TALKING WITH JENNIFER GORDON FOUNDER OF THE WORKPLACE PROJECT
The battle for immigrant workers
BY LIZA FEATHERSTONE
At 39, Jennifer Gordon already has embraced challenges ranging from Harvard Law School to Long Island's cruel underground economy to writing and raising small children at home in Brooklyn.
Now a MacArthur Fellow and a Fordham University law professor, she's the author of "Suburban Sweatshops: The Fight for Immigrant Rights" (Belknap/Harvard, $27.95), about the Workplace Project, a Long Island immigrant workers' organization she founded in 1992.
But Gordon's activism began in high school in Storrs, Conn., where she founded an Amnesty International chapter. "So long as I was there, it was fabulous," she recalls in an interview at her Fordham office. "But I was so bitterly disappointed when it didn't outlast me!" Like most outraged high school students, she hadn't known how to create a lasting institution.
Unlike most adults, however, Gordon learned. She founded the Workplace Project upon graduation from law school on a small foundation grant and ran it for six years; it has been going strong without her leadership for almost seven years. The organization, which started as a legal clinic, has collected back wages for countless day laborers, maids, nannies, dishwashers, landscapers and other immigrant workers.
"Suburban Sweatshops" describes the experiences of these immigrants. Zoila Rodriguez provided live-in child care for a family that not only reneged on a promised raise, but forbade her to leave their house during the work week, even if it was nighttime and she had no work left to do. After Rodolfo Sorto, a janitor, tried to organize a union in his workplace, his employer retaliated by forcing him to work with toxic chemicals without protective clothing; he eventually landed in the hospital, suffering from dizziness and respiratory problems. But the book is not just about the trials of workers such as Rodriguez and Sorto - it is about how they fought back by joining the Workplace Project, and Gordon provides serious analysis of their struggles.
Despite representing people who don't have the legal right to vote, The Workplace Project has successfully lobbied for stronger enforcement of New York State's minimum wage law; thanks to these efforts, it is now a felony for an employer to pay below the minimum wage. "People have been earning $2 to $3 an hour - or nothing at all - for their work," Gordon says. "The organization has been very successful in attacking that problem."
Yet Gordon is honest about what the Workplace Project has not been able to accomplish. "The hardest thing has been raising wages and working conditions in any lasting way, above the legal minimum," she says. As organizing traditional unions - which bargain for better wages and benefits - becomes more difficult, how can poor people improve their economic situation? "That's the question for more and more workers," Gordon says. "If you can't collectively bargain for one reason or another, how do you make work better?"
Increasingly, immigrants are settling in the suburbs, where the enforcement of labor standards can be especially lax and workplaces are often hidden from public view. Take, for instance, the office park. "What is protest supposed to do?" Gordon asks. "Communicate your message to other human beings who are going to sympathize with their fellow human beings. An office park is set up so the whole thing is private. There's no coincidence - no one is going to come by there, except if they work in the office park, which just makes you think of how much protest relies on coincidence and passers-by and public life. If you set up a situation architecturally where there is no public life, then protest is very hard."
Residential suburban neighborhoods, however, are another story. If a family is refusing to pay its maid, 15 people walking around outside the house with signs can create quite a sensation. "The neighbors come right out if you start to do that," Gordon says. "So in a sense, I think the Workers Project has been able to get more from publicly asking that workers rights be respected, because it's unexpected in suburbia that you would have that sort of protest or public demand. You get so much more attention than you would in the city. Even though there are more people in the city, they are more inured to protest."
Gordon's book does not fit into any existing genre; insightful accounts of labor organizing by people who have done it are all too rare. That's probably because reflecting on one's own practice is so hard. "It was very difficult," she admits. "I worked on the book for five years, and those were not easy or happy years. ... I think in a way it might have been easier to figure out what I thought if it had been someone else's work, but this was work that I cared so much about. ... I am so happy with [the book] now that it's done, but I never thought I would see the day."
Adding to the difficulties of writing, Gordon and her partner, Linda Steinman, a First Amendment lawyer, had their first child, Sophie, right after Gordon left the Workplace Project. (The couple's second child, James, now 2 1/2, was born when the book was in its last stages.) Gordon went last week to her daughter's school, in Park Slope, to talk about being a published author.
"I brought all of the notebooks with all the notes, and I brought edited pages so they could see I'd made mistakes," she says. "They had to guess how long it took. And it was amazing, because there was my daughter, and I have been working on this book for most of her life and she seems like such a grown-up kid. The book and the child were almost the same amount of time. It's like when someone says, 'in dog years.'" She laughs. "It's an amazing measure of what it takes to make a book, in terms of the time you put in," she adds, marveling that it took as long "to create a 6 1/2-year-old as to create this little square book."
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Liza Featherstone is the author of "Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers' Rights at Wal-Mart."