ozy | The organization Soni directs, the National Guestworker Alliance,
focuses on immigrants with temporary work visas. Hundreds of thousands
come to the United States each year. Despite their numbers, they’re
difficult to organize: transient, for starters; vulnerable and risk
averse, besides. Guest workers don’t come here to make trouble. Because
their visas bind them to one employer, quitting means deportation, or
worse.
Soni has led guest workers to some of the ballsiest collective
actions in recent history — the welders, for instance, ended up marching
all the way to Washington, D.C., going on a hunger strike
and catalyzing an uproar in India and the White House. A strike by
Mexican crawfish-peelers — who’d been forced to work 16- to 24-hour
shifts and threatened with bodily harm — changed corporate policy at
Wal-Mart. Striking student guest workers at a Hershey packing plant led
the State Department to rewrite certain visa policies.
More remarkable than all this, maybe, is what Soni thinks the guest workers represent: you.
“The guest workers and low-wage workers that I organize hold a
crystal ball into the changing nature of work,” he argues. It’s part of a
theory about the future of work that he’s elucidated in lectures at Harvard Law School, Soros-funded forums,
on television and, soon probably, in a book. “What’s happening to
low-wage workers is not just happening to low-wage workers,” he says .
What’s
happening is the rise of contingent labor — temporary, part-time,
gig-to-gig — and the lengthening of labor supply chains, like
independent contractors and sub-subcontractors. In their wake, even
American-born professionals have lost leverage. At universities, adjunct
professors are paid per class, hired per semester. Lawyers who used to
work at firms now contract for them. Sixty-four thousand Silicon Valley
engineers just won a settlement against four tech giants who’d agreed
not to solicit one another’s employees. To Soni, their plights all
resemble guest workers’.
