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What happens when the only way to ensure the survival of the people you love the most is to leave them behind?

That’s a choice no one should have to make, and yet it is the dilemma of overseas workers everywhere, no less so than in the Philippines, which exports about a fourth of the world’s 11.5 million migrant domestic workers, a predominantly female army of nannies, maids, and cooks. A significant percentage of these women are mothers separated from their own kids while caring for the children of others, sending home remittances and boxes of chocolate, Spam, and other treats, and wondering if their husbands are faithful and how many years will pass before they can see their families again.

“In the eyes of many employers, Filipinas were at the top of the ethnic hierarchy for domestic workers,” Rachel Aviv writes in one of the powerful stories below, “as if their nationality had become synonymous with family duty and deference.” Such sought-after traits have been a blessing and a curse, giving Filipinas access to the lives of elite families in cities like Hong Kong, Dubai, and New York City, but also subjecting them to highly exploitative and even dangerous situations.

Adding to their burdens, overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) have been called on to be “modern-day heroes” and uber-patriots. “Now, more than ever, we need you, the OFWs and your families, to take part in our nation-building efforts,” former President Rodrigo Duterte once said. “I thus call on you … to make our country proud.”

Laborers who remain in the Philippines, meanwhile, face their own dismal work prospects, such as foraging for discarded valuables in Payatas, a former dumpsite outside of Manila. Whether at home or abroad, Filipino laborers struggle valiantly to preserve their humanity amid hellish work demands.

You might not think that emotionally and physically arduous labor would be an inviting subject for longform writing, but it is. That’s because the writers featured in this collection portray the subjects of their stories not as victims but instead as three-dimensional people. As a journalism professor who has also reported on labor, occupational safety, and immigrant health issues, I turn to these compelling and well-researched narratives to illustrate how to report with empathy and care.

My Filipino American students in the Literary Journalism Program at the University of California, Irvine, appear to connect to the stories in this collection at an almost cellular level.

“I didn’t realize we could be in these stories or write these stories,” a student told me after reading the work of Filipino American author Alex Tizon, whose essay is featured in this collection.

Representation matters.

Fortunately, the U.S. media has broadened its coverage of Filipino and Filipino American narratives in recent years, and we now read about Filipino American entertainers, food culture, and political leaders. But it’s important not to forget the cost—borne by so many Filipino laborers—of toiling at the hardest jobs imaginable to provide for the people they love.

The following five excellent pieces reveal the endless work ethic of Filipino workers— those who leave and those who stay.

My Family’s Slave (Alex Tizon, The Atlantic, June 2017)

With deft sentences and restrained prose, Alex Tizon recounts the story of Lola (Eudocia Tomas Polido), a servant who accompanied his family when they moved from the Philippines to the U.S. in 1964. Tizon exposes the horrors of modern-day servitude in a deeply personal and indelible way. Sadly, he died a few months before the piece was published as The Atlantic’s cover story, which went viral and generated both praise and criticism.

The story begins for Tizon at birth, when Lola served as a maid, cook, and nanny to his family while his parents worked to establish themselves in the U.S. By the age of 11, Tizon had come to understand that his beloved caretaker—who was “given” to his mother, then a child living in the Philippines—received no salary. Lola slept in random spaces of Tizon’s home, such as on the couch or in the laundry room. Lacking documentation, she could never leave the U.S. to return home; she also suffered physical abuse and cruelty at the hands of Tizon’s parents.

No other word but slave encompassed the life she lived. Her days began before everyone else woke and ended after we went to bed. She prepared three meals a day, cleaned the house, waited on my parents, and took care of my four siblings and me. My parents never paid her, and they scolded her constantly. She wasn’t kept in leg irons, but she might as well have been. So many nights, on my way to the bathroom, I’d spot her sleeping in a corner, slumped against a mound of laundry, her fingers clutching a garment she was in the middle of folding.

What strikes me each time I reread this piece is Tizon’s anguish over his family’s treatment of Lola. He also wrestles mightily with his own complicity, despite having provided Lola a pampered life when he became an adult. But as this story reminds us, good deeds don’t wipe away the sins of the past. Tizon’s final published piece is a testament to how difficult it is to forgive our family and how it’s even harder to forgive ourselves.

After Lola’s death at 86, Tizon hand-carried Lola’s ashes back to her remaining family in the Philippines, in a beautifully rendered scene of pure grief among the now-aged people who knew her as a youngster. En route to this encounter, Tizon draws on the islands’ fortitude—surprising, given their fragile formation—to suggest a metaphor for the spirit of Lola and the enduring work ethic of her beleaguered yet resilient people.

Life here is routinely visited by cataclysm. Killer typhoons that strike several times a year. Bandit insurgencies that never end. Somnolent mountains that one day decide to wake up. The Philippines isn’t like China or Brazil, whose mass might absorb the trauma. This is a nation of scattered rocks in the sea. When disaster hits, the place goes under for a while. Then it resurfaces and life proceeds … and the simple fact that it’s still there makes it beautiful.

The Cost of Caring (Rachel Aviv, The New Yorker, April 2016)

Lola is only one face of the Philippines’ massive overseas workforce. In this New Yorker piece, Rachel Aviv portrays another laborer, Emma, who leaves her nine children behind and becomes a nanny to wealthy families in the U.S. In a heartbreaking moment before her departure, Emma faces doubts too enormous to ignore.

She said, “My conscience was telling me, ‘Don’t leave your kids. Don’t leave your kids. They are young and need you.’”

But like all working mothers, she chooses work over her children. Or, more accurately, she chooses work to provide for her children. I strongly connect to Aviv’s writing—which is as elegant as her research is exhaustive—and the piece’s theme of anguished working motherhood. I hated leaving my firstborn with strangers even though his babysitters provided loving care. My plight is of course trivial in comparison to mothers like Emma, who live apart from their children for years and even decades while they channel their maternal instincts toward the children of others. I wonder: Is this rerouted maternal love a form of consolation, or a source of bitter pain?

Either way, it’s clear that Emma’s children never stopped yearning for their mother’s return during her 16-plus-year absence, during which she mainly talked to her daughters through Facebook and brief telephone conversations (five minutes for each child). And while her girls gained opportunities from Emma’s sacrifice, these advantages didn’t seem to take them far enough. We learn at the end of Aviv’s story that their economic prospects in the Philippines have not improved much in their mother’s absence—one daughter has already emigrated to Abu Dhabi to work as a secretary—which is a stunning revelation given everything that Emma sacrificed to provide for a better future. And so the arduous toil of hardworking Filipina caregivers continues: 

Emma’s daughters and their friends wished to go abroad, too, if not to America then to Japan or Hong Kong or New Zealand. “I think there’s no end to the cycle,” Emma told me. She found it hard to resist the idea of her daughters joining her in New York. She hasn’t seen them in sixteen years and still can’t discuss the separation without quietly crying. Over time, the tone of her children’s letters has evolved; there is less rivalry and more resignation. In the early years, the children kept guessing which holidays might be the occasion for Emma’s return. Gradually, they stopped asking about her plans. “I believe someday, if God permits, you can be with us once again,” her daughter Roxanne recently wrote.

Departures (Tan Tuck Ming, The Kenyon Review, October 2022)

Working for an employment recruitment agency in international domestic work, Tan Tuck Ming brings a unique vantage point to this essay about Filipina housekeepers in Hong Kong. But for him the issue is also personal: He was cared for by a beloved Filipina housekeeper as a child, and it’s clear that her kindness left an imprint on his soul. Ming’s piece mines some of the same material as Aviv’s, but the essay form allows for more rumination and ties together personal narrative with historical and theoretical frameworks. Here, for example, he discusses migrant caregiving as the fuel powering the economic engine of international commerce:

[T]he way I understand an economy is as vertical motion, people either moving up or down but never staying still. This is how cities like Hong Kong or Singapore—these dense, vertiginous centers for global capital and its circulation … are made possible by tracing the fissures of nation, empire, and debt; by the subdivision of labor charted as unskilled within the topographies of capitalism to a secondary class of migrant workers. “We need to protect domestic workers with all our might,” a member of the legislative council says, at an antitrafficking fundraising event. “After all, without them, Hong Kong cannot unleash its economic power. We must be grateful to them for releasing our workforce.” 

This politician’s statement is of course vexing. I wonder if a low-earning Filipina maid in Hong Kong actually aspires to unleash the power of the wealth-gathering class. And yet the comment suggests a key truth, which is that the center of Hong Kong’s economic juggernaut is not a technology or financial infrastructure so much as a beating heart—that of the industrious, loving Filipina caretaker.

The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed (Adrian Chen, Wired, October 2014)

Of course, Filipino labor doesn’t only occur overseas. In fact, the Philippines is one of America’s leading outsourcing destinations for customer service, technical support, and other industries.

Adrian Chen explores the highly stressful labor of content moderators, whose job is to evaluate questionable uploads to social media and to remove offensive, harmful, and inappropriate material. And this profession takes a toll, as Chen documents in interviews with workers in the Philippines who spend all day looking at the beheadings, sexual assaults, animal abuse, and other horrendous content that users attempt to post on Facebook and other platforms. Chen shows us an invisible workforce taking on the worst of humanity to make our reading and viewing online more benign. But as always, it’s the laborer—and in this case, the Filipino/a worker—who makes a massive sacrifice to enable our scrolling pleasure.

In a shopping mall, I meet a young woman who I’ll call Maria. She’s on her lunch break from an outsourcing firm, where she works on a team that moderates photos and videos for the cloud storage service of a major US technology company….“I get really affected by bestiality with children,” she says. “I have to stop. I have to stop for a moment and loosen up, maybe go to Starbucks and have a coffee.” She laughs at the absurd juxtaposition of a horrific sex crime and an overpriced latte.

Constant exposure to videos like this has turned some of Maria’s coworkers intensely paranoid. Every day they see proof of the infinite variety of human depravity. They begin to suspect the worst of people they meet in real life, wondering what secrets their hard drives might hold. Two of Maria’s female coworkers have become so suspicious that they no longer leave their children with babysitters. They sometimes miss work because they can’t find someone they trust to take care of their kids.

The Magic Mountain (Matthew Power, Harper’s Magazine, December 2006)

In this final selection, the late great adventure writer Matthew Power explores one of the world’s notorious trash dumps at the time in Payatas, a barangay outside of Manila.

In this literally toxic workplace, enterprising foragers dig for buried trash items they can sell: copper wires, old cell phones, even a frozen swordfish thrown out by a restaurant. It’s grubby and exhausting work, and some of the foragers live on the site (at least at the time of Power’s visit). The descriptions are as precise as the site filthy:

The ground underneath our boots is spongy, and as we climb, black rivulets of leachate flow down the access road. A black puddle releases methane, bubbles like a primordial swamp, and the ground itself shakes when a loaded truck rumbles by.

Yes, the description is memorably graphic, but the story goes well beyond capturing the gross-out factor. Power instead brings the workers on this trash mountain to life, not only showing Filipino foragers in action but also in rare moments of leisure: singing karaoke, enjoying the cockfights, even planting gardens. The piece is ultimately a paean to work ethic and labor even in supposedly menial jobs that appear simple and straightforward. The work, like the people who perform it, is complex and worthy of our admiration:

A kalahig slits open a bag as if it were a fish, garbage entrails spilling out, and with a series of rapid, economical movements, anything useful is speared and flicked into a sack to be sorted later. The ability to discern value at a glimpse, to sift the useful out of the rejected with as little expenditure of energy as possible, is the great talent of the scavenger. 

I appreciate that Power goes beyond “studying” his subjects through the lens of first-world superiority and instead gives us reason to respect their immense work ethic and love of family. Sadly, like Tizon, Power died long before his time, in 2014. 

Amy DePaul is a college journalism instructor at the University of California, Irvine. She reports on public health, immigrant communities, and labor. You can find her boogie-boarding at Crystal Cove.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copy-editor: Krista Stevens 

To make the plastic resins that go into the flooring under Americans’ feet, Zhongtai belches greenhouse gases and mercury into the air. Its executives uproot lives, tear families apart, and expose workers to coal dust and vinyl chloride monomer, which has been linked to liver tumors.

Simala Leonard, a computer science student at the University of Nairobi who studies AI and worked several months on Remotasks, says the pay for data annotators is “totally unfair.” Google’s and Tesla’s self-driving-car programs are worth billions, he says, and algorithm developers who work on the technology are rewarded with six-figure salaries.

Meanwhile, the people who do “the most fundamental part of machine learning” are paid a pittance, he says. “Without the data labeled well, the models can’t predict properly.”

Twenty-three year old refugee Amina Diaby died in Fiera Foods’ Ontario factory while making croissant dough. She was a low-wage temp worker, one of thousands in Ontario, and her hijab got stuck in a machine. For The Toronto Star, reporter Sara Mojtehedzadeh worked undercover on Fiera Foods’ production line in order to document the dangers of Canada’s growing temp economy works. Fiera’s system is stacked in businesses’ favor, with poorly trained temp workers risking their lives and health for low pay, no job stability, no benefits and few legal protections in return.

It’s a system that’s on the rise, and consumers should check their foods’ labels and research chain restaurants’ sources. The foods we buy from Costco and Dunkin’ Donuts might have been processed by newly arrived immigrants just trying to survive while they pursue the same dream of upward mobility that we do.

Temp agency employees are some of the most “vulnerable and precariously employed of all workers,” a 420-page report recently compiled by two independent experts for the Ontario government says.

Temps can be terminated at a moment’s notice, the report notes. Companies who use them are liable along with their temp agency for unpaid wages, including overtime and vacation pay, but not for most other workplace rights. Temps are often paid less than permanent counterparts doing the same job, and sometimes work for long periods of time in supposedly “temporary” positions. Agencies are not required to disclose the markups they charge on workers’ wages. New provincial legislation, which goes to second reading this month, seeks to tackle some of those issues.

Research conducted for the Toronto-based Institute for Work and Health also suggests that companies contract out risky work to temps. When a temp gets hurt, the company is not fully responsible because the temp agency assumes liability at the worker’s compensation board — saving their clients money on insurance premiums. This is a crucial financial incentive to use them.

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Shawn Hamilton | Longreads | May 2017 | 10 minutes (2,566 words)

When I was about 7 or 8 I had my first serious conversation with my mother about the future: what I wanted to be; how I wanted to get there; how things really “were.” The word “were” in this context was probably my first paradox. Things that “were” were infinitely complex, yet simple. They were understood with or without understanding. You had to know how things “were” before they made themselves known, or you would regret having made the acquaintance.

There were jobs that were “gone” as she described it. Jobs that paid well right out of high school were “gone.” Jobs with security were “gone.” Before those jobs had “gone,” they had been scarce for black folks in her experience anyway, but now they were accessible in theory but nonexistent in reality. Now the door that would have been closed because of Jim Crow was open, but in the case of certain jobs, it opened into an abyss: sort of like an economic trap door. She didn’t say it exactly that way, but that was the gist of it.

We did not talk about globalization or mechanization or automation. There was no myth or theory to explain what was now “gone.” And regardless, there were groups whose complaints mostly fell on deaf ears anyway. As African Americans we were part of one of those groups. Struggle was not a sign of some flaw or conspiracy at work. It was how things “were.”

But not for everyone.

Donald Trump’s Chief Strategist Steve Bannon best articulated the difference in an interview, in which he argued, “You know, when two thirds or three quarters of the CEO’s in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think — on, my point is, a country’s more like, a country’s more than an economy. We’re a civic society.”

***

As my mother hinted so many years ago, the American working class has been in decline for decades. In When Work Disappears, William Julius Wilson cites a study that men in the bottom fifth of income distribution “experienced more than a 30 percent drop in real wages between 1970 and 1989.” Things didn’t get much better in the subsequent decades, but what was particularly frustrating about the problem was that even as the overall economy improved — as jobs were added, as unemployment plummeted — many workers became even less secure, having to move from one job to the next, often losing a well-paying manufacturing job and replacing it with one that paid less — often much less.

The worker had the surreal and infuriating experience of watching news about how great things were and not personally experiencing that greatness, especially if he or she expected to be included in the windfall.

Meanwhile, the top 1 percent of income earners in the United States received nearly one-fifth of the total gross income — more than double their share from 1979. Thomas Piketty in Capital In the Twenty-First Century attributed this rise in incomes to an “unprecedented explosion of very elevated incomes from [management] labor” — what he called a “veritable separation of the top managers of large firms from the rest of the population.”

Managers and management were winning. Over the same period CEO pay increased by almost 1000%, and the argument from many on the Right was that this was all perfectly normal and even desirable.

The Right until recently rejected a zero-sum relationship — or in many cases any kind of relationship — between the incomes of managers and workers. If the manager’s income rose sharply it was merely a reflection of their increased productivity. If the workers’ incomes dropped they must work better, smarter, faster or maybe get a second and third job.

This is simply how things “were,” workers were told. To complain, or worse, to organize was to claim unearned credits. It was cynical — even un-American – for workers to take collective action and demand changes. Working-class whites voted for and supported politicians that made these arguments for decades.

Meanwhile, the business sector ignored much of its own advice, choosing to behave a great deal like Labor used to. Businesses organized through Chambers of Commerce and mergers. Businesses lobbied to the tune of billions of dollars. Businesses threatened to boycott cities or states that they deem anti-business. Businesses threatened to strike if the government didn’t offer bailouts. Businesses marched in the guise of grassroots conservative movements. Businesses made demands and expected to be heard and obeyed.

Workers were told that they were part of a great chain of being of which they were the greatest beneficiaries: that, to paraphrase libertarian icon Ludwig Von Mises, all of the improvements in their material condition were due to the efforts of men who were better than them and that the smartest, most prudent thing that they could do was to defend the interests of those men. Deference, they were told, would make them free — or at least keep them out of trouble.

***

Trumpism modifies this. It preserves the deference, but rather than ignoring the worker’s losses it weaponizes them against a series of scapegoats. Bannon’s “civic” worker is being led to believe that the “other” is the barrier between him and progress: that were it not for the Silicon Valley Asian CEO, the middle manager in the Midwest would be a CEO; that were it not for tiny of fraction of tax dollars going to minorities on welfare, the employee would have enough money to start his business and join the ranks of the titans of industry; if it were not for the illegal immigrant, or “illegals” as many are fond of saying, the expendable, interchangeable worker in any number of industries would become essential again. To the “civic” man, these losses are not “losses,” but thefts.

These myths amount to an American version of the Dolchstoss, or the German stab-in-the-back legend. The Dolchstoss blamed the loss of World War I on a combination of political dissidents and “international Jewry” rather than a military campaign that was doomed before it ever began. The Dolchstoss pandered to the German military aristocracy. It soothed the psychological wounds of the general public. It created the hole in the German Republic’s legitimacy that Hitler and his cronies barreled through.

The defeat and decline of the American worker is creating a similar crisis that the Trump administration is attempting to exploit at the expense of democratic institutions. The press, the Judicial branch, local governments and citizens that disagree with Trump are not merely labeled wrong but illegitimate. But why are so many Americans receptive to the Dolchstoss — white Americans in particular? What wounds does it heal? And what are its implications in the years to come?

Identity and sense of privilege help to explain the appeal. Benedict Anderson, author of Imagined Communities, writes that “[a nation] is an imagined political community” and quotes social anthropologist Ernest Gellner’s observation that “nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.” Privilege is essential to this imagining and invention. It’s not merely a question of who you are, but who you want to be. To be a member of a nation is to be special or exceptional in some way and ideally to be on the road to becoming even more special and more exceptional.

For Germans, the military aristocracy, or Junkers, were the owners and bestowers of this privilege. Rather than challenge it or establish new standards, the growing middle and professional classes curried favor with it. The highest ambition of the middle classes was to become part of that military nobility. So the German military’s defeat in the First World War was not just the loss of a war, but the death of a dream.

***

Many Americans are experiencing a similar crisis of faith. The explicit promise of America is equal opportunity, but the implicit promise for many years has been white privilege and eventual prosperity. In her essay “On the Backs of Blacks,” Toni Morrison uses a scene from Elia Kazan’s film America, America to illustrate this point. The film tells the story of a young Greek immigrant’s determination to make it to and in America. She writes, “Fresh from Ellis Island, Stavros gets a job shining shoes at Grand Central Terminal. […] Quickly, but as casually as an afterthought, a young black man, also a shoe shiner, enters and tries to solicit a customer. He is run off the screen. — ‘Get out of here! We’re doing business here!’ — and silently disappears. The interloper into Stavros’ [the main character’s] workplace is crucial in the mix of signs that make up the movie’s happy-ending immigrant story: a job, a straw hat, an infectious smile — and a scorned black.”

Stavros would work. He would struggle. He might succeed or fail, but he could assimilate. He would have to watch his associations though. The stereotypes that he and other immigrants encountered would have a common theme: blackness. The Irishman was labeled a “nigger inside out.” The Italian was labeled a “guinea” which referred to the Guinea coast of Africa, alluding to their mixed racial heritage. And Jews were labeled “white-niggers.” To be truly and fully American they would have to disprove these associations.

They would need to become and remain prosperous relative to the black and other “others.”

Prosperity was either a cause or a consequence of American virtue depending on your tradition. The Jeffersonians believed that prosperity through agricultural toil in particular made Americans virtuous. The Puritans believed that virtue made Americans more prosperous. Alexis DeTocqueville commented on the popularity of this gospel of prosperity, noting that, “it is often difficult to ascertain from [American preacher’s] discourses whether the principal object of religion is to procure eternal felicity in the other world or prosperity in this.”

Prosperity, virtue, and American identity are closely intertwined, and yet those that feel most entitled to this inheritance feel themselves slipping behind. An African American president symbolized this more than their personal decline in fortunes, which in many cases had been underway for decades. This helps to explain why Bannon and others can promote an “economic nationalism” that is mostly devoid of both economics and nationalism, yet that resonates with many Americans.

***

Few politicians even pretended to defend the interests of African American workers. From the 1960s to the 1980s, Philadelphia lost 64% of its manufacturing jobs; Chicago lost 60%; and Detroit 51%, as William Julius Wilson notes in When Work Disappears. This meant hundreds of thousands of jobs lost, disproportionately impacting African Americans. The solution from conservative and many so-called liberal politicians? “Migrate” was black conservative Shelby Steele’s prescription. “Get new skills,” said others. And even more popular was “behave more like Asians.”

White workers were having similar struggles over this same time period, but the white American worker was iconic in a way that the black worker was not. He stood astride history: building monuments, bearing witness; finding “freedom” in America. His material condition, or growing “inequality” was beside the point.

Many economists on the Right discouraged discussions about inequality at all, but if it had to be discussed it should be based on consumption not incomes. So, if the worker could afford a DVD player and his CEO could afford a DVD player, then for practical purposes their differences in incomes did not matter. The kinds of forces that naysayers grumbled about: declining wages; instability; declining social mobility were really signs of a thriving economy.

Now, the Right is ready to acknowledge the challenges facing workers — not as consequences of conservative policies, but as a reaffirmation of the dangers of the other: the illegal immigrant, the Muslim, the Chinese. It is a mistake to indulge these arguments, simply because they reassure workers who feel left behind or ignored by the “establishment.” It is also wrong to accept Bannon’s euphemisms. Yes. Bannon – and by association – Trump are advocating a kind of nationalism: white nationalism, not economic.

When I was in middle school I had a conversation with my grandfather that was similar to one I had with my mother, but I wanted to know about his early life instead: what he wanted to be and do. He had grown up under Jim Crow in Mobile, Alabama. His answer was that he figured he would do something with his hands. I pressed wanting to know if that was what he had wanted. He sort of dismissed the premise of my question, as if I had asked about driving during the bicycle era or electricity in the age of kerosene. “Back then you couldn’t really be anything,” he said.

That is how things were.

They had not always been that way. As Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns, notes how, for a period after the Civil War:

“The federal government had taken over the affairs of the South, during a period known as Reconstruction, and the newly freed men were able to exercise rights previously denied them. They could vote, marry, or go to school if there was one nearby, and the more ambitious among them could enroll in black colleges set up by northern philanthropists, open businesses and run for office under the protection of northern troops. In short order some managed to become physicians, legislators, undertakers, insurance men. They assumed that the question of black citizen’s rights had been settled for good and that all that confronted them was merely building on these new opportunities.”

Poor whites benefited as well during this era. The Freedmen’s Bureau “paired impoverished whites and freed people, not as cutthroat adversaries but as the worthy poor,” writes Nancy Isenberg in White Trash: The 400-Year Untold Story of Class in America. “In Alabama, Arkansas, Missouri and Tennessee, the bureau extended twice — and in some cases four times — as much relief to whites as to blacks.”

However, by the mid-1870s the North had withdrawn much of its oversight and those poor whites along with their middle class and well-to-do counterparts voted to roll back the rights of African Americans. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s Southern states passed segregation laws covering everything from street cars, to bathrooms, to schools, to walking on sidewalks, to assorted personal interactions between blacks and whites. If a black and white reached an intersection at the same time the black had to let the white motorist go first. Blacks were not to speak unless spoken to. A black man could not offer to shake the hand of a white man, unless the white man offered first. And in Mobile, my grandfather’s birthplace, a curfew required blacks to be off of the streets by 10 p.m.

These laws and norms violated the letter and spirit of the law at the federal level, yet they remained in place for nearly 100 years. This was the real American dolchstoss. It stabbed my grandfather in the back before he ever drew breath. It was part of a cycle of progress and reaction that insures that with each step forward, there will be a betrayal.

***

Shawn Hamilton is a New Jersey based writer and filmmaker. He blogs at Dueling Interests.com and tweets @duelinginterest. He has also contributed to Salon.com, The Baffler, Huffington Post and The Society for US Intellectual History.

***

Fact-checker: Michael Fitzgerald

The problem of wage theft is not confined to any one industry, ethnicity, size of business, or corporate structure, says Labor Commissioner Julie Su. Each year, California loses approximately $8 billion in tax revenues to wage theft, and Su’s office has investigated millions of dollars’ worth of violations committed by, among others, a hospital, assisted living providers, and a construction project. But restaurants in Chinatown are particularly egregious offenders: A 2010 report by the CPA found that half of Chinatown restaurant workers have had their wages undercut, payments withheld, or tips stolen. A survey of low-wage workers in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, performed by the National Employment Labor Project, reveals that close to 85 percent of foreign-born Asians, 78.8 percent of women, and nearly 85 percent of undocumented workers have experienced overtime violations.

Among the most likely victims of wage theft are nonunion workers, people who don’t speak English, and immigrants who lack an understanding of their rights. Not all of the workers involved in the Yank Sing campaign fell into these categories, but many still felt vulnerable. If they went public too soon, if they picketed the sidewalk or stormed the dining room or publicized their story in the media, they risked turning management against them and losing their livelihood— and many of them wanted to keep working for Yank Sing. Their situation was unusual: According to Kao of the Asian Law Caucus, three-quarters of the wage claims received by the organization’s free legal clinic in San Francisco are filed by workers who have already left their job. People who are still employed, notes Victor Narro, project director at the UCLA Labor Center, typically don’t risk such actions without the protection of a union contract.

—Vanessa Hua, writing for San Francisco Magazine about a brigade of kitchen workers who successfully fought to recoup $4 million in lost wages from Yank Sing, one of San Francisco’s premier dim sum restaurants.

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