I’m fascinated by what’s going on in Saudi Arabia right now.
The kingdom of Saud apparently is suffering from unemployment. Many immigrants from the region are there illegally, and working. Tons of folks — 300,000 Sudanese alone, and thousands of Yemenis.
So the Saudis are giving them the boot — 28,000 in three days. Police killed an Ethiopian fellow who resisted arrest.
I’m getting all this from al-bab.com, a blog billing itself as “an open door to the Arab world” — which is well worth reading. Terrific blog.
Yemen, SA’s neighbor and closest cheap labor source, is worrying that remittances will drop, according to al-bab.com.
Up to now, nonunion immigrant supermarkets have been a low-cost place to shop for food — with prices based at least partly, I’ve always suspected, on an especially compliant workforce.
I shop often at El Super, Northgate Gonzalez, El Tapatio, and many others — far more than I go to Ralph’s. I find the produce especially good quality and cheap.
All are owned by immigrants (or folks in Mexico, in El Super’s case). They are staffed by Latino immigrants and target the Latino immigrant consumer. They see cactus leaves (nopales), tortillas, dried black beans, chorizo and often feel just like supermarkets in Mexico.
Many are in spaces once occupied by Ralph’s, Von’s, Alpha Beta and other non-immigrant supermarket chains — buildings many of them moved into after the other businesses were burned out during the 1992 Rodney King riots.
For consumers who’ve known where to go and what to buy, these markets I’ve long thought were a benefit of living in Southern California — same as cheap flooring installation.
I’ve never heard of any of them being struck. But that was then — during years of seemingly unending flow of illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America into the region.
I suspect the El Super protests have something to do with the dramatic slowing in the flow of illegal Mexican immigrants into the US in the last few years. Not to mention, the record numbers of deportations in the last few years.
A smaller supply of workers means those who have jobs gain confidence in their ability to demand better treatment.
The gravest threat to an illegal immigrant without much education or English is a lot of immigrants with the same limited skill set.
That’s why so many Latino immigrants have left L.A. over the years for places like Kentucky, Tennessee, Minnesota, etc etc. They weren’t escaping the migra. They were escaping others just like themselves, who bid down wages and forced up rents.
Now there are fewer of them.
So … might we see immigrant workers at more companies objecting to their treatment by their immigrant owners? Perhaps in other industries — home improvement, for example?
There’s been several of these lawsuits lately, all alleging the same practices at different car washes: non-payment of overtime, breaks denied, pay records falsified, etc.
The story again showed how much of the LA economic ecosystem is made up so entirely of immigrants. Immigrant business owners; immigrant workers. Often the customers are immigrants. Such a major change in only a few decades.
Also, many of the Westside carwash workers come from one town — Libres, in the state of Puebla, Mexico. In occasionally covering this issue over the last few months, I’ve run into many from that town. They assure me that hundreds of men and women from Libres work in the carwash industry, particularly in Santa Monica, Palos Verdes, Malibu, Venice, and similar areas.
The guy I spoke to for the story, Marcial Hernandez, was one of them.
