Low-income women have ally to defend labor rights

http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/columnists/249110.php

Neto's Tucson by Ernesto Portillo Jr.
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 07.20.2008

Finding and keeping a job is difficult in this souring economy. Even holding a job doesn't always guarantee a paycheck.
Rosario Martinez and Cruz Cardenas discovered that.

Martinez, 54, worked as a domestic. Cardenas, 48, worked at a charter school. They both were denied money owed them.
Unlike some workers, however, Cardenas and Martinez knew they had a chance to get their back wages.


Cruz Cardenas,left, and Rosario Martinez are converts to the cause of defending the labor rights of low-income women after the Tucson Women Workers' Project helped them collect wages they were owed.


Cardenas, the mother of five children, has worked a variety of low-wage jobs since she came to Tucson in 1984 from Agua Prieta, Sonora, across the border from Douglas.

She sold home-cooked food. She cleaned motel rooms. And she did janitorial and cooking chores for a local charter school.
Martinez also immigrated to Tucson, from Southern Sonora, in the mid-'80s. The mother of three children worked in restaurant kitchens and recently worked five days a week as a domestic in a private home.

Both women said they believed they were working hard and dutifully up until they didn't get paid.

Independently of each other, the two women did not meekly accept their predicament. They turned to Nina Rabin at the University of Arizona for help.

Rabin is with the Southwest Institute for Research on Women at the UA. She also teaches at the UA's James E. Rogers College of Law.

FULL story at link.