fixed costs remain high."

Gusman has never publicly said that his aim is to build Orleans Parish Prison, which can now accommodate 2,500 inmates, back up to its former size, which was 8,000 before Katrina. But in written testimony to the US House of Representatives in April 2007, he listed as chief among his critical needs "the restoration of our four largest jail facilities." This, Gusman wrote, "would increase our capacity (an additional 4,100 beds) to hold some of New Orleans [sic] most violent and repeat offenders."

In other words, "build them and fill them," says Henderson, "and we know who'll be filling them."

Henderson and other local advocates formed Safe Streets/ Strong Communities in the wake of Katrina, in the words of their founding statement, "to demand that elected officials address the root causes of our decades-long public safety crisis, cease blaming the victims, and stop investing time and money on tactics that have never worked.... Many of our children have been given nothing to reach for except guns and little to own and be proud of but their street corners."

While Safe Streets has scored some recent victories--helping win the appointment of a new Indigent Defender Board and funding to launch the Office of the Independent Monitor to oversee police policies and practices, for instance--the real challenge for activists is the fight to reallocate public resources, out of law and order and into community recovery.

But to Sheriff Gusman, these are one and the same; he has made sure that the city's path to recovery will be paved by his inmates--literally. Since Katrina, Gusman has used his Community Service Program and Neighborhood Response Team to deliver cheap labor for reconstruction projects. His office's website features photos of inmates in orange jumpers and sweatshirts emblazoned with Sheriff Gusman Community Service Program next to road signs announcing, Project Clean-Up. Inmates Working.

It's not so far from the way things were more than a century ago. Antebellum city records refer to what is now the Orleans Parish Prison as the Workhouse. In addition to those arrested for crime, the jail was a repository for slaves whose masters chose to lease them to the Workhouse. The same archives also reveal that African-Americans were committed to the Workhouse for "claiming to be free": In the space where the master's name was usually recorded, these inmates were referred to as "so-called free." After the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, African-Americans arrested in New Orleans for black-code crimes like vagrancy and unemployment were taken to the parish Workhouse. During Reconstruction, the incarcerated former slaves provided a critical pool of forced labor for railroad companies, agriculture and industry.

In its first regular session post-Katrina, the state legislature amended a law regulating parish jail labor in order to grant immunity to prison authorities "for injuries or damages caused or suffered by prisoners participating in any work program during incarceration at parish jail facilities." When I asked a legislative staffer about the origins of the post-Katrina amendment, she said, "I believe it was because there was a labor shortage."

Lieut. Eric Donnelly, director of the sheriff's work-release program, the one that Dewitt Solomon took part in before the storm, told a local business paper that the program played a vital role in restarting the city's economic engine. "As soon as the hurricane ended and we got a new phone, it was ringing off the hook from employers saying they needed their inmates," Donnelly said. "So as soon as we were getting them back in we had [employers] coming to pick them up themselves. That's how much they rely on this program."

But, as Solomon says, "you shouldn't have to go to jail to get a job."

on the second anniversary, a shrill call,

A Message from an Organizer to the Left and Progressive Forces inside the USA

by Curtis Muhammad

With this second anniversary of Katrina upon us, there are a few words I wish to speak. This letter is written to the progressive, left movement for justice in the USA. In the last two years, every left organization has been in New Orleans, but despite that there is still no sign of a mass movement. There is still no sign that most activists are willing to put their knowledge and resources at the service of the grass roots and take their leadership from the bottom. I have found myself wondering, have poor black people been so vilified and criminalized that they are completely off the radar even of the so-called left? When Katrina happened, I hoped and expected that this would be the trigger to once again set off a true mass movement against racism and for justice in the US, led by those most affected: poor, black working people. When it became abundantly clear that this was not happening, I found myself at the crossroads of hope and hopelessness, and began to wonder how to spend the last years of my life in the service of my people.

The thing that I remind myself when I'm contemplating hopelessness is the beauty of humanity and the fact that people have always fought for what was right even when they knew they couldn't win. They tried because they loved each other; I think it's because it's built into
human beings for people to look out for each other. There is a drive in humanity to be just, to live in a society that is just, equal and respectful. I believe that ultimately people will achieve a just society; I believe humanity came out of a just society and will create it again.

I do believe that there was a time that the lovers of life, the lovers of humanity, the lovers of justice dominated the world. Some say this was so during the hunter-gatherer days, when though there were evil people they could never gain dominance. Their numbers were always
small, less than 1%; people ran their lives collectively, and therefore the greedy could not dominate. Well then, I say what happened, there is only that same 1% who dominates the world now.

This thinking, this logic has been the motivating factor in my life of movement work: the belief that there is a basic humanity that is inside the soul of most people. That this humanity can be harvested and organized into a movement for justice to free our people from slavery, bondage, oppression and exploitation. That the 80% of the world who live on an average of $2 a day can and will overcome the 1% and return us to a collective life organized around love, justice and
equality.

Most of you who know me also know I'm a storyteller and believe story to be a universal language that can be a vehicle for voice - the voice of all regardless of status, class, cast, race, gender. Story is an egalitarian language. So I wish to share with you my story, an abbreviated story of my organizing work from SNCC in Mississippi through the ghettoes of the US to the villages and jungles of Africa, to CLU, PHRF, NOSC, POC and finally the International School for Bottom-up Organizing. My story is meant to clarify why I now choose to live, work, teach and write outside the US and away from the grip of a drastically de-energized and often opportunistic and reactionary left in the USA.

* * *

I grew up in a community that, of necessity, had to take care of its own. In rural Mississippi in the 40s, 50s and 60s, mothers and fathers, grandparents, uncles and cousins protected the children from the hostile, racist world and collectively helped each other meet their needs. Nonetheless, when I was a child traveling to church on Sundays, I had to pass the tree from whose branches my cousin was lynched. The community of my birth gave me both my strength -- my faith in the people, my dedication to egalitarianism - and my undying hatred of racism and the oppressive few that control the world.

When SNCC came to town, I found my direction. It was both a community of love and a set of organizers devoted, at the risk of their lives, to the folk on the bottom: the poorest black folk in Mississippi, those who had nothing, not even the knowledge of how to read. SNCC introduced me to the struggles of my brothers and sisters around the world, and particularly in Africa. I became an internationalist and a revolutionary. The lessons of Ella Baker and SNCC have stayed with me throughout my life; I labored to make them a reality from Mississippi to the ghettoes of our major cities, from my time in the revolutionary movement in Africa to my work as a labor organizer, and I have done my utmost to apply them in post-Katrina New Orleans.

In 1998, I helped to organize Community Labor United (CLU), a coalition that was founded with a commitment to bottom-up organizing. (CLU principles included "ending the exploitation of oppressed peoples everywhere; educating, organizing and mobilizing the masses within our organizations and communities from the bottom up.") After eight years of organizing in some of the poorest areas of New Orleans, it became the "first responder" after Katrina, and led the formation of the People's Hurricane Relief Fund (PHRF).

As a founding member of PHRF and an organizer and New Orleans resident, I was back in the city within 8 days of the flood, struggling with overwhelming pain and anger. I felt that Katrina
represented an historic moment. Never before had all levels of government united to attempt genocide of 100,000 black people at the same time. Even in the 60s in Mississippi, they were murdering us in ones, twos and threes. I threw myself into the attempt to put the knowledge and resources of the left and nationalist organizations and "movement" people under the direction of the bottom: the poor and working class black folk who had been left to die in New Orleans. PHRF became a coalition that committed itself on paper to that goal.

What followed was a dramatic learning experience for me and for all those whose commitment is truly to the people and not to their own particular grouping. Within months, mainly as a result of a speaking tour I went on for PHRF, we had raised about a million dollars from folk across the country who were deeply moved by the attempted genocide of over a hundred thousand black folk. And by December, there was already conflict over who controlled that money and how it was to be used.

The New Orleans Survivor Council was organized by PHRF with the understanding that it was to become the leadership of the organization and the movement, and should control all resources. By April of 2006, when the NOSC began to sound like it wanted oversight of the funds, the interim leadership of PHRF took the money and ran, firing its own organizers for daring to tell the poor black residents in NOSC that they had the right to control the resources raised in their names. Undaunted, the young organizers continued working for the survivors
and formed a new group called People's Organizing Committee (POC).

This event was a turning point for me. I realized that the words of those who I had considered my comrades were empty, that their so-called commitment to bottom-up was a fiction; that their real commitments were to various organizations and their own egos. Our attempt to institutionalize bottom-up had led instead to a coalition of opportunists.

When I had spoken to mass audiences about Katrina in the fall of 2005, I had spoken of my discovery of the depth of the fear and hatred America has for poor, black people. The images on the media of those left to die could have been taken in sub-Saharan Africa or the Caribbean: those people were very poor and very black. With the desertion of PHRF, I was confronted by the knowledge that this hatred of poor black people extended into and throughout the progressive movement, even within exclusively black organizations. I felt very lonely in my continued commitment to lift up precisely that segment of oppressed Americans to lead the movement.

But POC plunged ahead, still dedicated to that vision. Thousands of volunteers came in the spring and summer, and many continue to come to this day. The hearts of so many people are in the right place. The New Orleans Survivor Council and its member group Residents of Public Housing continue to work to put bottom-up leadership on the map and fight for the right of our community to return and control its own destiny. But the past year has also revealed further weakness and lack of vision in our movement.

From the days immediately following the flood, we recognized that immigrants - brown people, some of the poorest and most desperate of our brothers and sisters from countries to the south - were being brought into our city. They were put to the dirtiest, most dangerous clean-up tasks, and later to replace the forcibly dispersed black labor force, for slave wages and in slave conditions. From the start, we called for organizing this new part of the New Orleans community in unity with and under the leadership of the black folk on the bottom.

This call was part of my message in the speeches I made in the fall of 2005, and several immigrant organizers heeded the call and came to work with us. However, despite many serious attempts to develop unity between black survivors and immigrants, it has become clear that those organizers refuse to unite with and take leadership from black folk. They have organized immigrant slaves into separate groupings with no contact with the NOSC, despite their initial commitment to unity. They are essentially, wittingly or unwittingly, following the government's agenda, which is to build a racist, assimilationist immigrant "movement" that will serve the needs of a war economy and patriotism.

And so we come to the second anniversary of Katrina. Bottom-up organizing is still embryonic, though hanging on to life and with a small, dedicated band of survivors, organizers and volunteers. But the rest of the movement is in shambles, or under direct or indirect influence of our enemies.

Through the experience of the last two years, I have also come to the conclusion that the infiltration of and direct attacks on the movement that started (in my lifetime as an activist) in the late 60s and early 70s with Cointelpro have never stopped. Our movement has been successfully divided into thousands of groupings, non-profits and NGOs, and the left has been rendered ineffectual. It is not an accident that, for forty years now, the movement has been so totally reformist, or that those who want to be revolutionaries are so isolated as to be irrelevant. The government and its agencies have a stranglehold on the people, the culture and even the left. I do not think it is possible in the U.S. at this time - for me - to develop and train organizers with a real understanding and commitment to the folk on the bottom.

And thus, I find myself at the crossroads of hope and hopelessness. I find myself possibly in the position of writing not mainly to the current readers of these words, but to those future revolutionaries who will learn from our impasse. I find myself deciding to work toward creating an international organizing school as a vehicle to discover, recruit and train radical organizers. I want to continue my investigation of the movements in Mexico and South America among very poor -- members of the informal economy, workers, campesinos and landless people -- learn more about how class and hue interact to shape oppression, take inspiration from the fact that the struggle continues, un-abandoned, worldwide, and share my own knowledge and experience with the rebels of today and tomorrow.

I have lived 64 years and have struggled intentionally for justice for about forty-six of those years. I am thankful and appreciative to all those who have traveled some of that distance with me: those who helped nurture my children, who stood with me when I was imprisoned and tortured, those who have always supported my work and stood by me when all seemed to stand against me. To these worthy friends, comrades and loved ones, I will always honor you, be there for you, and know you are there for me.

Still, I have arrived at a place in my life where I wish to share everything I have and know with the "sufferers." My principle continues to be the struggle to engage the poor, oppressed, voiceless, and those who have the least and suffer the most. The only struggle that matters to me now is finding justice for those who have never had it.

This is me, where I am, trying to figure out how to organize our folk in a way that we always look at need as the principle of justice. If you are looking for me, look among the youth, the poor, and the struggling masses trapped in slave-like conditions throughout the world, for I am no longer available to an opportunistic and racist left. I NOW SEEK REFUGE AMONG THE POOR.

This is my struggle.

Wish me well,
Curtis

migrant workers' resolution

An International Conference on Defending and Promoting the Basic Rights of Migrant Workers was held here in Seoul from August 20 to 21st. The conference was sponsored by the KCTU and supported by the ILO, BWI and the Alliance for Migrants' Equality and Human Rights- a coalition of over 20 organizations in South Korea of which MTU is a part. Below is a joint statement issued by participants at the conference.

2007 International Conference on Defending and Promoting the Basic Rights of Migrant Workers Joint Resolution

The basic labor rights of migrant workers, who now suffer greatly from low wages, exploitation, and industrial accidents due to anti-human rights and anti-labor policies, must be protected!

On January 1, 2007 the South Korean government abolished the Industrial Trainee System, which had been called a “modern form of slavery,” and in place implemented the Employment Permit System (EPS). Currently, the government is carrying out a wide-scale publicity campaign stating that the new system would protect migrant workers' rights. However the EPS is in reality a short-term rotation system, which prohibits free transfer of workplace and requires yearly renewal of contracts. The EPS is in it self a severe repression of migrant workers' rights. In the interest of economic efficiency, the South Korean government along with other governments throughout the world demand tremendous sacrifices from migrant workers and expect them to remain silent while their rights are being denied. Furthermore, many governments are labeling migrant workers who have become irregular due to the failure of their policies “illegal residents” and conducting “human-hunting” crackdowns and deportations against migrant workers in a brutal violation of their human rights.

The attitude behind such government actions is one of complete disregard for the humanity and dignity of migrant workers. These governments view migrant workers merely as disposable goods that can be used and discarded at will, completely ignoring the economic, political, and social circumstances which forces workers to migrate. Migrant workers come from countries wrought by underdevelopment, war, and political, social, and economic devastation as a result of capitalist imperialism and neoliberal globalization. They migrate in search of gainful employment which they cannot find at home. We recognize the need to address these root causes of migration at the same time as we tackle the realities faced by migrant workers in receiving countries.

In the face of this grave situation we make the following demands: Each national government must change its overall attitude towards migrant workers and prepare legal and institutional apparatuses necessary to guarantee migrant workers a minimum wage that matches the standard of that country, equal pay for equal work and humane treatment on parity with that afforded native workers, thus removing the shackles of discrimination and oppression and creating the conditions where all workers, whether migrant or native, can live together harmoniously.

Since November 2003, the South Korean government has been treating irregular migrant workers as criminals, who disrupt social peace and undermine the standards of local working conditions. Thus, the government has been carrying out “witch-hunt” policy of crackdowns and deportations. Already 100,000 irregular migrant workers have been routed out and deported. Many have been hurt and killed in the course of these crackdowns. In the midst of this tremendous violation of human rights, the government has expressed pride over its brutal actions. This past February 2nd, 10 migrant workers tragically lost their lives when a fire broke out at Yeosu Foreigners' Detention Center. Fearing that those inside would escape, detention center officers refused to open cell doors, causing migrant workers to die behind locked iron bars.

This situation in which migrant workers are treated as criminals and forced to die behind prison bars for no other reason than having come to South Korea, a more developed nation, in order to earn money, is the true face of the South Korean government's policy on migrant workers. Since 2003, the government has been carrying out a massive crackdown against irregular migrant workers and at the beginning of this August the joint crackdowns intensified in severity. Once again migrant workers are being detained and forcibly deported in great numbers.

As such, the participants of this international conference on the rights of migrant workers demand that the South Korean government do the following:

1. Guarantee migrant workers the right to free transfer of workplace and decent working conditions! We condemn the EPS which is greatly deteriorating the lives of migrant workers.
2. Stop the crackdown and deportations immediately! Migrant workers are not criminals, and thus all policies that treat them as such must be immediately stopped.
3. Guarantee the right of residence and legalize all migrant workers.

Recognizing that the problem of migrant workers is not only of their concern, but rather an important issue for the entire labor movement and all labor-related organizations we resolve to focus on organizing and empowering migrant workers. Recognizing the significance of the High Court’s decision concerning the Migrants' Trade Union, in which the Court has recognized the right of irregular workers to join a trade union, we resolve to ensure the right of all migrant workers in South Korean and globally to organize and join a trade union regardless of their status. Utilizing the organizing experiences of each country, we commit to move forward and strengthen the network amongst us and work together to resolve the problems facing migrant workers.

As representatives to the International Conference on Defending and Promoting the Basic Rights of Migrant Workers held in South Korea, we will use the fruits of this gathering as a basis to establish regular and long-term solidarity and strategies for joint action. Whether we are representatives from sending or receiving countries, we adopt the position of 'unity of workers throughout the world' and 'workers are one' and vow to build close communication and alliances for the purpose of making a world in which workers can live dignified and humane lives.

21 August 2007
Participants to the 2007 International Conference on Defending and Protecting the Basic Labor Rights of Migrant Workers

remembering the vermont sky

kopkind day nine

kopkind night eight

kopkind day seven

kopkind day six

kopkind day five

kopkind day four

kopkind day three

kopkind day two

kopkind day one

and the reception

the wedding

lunch before

getting ready

public transit

at palapa

beauty requires

goodbye to eldridge

organizing 101