Former Clinton Health Chief Dona Shalala Forced to Support Immigrant Rights



At the University of Miami, students organized a successful sit-in and hunger strike this week that forced university president, and former HHS Secretary, Donna Shalala to lead a negotiation between striking campus janitors and UNICCO, a company providing janitorial services to campuses nationwide. University of Miami President and former Clinton Cabinet member Donna Shalala served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran in the 1960's.

Former Clinton Health Chief Dona Shalala Forced to Support Immigrant Rights

Former Clinton Health Chief Forced to Support Immigrant Rights

News Analysis, Megan Izen,
Racewire/Colorlines, Mar 31, 2006
At the University of Miami, students organized a successful sit-in and hunger strike this week that forced university president, and former HHS Secretary, Donna Shalala to lead a negotiation between striking campus janitors and UNICCO, a company providing janitorial services to campuses nationwide.
SHalala and students
Shalala also agreed to release a statement in support of the janitors, who are mainly Cuban and Haitian immigrants earning less than $7 per hour with no benefits.

The sit-in and hunger strike were part of the National Student-Labor Week of Action to demand workers' rights on college campuses. Led by the Student Labor Action Project (SLAP), a project of Jobs with Justice, the week of activity focuses national attention on the increasing number of college campuses that fail to provide adequate pay and benefits for their workers, many of whom are immigrants.

"The fight for workers' rights is also a fight for immigrant rights," said Carl Lipscombe, the national coordinator of SLAP after the victory was made public. "It's the fight for immigrants to have the right to organize and join labor unions; the fight for immigrants to get paid the same wages as American workers and to have access to affordable health care and sick leave and vacation."

The nationwide campus demonstrations have coincided with larger immigrant rights protests sweeping the country. Immigrants and their supporters, including both high school and college students, have come out in record numbers to show their opposition to the Sensenbrenner bill that would criminalize undocumented immigrants.

"These mass mobilizations present a unique opportunity for all social justice advocates in this country," said Tammy Johnson, director of the Public Policy program at the Applied Research Center. "Organizers must build multiracial and multi-issue coalitions to guarantee racial justice in all aspects of immigrant rights including education equity, health care access, and economic justice."

As a result of the heightened visibility, a federal law was passed that included the DREAM Act, granting access to higher education for immigrant students. A bill to protect the rights of child citizens whose parents are undocumented was also recently introduced into the House of Representatives.

As the interest in immigration reform builds, organizers worry that public attention may be co-opted by business interests who seek to maintain a vulnerable low-wage work force.

Immigration reform has been largely framed by earned legalization and guestworker programs that benefit business interests, claims Aarti Shahani, a co-founder of Families For Freedom, the multi-ethnic defense network by and for immigrants facing and fighting deportation.

"Business interests that are dominating the immigration agenda are claiming the mass mobilizations as a moral cloak to keep ramming through their agenda," said Shahani. "People have to make sure that the physical mobilization is accompanied with a very explicit agenda about what we want as black and brown people in this country."

Megan Izen is a writing fellow with ColorLines magazine.

When this story was posted in July 2006, this was on the front page of PCOL:




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