Arizona Interfaith Alliance for Worker Justice

Hey everyone,

This is my first post since getting here and it is long overdue. My first four weeks have gone well and have been challenging at times. The worker center here is on the smaller side. We are only 2 years old and still working to organize and create structure. Everyone at the office is so great it is like we are a family. Maria Alva who makes almost all of the calls and organizes the workers is a former worker that won her case with us against Food City a grocery company here in the Valley. Nic De la Fuente is a part time employee and a part time intern which makes him a full time employee. He works with intake and individual cases. Cristina Sanidad is here two days a week and has been with the center from the start. She also does intake and works on cases and has become an expert on recourse for wage theft. Trina Zelle is the director and stops in every week to meet with us and provide us with direction and any resources we need. This summer we are working on focusing and getting more organized. We have moved to working on group cases and we are focusing on wage theft. We are also trying to get faith communities and faith organizations involved with the worker center as well. That is where I come in.

I arrived here with the training for community organizing from IWJ so that immediately qualified me as the person with the most organizing training and experience. My job is to get faith communities on board and support our worker center. On thing that we are trying to do is move our worker rights trainings that we hold bi-weekly into the community. So I have been trying to get churches to hold worker trainings on site. The reason we are trying to do this is because we have recently seen a large decline in attendance to our worker trainings. This is mainly caused by the passage of SB1070. Our workers and the international community is scared to travel and only leave their home is if the have to. We feel that by holding trainings in churches people will feel safer and more willing to come to a church rather than our worker center. I started with a phone, the internet and a couple suggestions of communities that I could approach. I have really made an effort to reach out to the Catholic community because that is the community I was brought in and am most comfortable with. To date we have set up two trainings in Spanish speaking parishes sponsored by the parishes and 2 events for worker rights awareness in more affluent Anglo communities. Work is moving along and I plan to move into other faith backgrounds next in hopes to get some diversity in our religious support.

Besides faith outreach and worker cases SB1070 has been the other big topic and focus. We are part of a Latino service organization network called Somos America. Somos America is organizing most of the effort against SB1070 in Phoenix. They are trying to organize 30 days of action in June with different actions each day leading up to the 29th. The actions are of all types and sponsored by all different groups. We are currently working on a possible campaign against a contractor Solomon Diaz who has been known to not pay his workers and is very violent as well. We would like to kick off the campaign against him with an action in the week leading up to the implementation of SB1070 on the 29^th, as one of the days in the 30 days of action effort. It will have a joint purpose of fighting against SB1070 and what it means for our Latino brothers and sisters and an action to stand up for the injustice that Salomon is showing towards his workers. This action is just beginning to formulate and will take a lot of research and preparation to make sure that it is well organized and affective. We will also do everything that we can to promote the rally that will take place on June 29th against SB1070.

Being in Arizona right now is both frustrating and exciting. It is hard seeing the disregard my home state has for our Latino brothers and sisters but it is exciting to be here on the front lines of the fight. So far I have learned so much and will continue to learn every day that I am here. I look forward to the campaign that we are hoping to mount against Solomon and look forward to the June 29th rally against SB1070. We can use all the help we can get out here so if you would like to come out here we can always find something for you to do. The more voices that we have the louder we are. Hope that all of the other internships are going well. Sorry that the update is so delayed!

Paz,

Will Rutt