While most of the attention regarding immigration seems to focus on the US/Mexico border, Spain has a very difficult problem with illegal immigration. In addition to being the nearest European Union nation to the desperate poverty that plagues Africa, poor immigrants from Latin America have one advantage that Latino immigrants to the US do not have: a first language in common.
They also have at least one thing in common with illegal immigrants to the US: employers who exploit them. As this story on Saturday's El Pais (Spanish coverage in blog here; ephemeral English language link gone by about 5 p.m. EDT on Sunday June 24, 2007 here), a Bolivian immigrant in Bilbao, Spain, Udalrico Taboada, had enough:
“The employer always tells that if you complain, you’ll go to the police,” he [Taboada] says.
This fear, and the unfulfilled hope of achieving legal status, for two years led him to put up with terrible conditions: working shifts of 12 to 18 hours, often at night, with no days off. He spent hours and hours at the sewing machine, embroidering club insignia on t-shirts of Athletic Bilbao soccer club. “Each Athletic insignia has 8,000 stitches,” he says. Multiply that by the 400 shirts he had to do each day, in the shop of the firm Bordado Express SL at Leioa in Vizcaya. In order to elude Labor Ministry inspections, Udalrico and other immigrants were often put to work at night. “We worked from 7pm to 8am, including Sundays,” he says: 13 hours nightly, for €31.54 per shift. That is an exhausting day’s work, for about half the retail price of one of the official Bilbao Athletic shirts he embroidered.
Udalrico put up with all this because the woman who ran the shop had promised to obtain papers for him, in the mass immigrant legalization program in 2005. He had all the requisites: he had been in Spain since before August 2004, had no criminal record, and he had a job. “She kept telling me to be patient, that the process was slow.”
Tired of being jerked around and deceived, Taboada sought legal help - and got it:
Taboada, 27, and his legal counsel, Bilbao labor lawyer Roberto Cadenas, have obtained a ruling from the Basque High Court enjoining the state employment agency Inem to pay unemployment insurance to Taboada for time he worked, regardless of the fact he had no residence or work permit and was not registered in the Social Security system nor paid its monthly quotas.
Good for him. As the article says, not having papers does not mean that you are without rights.
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