A common cause

By: Matthew BlakeFor Juan Salgado, executive director of Instituto del Progreso Latino, bridging the gap between black and Latino workers means providing the necessary skills to end divisive struggles over low-quality jobs. "It's sad that we have companies with open positions, and we don't have a training system in place to fulfill their demands," Salgado said.

With that in mind, Salgado has started to work with the Chicago Manufacturing Renaissance Council, a group comprised of labor, business, community, education and government agencies, that seeks to provide workers in black and Latino neighborhoods with the skills necessary for well-paying manufacturing jobs.

Since October 2005, Instituto del Progreso Latino has also run a city-sponsored program called Manufacturing Works, which has matched 383 black and Latino workers with manufacturing companies in a nine-month period that ended on March 31.

Institutor del Progreso Latino's efforts represent one of several new approaches to improving the lot of African-American and Latino workers and, hopefully in the process, relations between the two. A year after a May Day immigration rally, which was largely bereft of black workers' presence, community organizers have begun to initiate dialogue and propose programs that highlight common struggles.

"There is life beyond immigration reform," said Alie Kabba, president of the United African Organization and member of the Faith and Justice Leadership Alliance, a coalition of African-American and Latino organizations."We need to put together a series of public policy issues and broaden our scope."

The Faith and Justice Leadership Alliance is one of several campaigns started in the past year that has emphasized facilitating conversation between the two communities. So far, labor has been among several topics in dialogues that have also looked at issues of housing, education, immigration and police brutality.

Faith and Justice is specifically designed to build a strategic coalition among black and Latino faith-based and immigration advocates. While mostly composed of Latino organizations, the alliance includes Clergy Speaks Interdenominational, an organization that pulls together about 200 Chicago-area churches, the vast majority of them from the black community. "The commonality is not just our distresses but our faiths," said the Rev. Albert Tyson III, president of Clergy Speaks Interdenominational. In terms of jobs, Tyson echoed the need to "change mindsets" and look beyond "fights for low-level jobs."

Slightly further along in the outreach process is the John J. Egan Urban Center of DePaul University, which has focused on cross-cultural dialogue in Humboldt Park and Chicago Lawn-working-class communities with large African-American and Latino populations.

"I like to call what we do guerilla social work," said John Zeigler, project director of neighborhood and community partnerships at the center. "We go to church basements and block club meetings and just start talking, and then we try to build capital and capacity."

The center's efforts have yet to bear fruit on labor issues but have inspired collaborations between African Americans and Latinos in ethnically mixed schools. Dean Morris, director of Nobel Neighbors, which serves the west Humboldt Park community, said black and Latino students at Orr High School have begun collaborative artistic and leadership projects that focus on unity within the school.

One success for labor in the area was that, in November, the Chicago Board of Education approved the Chicago Manufacturing Renaissance Council's proposal to open Austin Polytechnical Academy, which is focused on training for high-skilled manufacturing jobs. The council is also working with city colleges and vocational schools to ensure that metalworking students will receive an education that prepares them for National Institute for Metalworking Skills standard credentials.

According to Dan Swinney, executive director of the council, deindustrialization has taken thousands of entry-level jobs from Chicago minority communities. But there is a labor shortage for skilled manufacturing jobs that pay more than $60,000 a year due to a generation of specially trained workers on the verge of retirement. "Latinos and blacks are fighting for unskilled jobs when they are more than enough skilled positions to go around," he said.

Another group that does focus on worker issues among African Americans and Latinos has been Humboldt Park's San Lucas Workers Center, which organizes day labor workers. Several labor and immigration advocates pointed to San Lucas' campaigns, such as efforts to pass the Illinois Day Labor and Temporary Services Act in 2005, show what workers can accomplish in solidarity.

"San Lucas has been the leader," said Mehrdad Azemun, senior organizer with the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. "They passed the day labor services act by bringing together African-American and Latino workers and having them negotiate with day labor agencies."

But, according to Mario Johnson, day labor worker and San Lucas board member, the organization has not been immune to common struggles often found within the activist community. He says that the organization has been focusing too much on issues facing immigrants, who now make up an increasing share of the lowwage workforce. "Lately, San Lucas has been working on immigrant rights," he said. "We have a lot of members who are immigrants, and we support them. But you can't focus solely on that. You don't want to cast shadow over everybody else."

But Ari Glazer, director of San Lucas, says she does not consider a campaign involving immigrants differently from any other-on the belief that all workers, immigrant or not, are ultimately fighting for the same cause. "It sounds like we're all divided. But we're all together," she said. "Immigrant workers are concerned with the same worker issues as any other workers."

Finding such common threads among these disparate groups of workers is one of the toughest challenges facing advocates and workers alike, said Tim Bell, executive director of Chicago Workers Collaborative, a group that works mostly with Latino day labor workers. "There is a real issue in terms of jobs, and it takes a lot of education and conscience building to overcome these animosities," he said. "But the potential for collaboration is certainly there."