BY ARLENE RUBINSTEIN
TRENTON, Georgia - Fred Parrish, the president of the
Atlantic Finishing Inc. garment factory here, is free on
$10,000 bond. Along with nine others, Parrish was indicted by a
federal grand jury December 23 for smuggling Mexican workers
into the United States to work in his t-shirt factory here and
in neighboring Henegar, Alabama.
Militant reporters were unable to find out what happened to the workers from Mexico who worked in Parrish's plant.
Trenton is an isolated town in the mountains of northwestern Georgia, inaccessible to the rest of state except by going through Tennessee or Alabama. On a December 24 visit, the factory made of corrugated metal was closed, and the windows were boarded shut.
The local weekly paper ran a brief article titled, "Local employer indicted on alien charges," which reported only on the arrested bosses. Next to it was an ad that read, "May The Peace & Joy Of The Holiday Season Surround You."
Raids against undocumented workers are common in the garment factories, carpet mills, and poultry plants of Georgia. A construction worker from Dalton, a giant carpet manufacturing center near here where there are very few unions, said, "Three months ago there was a raid here and about 50 workers were picked up. Then they were sent to a detention center in Elizabeth, New Jersey." Referring to the workers from Trenton he added, "I hope they weren't taken there."
"They may be in jail," a woman working in a Mexican restaurant told the Militant. "The INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service] only sends a bus back to Mexico when they fill it up."
In September 1997 immigration agents arrested 165 workers at the American Rug carpet factory in Calhoun, about an hour from Atlanta. Jesús Morales, a worker at the plant from Guatemala, explained how "the head of personnel convened a meeting of the three shifts on September 25 supposedly to present us with a new program of better benefits. I thought it was a little strange when we went to the meeting room that we were all Latinos. I imagined the company must have known something. They closed all the doors and 60 immigration agents handcuffed the workers, and as it was pay day they gathered up all the checks."
Another worker from the plant, whose brother was arrested in the September raid, added, "Another important fact is that the company told us if we had family and friends that needed work to bring them to that meeting. Fifteen or 20 of those arrested were just filling out applications."
The two workers said the INS set a $2,500 bond in those cases.
Interviewed in the New York Times about the arrests in Trenton, Harris Raynor, a representative of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees in the southern region, is quoted as simply raising the union's protectionist campaign against the North American Free Trade Agreement. He said, "Ultimately, if retailers don't take responsibility along with consumers for policing these issues, and as long as our government - through policies like NAFTA, with no worker or environmental protections - keeps pushing the edge of the economic envelope, we will see more of these situations."
In contrast, Mario Flores, a worker in a Dalton rug mill expressed concern for the workers. "I was down on my luck, so I came here from Mexico," Flores said. "I was denied food stamps and had to beg to live in a shelter. Things are better for me now. But workers need each other in every country."
Arlene Rubinstein is a member of UNITE in Atlanta. Elvi Roblero contributed to this article.