Meet the Crawfish-Peeling Guestworkers Who Inspired Walmart Walkouts

Meet the Crawfish-Peeling Guestworkers Who Inspired Walmart Walkouts

How a few courageous workers in small-town Louisiana sparked nationwide actions demanding better wages and working conditions for those who pick, pack, stock, and sell the mega-retailer’s products.
by Cecilia Garza


Guestworkers at Walmart supplier C.J.'s Seafood, where they were forced to work up to 24-hour shifts with no overtime pay and locked into the plant to prevent them from taking breaks. Photo courtesy of the National Guestworker Alliance.


In the small town of Breaux Bridge, La., Martha Uvalle and her co-workers at C.J.'s Seafood, a Walmart supplier, faced abuses many Americans imagine only take place in poorer, faraway countries: They were forced to work shifts of up to 24 hours, with no overtime pay; threatened with beatings if their breaks lasted too long; and, on at least two occasions, locked inside the facility to work. Some fell asleep at their workstations from exhaustion.

Uvalle had heard that there were organizations that defended the rights of immigrant workers like her. In 2011, someone had mentioned a group called the National Guestworker Alliance (NGA).
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So when Uvalle gave the NGA's number to her feisty co-worker, Ana Rosa Diaz, it was an act of tremendous courage. Diaz then actually called the NGA to report the working conditions at C.J.'s.

“Apart from the fact that he (general manager Michael LeBlanc) screams at us, he humiliates us all the time, apart from the fact that we were being made to work these excessive hours, this year the supervisors blocked the doors to the plant so we couldn’t take breaks,” Diaz told YES! Magazine of her C.J.'s experience. “One supervisor threatened to hit us with a shovel. And finally the thing that pushed us over the edge was that the employer threatened our families if we reported him.”

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A climate of intimidation...

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/10/14-0