The professional carwash industry is a $23 billion enterprise, one which more and more Americans make use of every year. If you visited a carwash lately – which judging by the latest industry report you probably have or will in the near future – you may have noticed the fast and arduous labor of carwash workers. You have seen that even in the most extreme heat or cold weather, carwash workers are hard at it – focusing on every nook and cranny of your vehicle. What you probably missed – as is the case in many carwashes across the country – is that this work is accompanied by obscene labor abuses, health hazardous conditions, employer exploitation and intimidation. Carwash workers are the face of the new American sweatshop.
Carwash operators routinely violate basic employment laws like those requiring workers be permitted to take rest breaks or have access to shade and clean drinking water. Workers frequently work more than 10 hours a day, more than 6 days a week, without even the slightest thought of overtime. In fact, car wash workers are often paid much less than the legal minimum wage, sometimes earning less than $3 an hour or working for cash tips alone. Employees who complain about the exploitative conditions at the workplace are often intimidated and threatened by car wash operators.
A majority of carwash workers are Latino and immigrants – many do not have a clear understanding of their rights, which opens the door for abusive car wash operators to take advantage. Cuéntame has launched a documentary video and a national campaign exposing the sweatshop practices and is calling for individuals who have witnessed these or other abusive conditions at their local car washes to submit there stories on their website.
Cuéntame has documented how carwash workers are subject to health and safety hazards such as constant exposure to water and to dangerous chemicals without protective gear. Workers in the industry have reported severe kidney damage, respiratory problems and nerve deterioration. Most lack health insurance, services or protection and end up using up all their earnings to pay their medical bills. It is a shameful and vicious cycle with no apparent end.
According to the Community Labor Environmental Action Network (CLEAN), an advocacy organization working to protect car wash workers’ rights, in Los Angeles, CA alone there are approximately 10,000 carwash workers that are potentially exposed to this abuse on a daily basis. This past June, the Clean Carwash Campaign helped a former Los Angeles carwash worker win an $80,000 lawsuit against his ex-employers who forced him for years to work early in the morning but prevented him from clocking in officially until later in the day. The campaign has been working to improve conditions and to ensure that carwash employers meet labor standards and abide by fair workplace practices, but there is still much more that needs to be done.
The exploitation of car wash workers is the face of a new American sweatshop, one that operates in plain daylight in our communities, in our neighborhoods and at our corner carwash. It’s time to stop turning a blind eye to it.
Though Robert’s article may assuage his conscious when he gets his car washed, this article completely masks the underlaying problem that has created and perpetuates injustice in California’s labor market.
Robert misses the genesis of the labor conditions he describes.
labor conditions reflect the laws of supply and demand. The supply/demand ratio is a function of our democratic policy expressed through immigration and trade law. The labor conditions he described are not going to be altered anywhere but at the source of the problem. Illegal labor must be completely rejected.
Then wages and benefits will rise due to market conditions and restoring the political power of the working and middle class.
We have plenty of toothless laws “protecting” illegals that already don’t work. They work as well as the immigration laws: not at all.
I am not suggesting taking no action. I am insisting on full enforcement of our fundamental immigration laws to defend labor conditions. And environmental conditions. And educational conditions. And access to social services for Americans. And so on. This is the only way to fix the third-world labor conditions that have been established in California.
California worker’s wages, benefits, working conditions, access to eduction, and social services have all been artificially distorted and depressed for decades by illegal immigration and offshoring. These policies have had predictable consequences, and now we are paying the piper.
The result for the average American laborer in California is that they will find that American labor costs and conditions have been generally transformed to near third-world levels.
The minimum loss per American worker is at least 3000 dollars a year. This is not the worse of their losses. American’s loss of access to the “engines of equality,” brought about by the destruction of our educational and social support infrastructure under a flood tide of illegals, cannot be measured.
The unlimited and irresponsible demographic growth in America during the last 40 years, substantially fueled by illegal immigration, has moved the majority of our nation’s wealth and political power to the top of our polity.
The middle-class’s earning and political power has been smashed by illegal immigration and offshoring. This is now undeniable in the wake of this great scam collapsing, and this concentration of wealth and power was the goal from the very beginning of this mass immigration, 40 years ago.
After 40 years of the American working and middle-classes hearing that “replacing you with cheap labor is good for you,” I believe the middle and working classes are finally just about ready to explode.
This is exactly the same mass-immigration shit the Robber Barons used to establish their corporate aristocracy between 1880 to 1924. The Robber Baron policies smashed our farmer democracy, banckrupted our country, and established a corporate elite with overwhelming political and economic powers.
These exact same mass-immigration policies are being used today to evolve their same corporate aristocracy, but this time into a corporate fascist state.
Their job is done. Look around. Now the only question is “who pays for these crimes?” Obama has squarely put the debt onto the public.
I would say that our argument about the welfare of car washers is missing the point of what has happened in our country to bring us to this point.
Progressives and economic conservatives have both ignored the destruction of the Middle-Class for the past 40 years as they continued to profit form regularization of unlimited illegal immigration.
The labor conditions, economic status, and political power of the middle class declined. Labor conditions are a function of simple supply and demand: More mouths to feed, more people to house, and more people to clothe raise profits for our elite and costs for our middle class, while more labor on the market drive wages down.
These perfect conditions for greed were politically created, a massive labor influx accompanied by rising prices of necessaries, and these corporate policies have been sustained by progressives and conservatives for decades. Both sides have put their economic and social goals before their duty to our fundamental rule of law, and the unifying national principals the once founded our political process.
If we want to end these bad conditions, we must end these corrupted political processes, and we must end illegal immigration. If we do not want to end these labor conditions, if we do not want to restore the earning and political power of the middle class, we will perpetuate illegal immigration. It is as simple as that, though we are still left with a raft of secondary problems these policies have brought.
The wage suppression and draining of benefits caused by illegal/offshoring has not just denied the illegal a fair deal, these policies have finally succeeded on their forty-year journey to designed to strip the American Middle Class of their share of our nation’s wealth and political power. It’s done. This change in the distribution of our nation’s wealth has also changed the character of America.
What it means to be an American has changed: rather than being a citizen pledged to defend and protect each-other’s mutual private rights, and preserve public democracy under the rule of law, we are now a nation who’s only common assumption is the mutual greed of individuals, and the knowledge that our polity is controlled from the top-down by the greediest individuals in the world, our corporate elite.
The influence of our corporate class is not limited by the number of their votes: they buy and sell politicians like skittles.
We are presented with the amazing spectre of illegals claiming citizenship from our corporate elite government because they broke American Laws to serve the corporate elite that controls this country. And irony of irony, our government these criminals are claiming citizenship from is criminal too, by the very terms of our own founding documents.
I ask, “what kind of citizens is our criminal system attracting and rewarding?” Alberto Gonzales? John Yoo? What kind of lives do we want to lead is the real question? I choose one under the rule of law created by our founding documents. Today, that means a fight.
The American Corporate Class, in both its conservative and progressive expressions, continues to manipulate our polity, and both sides of this sick equation accepts the illigimate claims of illegals and rewards them with citizenship. This is just wrong.
We now have millions of “Citizens” who didn’t just disobey American Law to qualifiy for citizenship, but who base their claims for citizenship on defiance of the rule of law itself.
This spits on the very concept that we are a nation based on political, not personal principals. Your greed justifies nothing. Greed brings about the labor conditions you are complaining about, and if you don’t end the illegal immigration and political corruption that supports illegals, you don’t end the conditions. In fact, these conditions have spread through all of America’s laboring and middle classes.
I philosophically object to a government that grants such “citizenships,” and I openly question the basis of all grants of citizenship outside of the rule of law and far outside of our fundamental democratic principals. I know that’s tough for our progressive and conservative corporate elite to swallow, as they have put their own respective beliefs before our rule of law.
“I obey my desire for wealth, and I break the law, therefore I am…” (fill in the blank yourself: “a lobbyist,” “a politician,” or “a citizen” all fit.)
That’s why illegal immigration is illegal in a democracy. The working citizens have tried to protect themselves from this long term assault, but both the Democrat and Repugnant parties are so throughly corrupted that neither is responsive to the will of our voters, the rule of law, or the general welfare of our citizens.
Apparently, if we believe the progressives and conservatives, we have a “democracy” where the citizen has decided to lower their own wages through illegal immigration, offshoring, and placed the total cost for educating, medicating, and providing the social benefits for the illegals upon themselves.
Yeah, sure.
We face a deep crisis as a nation. The Democrat and Repugnant parties have both become totally corrupt, neither represents the citizens of our country, and both are fully-funded to work to protect the top-down corruption of our democratic process by the concentrated corporate wealth of our nation.
I hope you progressives are watching the shennigans that are happening during the end of the California Assembly session. Any objective observer would call it bribery.
What is clear is that in California the Democratic Party is a lap-dog of corporate wealth and power.
Like Republicans in other state’s, California’s Democrats are perpetuating their same policies of endless growth, endless offshoring, and endless illegal immigration has already smashed our middle-class and our democracy.
How do you tell a Democrat from a Rebublican? Beats me. They share the same corrupted system, and work for the same people.
Thus neither party will alter the trajectory of draining the middle-class through illegals and offshoring. Their funding base, mainly composed of their corporate bribes depends on perpetuating these policies.
Both parties justified betraying our principals by saying that greed is good. Clinton brought the Dems to corporate control in 1993, and Obama is perpetuating the trends of Bush.
The ethical among us knew these policies would do just what they did during the 1880s: concentrate wealth and power in our version of the Robber Barons. Our political leaders were either “wrong” about the benefits of unlimited greed and growth, or they lied and we have been robbed of our rights and our wealth by both parties.
In either case both parties are dependent upon corporate contributions for their existence, and neither represents the interests of our citizens.
We are now faced with the amusing scene of watching economists, politicians, and the press all wondering what happened to the irresponsible “wealth” generated by their 40 year long “never-ending” growth and expansion of the American Economy.
It’s gone, and now we don’t have a middle class with sufficient earning power to maintain the current values of housing, equity, or debt assets. If you think our economic roller-coaster ride is over, you are very wrong. Nothing Obama or his twin Bush has done have done a damn thing to restore the earning power of the middle-class. Quite the opposite. Both have put the losses of their biggest bribers onto the public account. No prosecutions, no problemo…
They have merely done the same thing with the losses of the banks that they did with the social costs of the illegals: The Dems and Repugs have both put the losses of the banks and the costs of the illegal’s subsidies onto the public debt!
Now the Dems are getting ready to do their corporate master’s bidding and deeply cut medicare and social security. Obama gives Wall Street everything.
What do the illegals say about this? About torture? About illegal wars? They kiss the ring of our criminal elite and work harder for cheaper. Is this how we run our country? No wonder we torture, make war, and wallow like obese pigs in a sea of debt. Our “citizens” obey and consume.
The only thing that happened during the past 40 years is who owns and runs American has changed. Power and wealth have been concentrated into very few hands, and we are supposed to bend down like illegals to kiss the ring of wealth and power, work like illegals for nothing, for a lousy life of cheap labor, and crow about the benefits of “American Oppertunism.”
Oh, and then the progressive elite “feels bad” when they see the consequences of their “policies.” The bad feelings have not yet begun to manifest themselves.
I’ll tell you what really happened: their big growth bubble has popped. Their 40 year long ponzi scheme of irresponsible growth had exploded. The consequences of the policies that both the progressives and the econ conservatives have pushed for four decades, offshoring and illegals, have come home to roost. And we have nothing to pay the bills with. They stole the very value of our money!
Our corporate elite have drained our middle class of their wealth and purchasing power, so forget having us “buy” our way out of DEPRESSION. We have already looted our schools, drained and destroyed our public utilities and our social welfare systems, and they have drained our environment of its resources.
Now we are hearing the tired refrain, “We must drill-drill-drill to serve the energy needs of our expanding population.” Now we are also hearing about how we have to dam every river in California to preserve the expansion, this expansion of greed, poverty and desperation.
Let’s pretend it’s 1969 all over again, and we have the chance to “do-over” the last 40 years. Do we allow unrestricted illegal immigration and irresponsible growth to strip our state again? Do we “open” China so our corporate masters can move our manufacturing to China?
Maybe we should look to the past to identify our political mistakes, and stop making the same mistakes over and over again into the future. Maybe we should act like Americans.
Maybe this time around we should hold our parties, the corporate elite, and the illegals within the rule of law, and fully responsible for their actions.
My point is that American laborers and the American middle-class have been under sustained attack from the offshoring/illegal labor policies shared by the progressives and the conservatives for the last 40 years, and one aspect of the solution is deporting the carwash workers, not protecting them. It’s time to bring wages up, not protect those illegals and their criminal employers who have pushed the American working classes down so low.
We have the amazing spectacle of watching the corporate traitors of both parties, at the “top” of society, making a deal with illegals, the “bottom” of society, to divide the wealth and power of the American middle class between them. “Hey, I’ll make you a citizen if you vote for me,” is one to the most disgusting and traitorous political strategies every conceived.
It’s going to take a sea-change in politics to even begin to address the injustices these short-sighted labor policies based on greed have engendered.
It’s long past time we decided to take care of our own American working class, and this is going to require putting the welfare of our people before our corporate elite and their illegal and Chinese cheap labor. I don’t look for these changes to come from within the political system, but from its failures.
The hidden conditions on job sites, the open secret of illegals in your favorite luxury resturant, and your complaints about car wash workers ring hollow. If you support illegal labor, you support these conditions, and the impoverishment of the American laboring classes. It is as simple as that.
It is the corruption of our polity that created and perpetuates these screwed-up labor conditions, and we will only improve the status of labor in America by stopping illegal immigration and offshoring.
It’s time that “Americans” start acting like Americans, and take the positions necessary to restore bottom-up democratic forms, the rights of the citizen, and put corporate profits second to our democratic principals and practices.