On a humid day on Flatbush Avenue in Mill Basin, Brooklyn, Margarette Bastien stood beside a home-care agency, telling a woman in Haitian Creole about the strikes her labor union had organized. She described health and employment benefits that union membership offers, and how Best Care had refused to sign a contract that would pay home-health aides $10 an hour instead of $6 or $7 an hour.
The Haitian worker, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that when she worked at that agency two years ago, she received about $5 per hour. Now that they were offering her a temporary four-hour daily shift, she said she would earn $23, after taxes.
"Twenty-three dollars can’t do anything for me," she said. "I have kids."
Bastien, a home-health aide for five years and member-organizer at SEIU 1199, said, "Don't’tbe discouraged, that will change. You have to fight."
In the battle for workers' loyalties, many labor unions have chosen Haitians such as Bastien to get the message across to their compatriots, in their own language. Their participation in unions has gone beyond paying dues to more active roles.
"When you're a minority and you come from a foreign country, you're on your own," said Frederic Menuau, assistant manager of Local 23-25 at the Union of Needletrades and Textile Employees in Manhattan. "But if you join a union, you'll probably have a better chance because the union will help," said Menuau, who joined UNITE when he worked in a garment factory in the 1970s when he emigrated from Haiti.
To create leadership in the union that reflects its work force, UNITE and the Service Employees International Union, which represent industries that employ a large number of Haitians, have either hired or promoted Haitians as delegates, business agents, assistant managers, directors of divisions and other managerial slots.
The exact number is difficult to quantify, but scores have been spotted outside of home care agencies, at rallies, and conferences. Haitians sit in executive boardrooms where sweeping decisions are made, attend conferences, ensure that contract terms are respected, enforce regulations and make impassioned speeches to galvanize their colleagues.
Essentially, the Haitians' increased activism is a precursor to organizing a community politically, as other immigrant groups have done in the past, experts said. "The key for communities to succeed is to build coalitions with other community groups to amass collective power," said Joshua Freeman, a professor of labor studies at Queens College in New York.
"The unions become a mechanism for them to get a say-so in the society," Freeman said. "The immigrants are the union members."
A symbiotic relationship exists where labor unions are a means for immigrants to gain power socially and politically, and the unions' embrace of immigrant issues to gain their allegiance makes unions stronger, Freeman said.
Taking workers to the streets
Of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated 15.8 million union members nationwide last year, tens of thousands of Haitians nationwide are among them.
Unions such as the SEIU have been using immigrants' contributions in their demands to politicians and employers for years. Its most recent campaign to get home-health aides a raise to $10 per hour by 2007 has gained some success because it is able to get its members out to strike at will.
After a three-day spurt of rallies citywide June 7-9, four major home-care agencies in New York City agreed to a new contract for the raise.
Last year, full-time wage and salary workers who were union members averaged weekly earnings of $760, compared with an average of $599 for wage and salary workers who were not represented by unions, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.
For the last 14 years that Rose Assinthe, a Miami resident, has been a home-health worker at a nursing home, the days have gone quickly. From the minute she woke up at 4 a.m. to get her four children ready for school and the baby sitter, the day was a flurry of activity. At the North Bay Village nursing home she spent eight hours working, the tasks never ceased.
From $4.10 per hour in 1990 to $9 per hour nowadays, every moment of a home health-care worker’s day is filled. Taking care of the elderly and sick means thousands of Haitian home health-care workers such as Assinthe spend the day feeding, cleaning, changing bed sheets, taking the patients out on strolls and sitting with them.
"With the help of God, I've stood it," said Assinthe, whose three older children are now in college. "Despite life’s problems, God helped me stand it."
With rent, transportation fares, cost of education, food and the cost of other basic needs rising, thousands have taken to the streets of New York's’sfive boroughs and the sidewalks of home-care agencies such as Best Care to demand better pay. There have been similar actions and campaigns to benefit service workers in South Florida.
Instrumental in getting so many out were people like Bastien, who speaks Haitian Creole and had been in the workers' position. Notices of forums, brochures, and other leaflets were sent out in Haitian Creole and other languages for the June 7- 9 action.
"They're able to communicate with the union members better, and people feel more comfortable knowing that there's one of their own in there," said Rose-Magallie Maïtre, director of the Laundry, Dry Cleaning Workers and Allied Industries Health and Pension Funds, UNITE. The fund serves more than 5,500 workers, 1,500 of which are Haitian.
When she first came on board 19 years ago, reports were in English and Spanish. After Haitian workers complained, the Haitian-American director hired translators to produce a version in Haitian Creole.
Maïtre helped some Haitians get hired in the benefits department to help Creole-speaking members with their claims, questions, and complaints.
Jean-Joseph Maxime Bruny, secretary treasurer of the United Food and Commercial Workers' Union Local 888 in Mount Vernon, said his organization donates to Haiti and works to improve the conditions of butchers, cooks and others in that food service sector.
Members donated $1,000 to help recent flood victims in southern Haiti. Before that, they paid for a heart surgery candidate’s trip to Canada for the operation.
In collaboration with AFL-CIO, Local 888 has offered English-as-a-second-language courses. Some of its 600 Haitians members have participated.
"The reason that we're starting to move up is because the old membership realized that they needed people to tap into the large Haitian membership," said Bruny, who worked as a butcher and cook 25 years ago. He said he was tapped as a union delegate because he speaks Creole, French and Spanish.
Fighting back
Some unions joined political fights that affect Haitian laborers. Monica Russo, executive director of SEIU 1199 Florida, said her union is in redefining the union movement. They not only get involved with issues in the workplace, they rally around issues in their workers' communities.
The statewide chapter has taken a stand against the detention of Haitian refugees, advocated for better health care and joined others in the fight to create smaller class sizes in public schools.
Russo said Haitians make up about 40 percent of the chapter's’s8,000 health-care workers, most of them in nursing homes. Six of the chapter's 17 board members are Haitian.
"At the end of the day, we need to collaborate, or else we're all going down," Russo said. "There's’sa myth that immigrants don't know about unions or are uneducated. But Haitians know how to fight back and are very experienced at organizing."
At UNITE for Dignity in South Florida, community action director Winnie Cantave oversees a leadership development program for union members called Travay-Vanyan, it's Creole for Brave Workers. The six-week program seeks to teach union members how to speak for themselves and has graduated 70 as of March.
"These union members tell their stories, explain how the political system works and educate others in neighborhoods such as Little Haiti what they've learned," Cantave said. "While many workers may have came over in boats or been educated formally, they are nevertheless intelligent and have leadership capabilities.
"If these people are pushed and trained to develop that ability, all they need is the self-confidence so they can go and speak for themselves about their needs in front of a crowd," Cantave said. "They know what they want. They know what their problems are."
A difficult position
Freeman said immigrant communities have gained influence through the union, but with varying degrees of success. The era of widespread inhumane abuses in the workplace is over. Neither have new immigrant groups been coming in droves such as the Irish and Italians did in the last century.
The labor unions of yesteryear are not the same as today's unions, as their numbers have dwindled from a peak two decades ago, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. The bureau reports that 12.9 percent of wage and salary workers were union members last year, down from 13.3 percent in 2002.
The labor movement has suffered setbacks because many manufacturing companies have gone overseas, Freeman said. But they are still strong, depending on the sector such as health-care.
Freeman said they have built the structures and know how to execute campaigns that could make or break political candidates, mostly through financial donations. Electing pro-union officials has translated into more resources for targeted communities and labor constituents.
The time period they arrived, the percentage that becomes citizens, and geographic concentrations have determined their success. Freeman said Caribbean immigrants are politically savvy because they've grown up discussing politics, but for them to have an effect requires coalition building.
"Some of it [influence] is to become assertive in the union," Freeman said. "They could control it if those people see it as something they own."
"There were people there for that, Haitians, the first day I got in," said Assinthe, a graduate of Travay-Vanyan in Miami. The union helps me understand things I didn't’tknow before. They give you benefits, send you to trainings and fight for everybody, not only workers." Comparing the way she cast her vote before through others' suggestions is different from the informed decisions she makes now about the candidates, Assinthe said.
"It’smade me a different person," said Assinthe, who became a delegate last year.
