This April, we witnessed that increasingly rare thing in Californian politics -- a good day. On Wednesday 7 April, the mostly African-American and Hispanic residents of Inglewood in Southern California were faced with a ballot measure sponsored by Wal-Mart, an attempt by the corporation to buy its way around democracy, and drop a "supercenter" into the center of Inglewood's community. The community said, overwhelmingly, no. On the same day in San Francisco, in Courtroom #9 of the U.S. District Court, we saw a rather more muted community victory in a civil suit against Lakireddy Bali Reddy. In 1999, when Reddy was Berkeley's richest landlord with an estate valued at $100m, Chanti Pratipatti, a 17 year old girl whom he had trafficked into the country, died of carbon monoxide poisoning in one of his properties. On 7 April, the suit brought by Pratipatti's estate was settled for an undisclosed sum.
Reddy's case, which involves his sons as well, has been reported as a "sex-slave civil suit", a torrid Indian tabloid tragedy. Reddy Sr is currently serving the fourth year of an eight-year federal jail term for importing minors for immoral sexual purposes, as well as tax and immigration fraud. His sons pleaded guilty to trafficking teenage girls from India for sex. But the real Reddy story is far closer to home, far less exotic and far more prevalent, than we might want to think. The Reddy's sexual crimes do not, and should not, admit of comparison. But in respect of exploitation, the difference between Mr. Reddy and his family and the Walton family -- owners of Wal-Mart -- is not race, but a simple order of magnitude. The Reddys deal in tens of millions and the Waltons in tens of billions. The Reddys actions hurt dozens of people, the Waltons hurt hundreds of thousands.
There are remarkable similarities between the millionaires and the billionaires. Perhaps the most pertinent is that both families thrive on exploitative labor practices to build their own empires. Before Chanti Pratipatti died, she was paid next-to-nothing for her labor, sexually abused, and virtually imprisoned, unable to go to school. The Mexican and Eastern European janitors now suing Wal-Mart, were paid next-to-nothing and were locked up in Wal-Mart's stores while they worked "off the clock" in the late hours of night. One's abuser was brown, the others was white. Both abusers are American, and wealthy because of the suffering of others.
At one level we could be angry, what with all these illegal immigrants taking away jobs from 'legal' Americans. There is, for instance, a great deal of recent Northern Californian fury about brown folks taking away white collar tech jobs, a creeping and evil outsourcing that threatens to wake Silicon Valley's professionals from their dreams of suburban homesteading. The high-profile outsourcing of white collar jobs is, however, a little overstated. Forrester Research's predictions of white-collar job losses over the next decade suggest that around 300,000 jobs a year might be outsourced. In the context of the 138 million jobs in America and an average annual jobs loss rate around 28 million over the last decade, this seems a little less dire. But in all this, the debate spins as if the new workers, wherever they are, are the bad guys.
To pit U.S. workers against foreign ones working for lower real wages is to miss the point. Why isn't anyone talking about the employers? The tragedy is that the bleak futures with which California's programmers are now becoming acquainted are ones that have been lived by plenty of workers on the breadline in America for years. Real wages for the poorest Americans have stagnated over the past two decades. It may come as very cold comfort that there are federal minimum wage laws and support programs for the poorest working Americans. Indeed, Wal-Mart fixes its wages so that its employees qualify for these programs, and employ staff to help new recruits fill out the forms to allow them to claim welfare from the state. And Wal-Mart's revenues contribute 2% of the U.S. GDP, employing 1.3 million people.
For some employers, including Wal-Mart, the spigots of federal corporate welfare programs still don't justify the cost of legally hiring U.S. workers. It is these employers who turn to poor workers outside the country, often women, often bringing people over on false pretences. It is for the jobs below minimum wage that immigrants are brought into the country -- or simply, conveniently 'used' yet not recognized – by unscrupulous employers. It is these immigrants who live and sometimes die beneath the outsourcing radar.
It's easy to demonize those picking up white collar IT jobs, because they're distant and they don't seem to be starving. Not so with the in-country outsourcing, of the sort practiced by the Waltons and Reddys. Instead of demonization, these workers are met either with sensationalism ('she was a sex-slave, you know') or outright silence. And congress isn't helping. The Clear Law Enforcement for Criminal Alien Removal (CLEAR) Act, currently in Congress, would require local police to act as immigration enforcers. In addition to human rights groups and immigrant organizations, police departments around the country have poured scorn on a bill that threatens further to victimize abused workers, rather than help them.
So where does that leave us? The millionaires and billionaires may end up in jail (and the richer they are, the less likely it is that they'll ever end up behind bars), while the victims of their crimes, foreign and domestic, are ignored, blamed or deported. Wal-Mart will undoubtedly find some other community to buy out. Although their Inglewood venture was the most brazen to date, they've already managed to use the ballot box tactic to open stores in Calexico and Contra Costa in California. The spirited support of workers' rights, whether through labor, immigration or human rights law, is our communities' strongest defense. And we can only begin this when we end the silence and suspicion that divides foreign from domestic workers.
Raj Patel and Maninder Kahlon are members of the Alliance of South Asians Taking Action (ASATA) ASATA mobilized around the Reddy case, motivated by the need for both community criticism of Reddy as well as watchfulness around the racism & xenophobia in how the case was presented to mainstream America. ASATA continues to work to empower the San Francisco Bay Area South Asian communities around racism and xenophobia both within and against our diverse communities. A version of this article appeared in India West.
