Department of Labor provides little enforcement for Cargill workers.

It may not seem like much, but taking on and off your uniform your work can end up costing you money.

Lots of it.

That’s what the largely Latino workforce at Cargill plants around the country learned.

These workers have to put on and remove protective equipment that they wear to ensure their own and consumers’ safety.

In addition to the beginning and ending of their shift, a time when many workers would also end up spending off-the-clock time cleaning their uniforms, the employees would take off the equipment during the 30-minute break required by law.

Doing so can take as much as 20 minutes, according to Brian P. McCafferty, a lawyer in the Philadelphia area who has represented thousands of workers in lawsuits against the meatpacking giant.

The workers contended this activity should be considered part of the work day, since it related directly to the performance of their job.

The problem for the workers was that the company disagreed, and refused to pay them.

The United States Department of Labor is the federal agency in charge of dealing with wage theft.

We obtained and and analyzed data from the department’s Wage and Hour Division.

Despite evidence from a series of lawsuits in states from Pennsylvania to Nebraska to California that this was a nationwide practice among Cargill plants, the division found just five examples of wage and hour violations during the past 62 years, according to our analysis.

The total values of fines levied?

$100,000?

Guess again.

$10,000.

Lower.

$0.

You’ve got it.

We contacted  department spokesman Scott Allen with a number of questions about why this was the case.  He assured us he would get back to us.

After we sent several emails, he sent us to Sonia Melendez, a spokeswoman in Washington, DC.

She asked where we had received the data and said she will get back to us with answers.  To help advance the process,  we sent documents from three different cases.

Given that this level of public enforcement didn’t appear to be working, workers’ other options include going to the courts.

This of course can be a risky affair.

To begin, many workers do not know their rights.  Those who do may have understandable trepidation about exercising them.

Cargill spokesman Mike Martin said  the company talks often with the union representing the workers and generally enjoys positive relations with the union and its employees.

But many workers may be aware of what McCafferty called the “use them and throw them away” mentality that he said appeared to be operating among management at many Cargill plants.

Nevertheless, thousands of current and former workers found it within themselves to sign up for a number of suits against Cargill.

The process generally takes years, according to McCafferty, and the workers did get a positive result.

Toward the end of last decade, Cargill agreed to pay $7.5 million as a settlement.

This sounds like, and is, a large sum of money, but the total given to individual workers gets smaller fast.

To begin, the lawyers take their fees and court costs.

The number of workers is in the thousands, so the pot is divided many ways.

And the income they receive is taxed.

Put that together, and you’ve  got a situation where settlements like the Cargill one are likely at most to yield three or four weeks pay per worker, according to McCafferty.

The veteran lawyer explained that he works hard to manage clients’ expectations and to tell them about the long they have to travel before ultimately receiving any compensation.

As a result, he said, clients are generally pleased with having received money.

The compensation for the previously unpaid wages does nothing of course for the workers who are injured at the plants due both to accidents and to meat packing’s repetitive nature.

And workers’ ability to file class action suits at the state level may be reduced in the months and years going forward.

That’s because there are lawyers and companies eager to build on the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dukes, et al. v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc..  In this case, the Court held that the differences in the treatment female employees at Walmart experienced in stores throughout the country meant that they could not be considered a class.

The consequence of the decision is that class action suits face a higher threshold than before, McCafferty said.

Another concern: in a number of states, workers don’t have the right to file class action suits at the state because there are no laws there on the books.

McCafferty praised Cargill for its reasonableness in resolving the donning and doffing issue after being confronted with the evidence and with adopting  more progressive and legal practices in their plants.

Smaller companies where there is no union and in states where there are no laws act more harshly, he said.

We’ll keep digging to tell you what that looks like.  In the meantime, we’d like to hear from you.

Does our enforcement system adequately protect workers?  Did the Department of Labor do enough in this situation?  Are the courts a sufficient means of checking companies’ practices?

Packed (just about) and ready to fly to South Africa

I don’t want to lift too heavily from John Denver, and I do know when I’ll be back again, but it is true that my bags are packed and I’m ready to go.

To Durban, South Africa, that is.

It’s been a hectic few days, between gathering the latest batch of business cards, printing out the various documents that attest to my being authorized to attend the United Nations Framework on Climate Change Conference, making sure I have the correct transformers and adapters to ensure that my electronic equipment does not become a conference casualty, and at least 20 other things, and I’m just about there.

We’re about to turn in so that we can get up early for our last walk for a couple of weeks, put the final touches on the packing-this means making sure I don’t forget toothpaste, my recently acquired reading glasses and my pajamas-and then heading into the taxi at 9:45 a.m.

The flight will be lengthy and indirect.

We’ll fly from Chicago to Dulles to Dakar, Senegal to Johannesburg and then Durban in South Africa.

I can’t wait.

Heather King, the other Climate Change Media Partnership fellow from the United States, will already be at least five hours into her journey when we board the same plane at O’Hare.  I’m looking forward to meeting and learning from her as we swap notes.

I’m also eager to have some time to fully wrap my head around the enormously rich, varied, and, I am told, frenetic environment in which I’m about to plunge.

As many of you know, this trip to South Africa is freighted in many layers of meaning for me.

It was 26 years ago that I first learned about Alan Paton’s Beloved Country during the state of emergency declared by P.W. Botha, the intransigent Afrikaaner known as The Great Crocodile, during what proved to be one of the early death spasms of the apartheid regime.

The courage and moral clarity of the African people standing up and, in many cases, giving their lives to topple the racially-based government, transfixed me and bred in me a deep desire to go there.

A decade later, that chance arrived

It came in the form of a Fulbright Teacher Exchange year at the Uthongathi School in Tongaat,  just miles from where we’ll be staying.

The Zulu word for “A Place of Importance” and “It’s Something Because of Us,” Uthongathi was one of the country’s first private, multi-racial schools.  The school’s houses were named after Mahatma Gandhi, whose first steps toward justice came in South Africa, Paton, the novelist and politician, and Chief Albert Luthuli, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and former African National Congress head.

The naming was just one of many that sought to convey to the students and the community the seemingly commonsense, but still radical notion there and here, that children of different races can benefit from being around each other in large numbers.

The country and the school were both undergoing fundamental transitions during the year I was there.

Chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was holding hearings throughout the country to give apartheid’s survivors a chance to say publicly what happened and to provide perpetrators the opportunity to expunge their sins and obtain legal impunity if they gave an unvarnished accounting of their actions and could show that they were taken for political reasons.

Natal Province, where Uthongathi was located, held its first free and democratic elections in the spring of 1996.

At the school level, Uthongathi was trying to figure out how to make its way in a land where its signature feature, that of being multi-racial, was no longer something distinctive, but rather the law of the land.

The effort ultimately did not succeed, and the school no longer exists under the same banner.

This is just one of many changes I anticipate seeing while I am there.

The Greenway Hotel where we are staying, for example, is a multi-million dollar green hotel, the largest of its kind in the country.

It stands right next to the largest shopping mall in the southern hemisphere.

None of this existed when I was there.

Yet, amidst all the changes, there will be a couple of constants.

The first is Vukani Cele, my exchange partner.

When we met in Washington, DC in August 1995, we were young,  unmarried teachers.

Now we are middle-aged husbands and fathers working in different fields.

But the bond we forged is still there, and will be renewed when he picks me up at the airport and, later, introduces me to his family.

Some of my former students and soccer players are in South Africa, too.

I’ve become Facebook friends with a number of them and put out the word that I’ll be returning.

About half a dozen have responded, saying they’ll make the trek and the time to get together.

When I left in August 1996, I didn’t think that I would ever see many of them again.

This trip, then, will not only be a place for nations of the world to come together to wrestle with what we will or will not do together to lessen, and perhaps push back, the pace of environmental destruction.

Being a witness to that process will undoubtedly be a professional and a life thrill.

Yet it will also be a time when I will have the great fortune to return to a place that has held great meaning to me for more than a quarter century, and to be again with those people who helped me realize a decade-old dream and believe in my ability to make other such visions come true.

The journey begins in less than 13 hours.

Gratitude on Thanksgiving Day

I’ve written before about being grateful each day for life, and today is no exception.

Along with families across the country, we gathered to cook turkey and the trimmings, eat and drink more than we should have and generally express appreciation at being alive and with each other.

For Mom, who flew in from Boston on Tuesday, it was having a new hip and a working heart thanks to the insertion last May of a pacemaker.

For Ava, it was “waking up not dead.”

For Dunreith, it was being able to sit around the table and soak in the joy of each other’s company.

And for me it was sitting there with my wife, our son who is back from college and finding his way in the world,  my mother, who’s lived a quarter century longer than it looked like she would when the car she was in slid into the path of an oncoming car with a snow plough on the front, and Ava, our friend, teacher, sprite and general source of life wisdom whose survival during World War II by pretending for four years that she was deaf and mute was only one, but far from the only, chapter in a remarkable life.

Although we were physically in the room, others were with us, too.

We served the food on dishes, relaxed on chairs and sat at the table that all had been passed from grandparents to my mother to us.

I received a lovely email from my former sixth grader teacher, Nona Bock.  More than 35 years after I was a student in her class, she reached out to see how we were doing and affirm our connection.

And we talked to Dunreith’s brother Shaun late in the day, who had just returned with his three kids from spending the day with their cousin Pam and her family in Wilton.

Then there were the people who are no longer here.

We also felt Dunreith’s parents Helen and Marty, both of whom passed on in the past year and a half.

I tried to make stuffing the way Helen taught me, by cutting each chestnut in a X, roasting them and peeling them by hand before combining them with celery, onions and gluten-free bread and pushing it deep into the cavity of the bird.

This is the first holiday season without her, and the wound for me is still fresh.  Much as we remember her and honor her memory and all that she gave us, it’s still hard that she and Marty are not here with us in person.

We had done some prep work last night, so the preparations were comparatively stress free.

We started feasting by 2:45 and were happily feeling the tryptophan drowsiness by 5:15-at which point we had seen a fashion show in which Dunreith tried on sweaters Mom had brought for her, heard about Ava’s entry into a Hades-like cave in New Zealand and gobbled down plenty of pie.

After driving Mom to her hotel and Ava back to her home, Dunreith and I headed back to face the mountain of dishes.

I don’t know about you, but we’re at the point when the proverbial torch of providing and raising the children and hosting the holidays and caring for and honoring those who brought us up has been passed.

We’re holding on it.  Firmly.

Aware of life’s finitude and deeply grateful for its gifts, I savored a lot of today’s tastes, touches and smells.  Even the burps that issue up from within me are reminders of the bounty in food and family that it is my great and good fortune to experience.

I hope your day was full and rich, too.

Love.

The Great Chicago Shuck ‘N Suck

Before Saturday night I had never watched animated tuna fish cans fornicate, received a gift bag of doggie treats drawn from the leftovers of homemade beer, and eaten low country South Carolina oysters roasted after having been driven nearly 1,000 miles.

But I did all this and a whole lot more at the Great Chicago Shuck ‘N Suck Oyster Porn, the exclamation mark on Chicago’s Second Annual Food Film Fest.

Much gratitude goes to childhood friend Amy Kantrowitz, one of the event’s producers and the gatekeeper on the guest list that included Dunreith and dear friends Derrick Milligan and Kathy Tossas.

Amy who stayed with us earlier in the week, had come straight from New York’s annual film and food fest.  She raved about the problem-solving mentality of the food/film community there.

The same spirit was in evident supply at Kendall College.  Dunreith and I took a while to figure out the detour from Halsted and Division after exiting the El at North and Clybourn, but the sight of the three open fire pits raring  near the Chicago River told us we had arrived at the right destination.

Generosity instantly enveloped us.

From the event volunteers to the Kendall students to staff like Amy to the many vendors showing their ware to Executive Producer George Motz, each person thanked us for coming, made sure we had plenty to eat and drink-this was the least of our concerns-and conveyed a bone-deep appreciation for helping to make the event a success.

The festival took place on Kendall’s fifth floor, and began after we had sampled some of the available food treats that included red chocolate covered almonds from Zagat’s-you could get a free guide for identifying and commenting on your three favorite restaurants-a tasty lager from Argyle Brew, a micro-brew set to launch next year on Irving Park and the source of the aforementioned dog biscuits, and exquisite crusted pork cubes topped by coleslaw whose juices exploded in your mouth.

The seven films were short and varied in quality.

Beyond the copulating cans, we were treated to  movies that took a sensual look at a woman preparing to eat an octopus, Parisian pastry and deconstructing vegetables from a refrigerator.

Food service that matched the movies’ theme accompanied the films.

We had samples of octopus with the second film that showed the tentacular octopod’s path toward consumption.

A chocolate mousse went with a  short about the preparation of a Valentine’s Day meal.

And a flaky pretzel shaped pastry to munch on during the film set in Paris.

Motz set the stage for the night’s main event with The Mud and the Blood, the final film and a paean to the oystering region from which he hails.  The movie showed his cousin and a fellow oysterman doing the hard work of harvesting the mollusks that grow for anywhere from 2 to 8 years.  This means wading through mud, plucking the oysters that are sufficiently grown, placing them in a bag and driving them back to shore.

Typically, the film explained, Bell’s Bay oysters are only consumed by locals.

Which made last night’s roast all the more special.

Motz’s uncle Oliver Thames, a sturdy and tall man with a wintry beard and kind open face, drove 950 miles in a Yellow Penske truck over two days to bring the 40 bushels of oysters.

In between carrying shovel load full of piping hot oyster to the wooden tables where attendees stood eagerly awaiting the opportunity to carve open and consume the salty treats, he told me about his nephew’s request to bring some of South Carolina’s best to Chicago.

“I told him, ‘If you want it to happen, we’ll make it happen,”” Thames said.

The effort did not go wasted.

Thames was greeted with rousing applause, as was Motz’s cousin Steve, who had picked the oyster.

I dug into at least a dozen myself, managing not to cut myself on the razor-sharp edges, savoring the savoring-drenched oysters and washing them down with some Palmetto beer only found in South Carolina that Thames had brought up for good measure.

If sensual and sexual pleasure were two major themes of the event, sustainability was another.

Motz’s film discussed how the harvesters let immature oysters grow and do not deplete the available stores.

An adverstisement and sliced apple from a stand sponsored by the The Good Food Project talked about the need for introducing children to healthy food for the long haul.

And Matt, the Argyle Brewing master, talked about how the brewery will be a Community Supported Brewery based on the community supported agriculture model.

“This is going to be huge next year,” Derrick told me as he wrestled to pry open a resistant oyster.

He was right.

For those  of you who did not have a chance to attend this year’s festival, mark it down on your calendars now.

I know I’ll be there.

The Virtuous Circles of Climate Change

In eight short days I’ll be flying to Durban, South Africa to attend the United Nations Framework on Climate Change Conference.

I’ll be one of 18 journalists participating in this year’s Climate Change Media Partnership fellowship.

I’m humbled to have been selected and thrilled to be attending the two-week event.

It will undoubtedly be a momentous one.

Next year marks the expiration of the Kyoto Protocol, signed and ratified by more than 100 nations, but not the United States, in 1997. On a basic level, then, the national delegations will be negotiating about what happens next.

Much has happened to the world’s environment since the world’s countries first gathered in Rio, the precursor to the Kyoto gathering and agreement, and, while there have been many individual, group and even societal efforts to stem the mounting damage, the majority of human activity has been destructive.

The report released Friday by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change i is only the latest in a growing chorus of scientific assessments warning that we are all too rapidly approaching the point at which the world’s temperature may rise more than 2 degrees about pre-industrial levels-a development that could trigger catastrophic and unstoppable devastation.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading to prepare for my trip and have encountered a number of memorable images to describe the earth’s current precarious state.

For activist and author Bill McKibben, the earth is like a middle-aged person for whom the best outcome is a graceful decline through concerted and decisive effort.

For scientist and truth teller James Hansen, the earth is like a baseball hit during a Brooklyn Dodgers-New York Yankees World Series game. If we run with maximum effort, Hansen writes, we can catch the ball and prevent the loss of the game and series.

For the people at the IIED, the Institute for International Institute for Environment and Development, the key image is a circle

By that, co-authors, the late Andy Jones, Michel Pimbert, and Janice Jiggins mean that the we must change from our current linear methods of food and energy production and consumption to live more circular, locally-oriented and grounded lives.

Only then, they maintain, can we avert the almost certain disaster that awaits us.

Full disclosure: IIED is one of the three groups who form part of the Climate Change Media Partnership that is sponsoring my attendance at the conference.

It is important to note that this is not simply a prescription for behavioral change, though.

Rather it is a call for a fundamental reorientation of how societies work and govern themselves. The authors call for a shift from the current top-down, elitist system in which a few people make decisions for the many to a more inclusive and participatory form of decision making for issues large and small.

In other words, the virtues deserve equal billing.

The task may sound daunting, and the work is certainly grounded in a clear-eyed assessment of current practices and the difficulty in changing them in any kind of rapid fashion.

As with other books of this ilk, Virtuous Circles makes a case for change by providing plenty of data where we are, how we have gotten here and what lies ahead should we fail to make the changes the authors recommend.

As opposed to other books, however, this one includes plenty of diagrams, side boxes and even the classic Robert Frost poem, “The Road Not Taken.”  An additional appeal of Virtuous Circle is its peppering in throughout the book examples of places in Latin America and the Caribbean where precisely this shift has happened.

The sections about increasing food and water security in the Andes through rainwater harvesting, sustainable water management and agro-ecology are informative, for instance. But in some ways the response of Cuban people to the sudden end of oil support when the Soviet Union fell in the late 80s and early 90s may be more instructive in pointing us toward where we might need to go.The authors’ palpable belief in these projects and commitment to highlighting them radiates out from the pages throughout the book.

The question of course is how the the story ends.

The answer may lie to a large degree in what happens in Durban one week hence.

But the bigger part of it will come in the weeks and months ahead.

Only then will it become clear if these examples highlighted in the book, relatively small scale and expensive as they are, become the harbingers of the virtuous circles in which the authors so clearly believe, or if they become a footnote for later generations to say that those of who continued in the linear way did so not because no other options existed, but rather because we did not insist for ourselves and others that we move in that radical and circular direction.

The Underreported Side of the Penn State Scandal: Access and Ways to Protect and Heal

It’s a scandal that has rocked the nation.

The shattering of the wholesomeness of the Happy Valley, in which football reigns supreme and Joe “JoePa” Paterno has been little short of a god, is permanent and irrevocable.

The legendary coach who just celebrated winning more games than any other coach in college football history has been summarily fired, ending his 61-year “grand experiment” in utter disgrace.

His sin of omission: not having done more when he learned from then-graduate assistant Mike McQueary witnessing a naked Jerry Sandusky, Paterno’s former heir apparent, allegedly sodomizing a 10-year-old boy in the shower.

The damage extends far beyond Paterno to the institutional coverup of these actions.  President Graham Spanier has also been dismissed by the board of trustees, while top-ranking former administrators Tim Curley and Gary Schultz face criminal charges both for having committed perjury and for not having reported the abuse to the police after having learned about it.

Reactions have predictably been all over the place, with some students rioting to protest Paterno’s firing and far more expressing their solidarity with the victims the next day.   The trustees have been criticized for not having consulted the victims before taking action, while a group of former players plan to attend today’s game to demonstrate their loyalty to the institution and to the man who coached them.

Chicago Tribune columnist David Haugh wrote a widely-read piece in which he urged readers to have no pity for Paterno, but to focus instead on the victims whose lived have been so thoroughly damaged, while former NFL player Heath Evans, whose wife was abused as a child, has talked about the importance of speaking up.  A men’s health writer discussed Stanley Milgram’s famous and controversial experiment about obedience and the role of hierarchy in ensuring conformity among men.

Having reported on this issue for a number of years, I can say that child sexual abuse is one of the most emotionally topics I have ever covered.

While the discussion prompted the scandal about the issue is welcome, thus far one aspect has been missing in the blizzard of coverage that has engulfed print, television, radio and the web: the role of of access.

Being able to have regular and consistent contact with one’s victim is an absolutely essential element in the all too pervasive phenomenon.

Because of this, while it is true that there is an all too long list of authority figures like Sandusky, who allegedly abused boys in his Second Mile non-profit, the harder part to face is that the vast majority of abuse happens not from people outside the home, but from people within it.

We are talking family and friends.

Parents, siblings, aunts and uncles and trusted family friends.

In 2004 and 2005 I worked at South Shore Community News.

While there, I did a six-part series about child sex offenders.

For me, by far the most difficult piece to write was about a mother whose daughter had been abused by the man who had fathered her two other children.

The woman was in an unimaginably horrible position.

On the one hand, her daughter was wrecked, perhaps permanently-a condition that evoked shame, guilt and inexpressable rage within the mother.

She literally wanted to kill the man.

On the other hand, her sons missed and constantly asked for their father.

The man apparently had provided, if not formal child support, money here and there, doing things like buying shoes for the boys and paying for haircuts.

He also spent time with his sons, giving the mother a much-needed break.

At that point, she had neither respite nor money, just a devastated daughter, two confused and grieving boys and a nearly unbearable load to carry.

During our conversation the woman explained that the abuser had, like Sandusky, cultivated his victim over time, gradually expanding his advances until he raped her.

Again, access was pivotal in his insidious plan and actions.

The question that arises of course is what can be done about this, as adults of some sort will be able to be around children, especially in the home.

In a story I did last year for The Chicago Reporter, Dr. Carl Bell talked about strengthening families.  By this he meant having an extended network of people caring for children so that many eyes are watching them and are exchanging information about possible threats.

It’s far from perfect, and it is an option.  Bell explained that he had conceived and directed a program that had operated this way that had seen positive results.

It worked, he said, because it drew on the strengths that lie within communities, rather than treating them as objects to be scrutinized from outside.

The other hopeful note is that healing is possible.

Along with Doran “Bolo” Woods and Vincent Bolton, we made this film below about three young women, all of whom endured sexual abuse.

Two of them were abused by family members.

Yet all three of them found within themselves and through artistic expression the means to heal.

As you watch and listen, please think about the horrifying and enduring consequences of abuse, the central role access to the victims plays and the actions we can take to better protect our children.

They deserve no less.

Kristallnacht memorial ceremony

I wrote Tuesday about Gabriele Thimm’s coordination of a memorial ceremony for Essen’s Jewish community on the 73rd anniversary of Kristallnacht.

Here are her words from what sounded like a very memorable evening:

Yesterday evening was moving.

The pupils were very concentraded. The darkness was lying above the town. The weather was clear and the full moon was shining through the trees. The shops were opened and much people walked along.

We began with a little music with the Kontrabass (double buss?) Then the pupils read the first text.

1. station: Bochumerstr.6, previously Berlinerstr., history about the families Levy and Wilhelm Stern.

2. station: Hansastr.22 and 15. Family Coppel, Seligmann and Bukofzer.

3. station: Family Dr. Joseph Löwenstein.

The pupils told about the Jewish Live in the 19. and early 20. century. The jewish family Rindskopf celebrated their golden wedding with all the citizen of Steele. The sinagouge was to small for all people. Citizens have adorned the street and all people celebrated the golden wedding. Rindskopf were living on the Berlinerstr. 33, today Bochumerstr.

Jewish people lived as german parents, friends, did their profession, sports colleagues…

It was told about the broken glasses, about sorrow, bewilderment and devastation. Men would be arrested and the women had to pay money for her husbands to be free. Jewish people lost their profession and also the participation to for example sports clubs.

Original documents were shown and read. Also was told of the deportation and that the people were murdered.

Much people stay around us, heraring the text and look at the pictures. So it goes on to all stations, also the people went with, also to the house of Löwenstein in Alte Zeilen 22.

After reading the text (translated), your original text was shown at the screen, as well as the old and the new photos of your family. The last part of the presentation was “Live goes on”.

The last photo which was shown, it was the wedding picture of october and the pupils played with flute and double buss “Bey mir bistu schejn” 1932 text: Shalom Secunda, music: Jacob Jacobs for a jiddish musical. Meanwhile the other pupils destributed candles to the visitors.

We were accompanied by police, but there was no terrorism.

The whole project was done in collaboration with my girl friend Katja Schütze of the Bildungswerk der Humanistischen Union. She organized the technic and provided for the approval by the City of Essen.

Now we try to get some money for your flights.

All best wishes to all of you Gabriele

Here is the statement we sent as a family:

Dear Ms. Thimm, parents, teachers, and members of the Essen-Steele community,

It is with gratitude and respect that we write this note to register our appreciation of the commitment you have shown to confront the dark chapter in Germany’s past and to commemorate the lives of residents in the community who were killed during the Nazi era.

Ms. Thimm, we honor the courage, character and persistence you have shown in undertaking this project, and we also want to acknowledge the support you have received from your supervisors and the other members of the community in making a public and permanent acknowledgment through these memorials of what happened here during the period when Adolf Hitler ruled the country.

This memorial and the ongoing teaching of the children about what occurred represents an important act of acknowledgment that has, in its process and substance, contributed to a healing process. It is also a critical, but not sufficient, element in allowing young people to emerge into adulthood with a full understanding of what has been part of their nation’s past, but what need not be again should they act with the same decency and humanity demonsrated by so many of the people who are gathered here today.

We regret that we are not able to join you on this momentous occasion, but want to be emphatically clear that our inability to attend in person does not in any way signal al lack of awareness, appreciation and respect for what you have done and what you will continue to do this in this area.

We look forward to the day, hopefully this spring, when we will be able to meet and express our gratitude to you in person. In the meantime, we hope the ceremony goes well today. Please know that it is deeply appreciated by us.

Sincerely,

The Lowenstein Family

And here are some pictures from the evening that Gabriele sent.

Kristallnacht Anniversary Has Special Family Twist This Year

Gabriele Thimm (in red sweater) with some of her students.

The anniversary of Kristallnacht has always been significant for our family, but this year will have an unexpected layer of meaning.

The “Night of the Broken Glass” is the name given to the two-day rampage in November 1938 that saw Jewish synagogues, business and homes looted, burned and destroyed. Hitler’s Nazi government sanctioned the violence, then fined Jewish people $400 million and required that Jewish shop owners pay for the damage themselves.

Kristallnacht’s brutality and the government’s subsequent actions convinced my grandfather Max, who lost his hearing and the unrestricted use of his right arm fighting for Germany during World War I, to relinquish his deeply held conviction that the increasing legal isolation and violence being inflicted on the nation’s Jewish community eventually would pass.

Fortunately, he found a destination for his two boys.

It came in the form of the Kindertansport, a program created by the British government in response to Kristallnacht to give refuge 10,000 Jewish children ages 4 to 17 from Germany, the then-Czechoslovakia, Austria and Poland.

My grandmother had a cousin in England who made the necessary arrangements, and two spots were set aside for my father and uncle.

They were 5 and 7 years old, respectively.

Their children’s acceptance into the program meant my grandparents had to send their sons away to save them.

They did so, not knowing the woman who would take them.

They did so, unsure if they would ever see their boys again.

My father left several weeks after my uncle and days after having had his appendix removed.

My grandfather had taken his ailing son from doctor to doctor throughout Essen-Steele, the town where our family had lived for five generations and nearly 150 years.

None would operate on the boy because he was Jewish.

Grandpa Max finally convinced a non-Jewish doctor to perform the procedure in my great-grandfather’s home that doubled as an office.

Remarkably, my grandparents got out of Germany in 1940, after the Second World War had begun, and reunited with their sons in the United States.

Although that branch of our family escaped, many other relatives did not.

My great grandfather and namesake Joseph, the family patriarch who was deported to Theresienstadt in 1942 and later murdered in Auschwitz, was among them.

My great uncle Rudolf, his wife Magarete and their children Klara and Klaus-Martin, were some of the others.

Which brings us to this year’s anniversary.

About three weeks ago I received an email from Gabriele Thimm, a teacher in Essen.

Several years ago she organized a memorial for the town’s Jewish community, she said.

Students presented Essen’s Jewish history.

Parents donated a stone in memory of Klaus-Martin, his parents and sister in front of my great-grandfather’s house.

This year, Gabriele was coordinating another event on November 9 that will include stops at the homes of three Jewish families who used to live in Essen.

My great-grandfather Joseph’s house is one of them.

“I think, it’s our responsibility to teach the children/pupils about the German history in the time of National Sozialism (Hitler) and the history of the Jews in Germany,” Gabriele wrote.

We will not be able to attend the event, but we have sent a statement to be read and pictures to be projected on a wall of the house and accompanied by music.

Kristallnacht will always be the Night of the Broken Glass.

Holding a memorial ceremony cannot undo the atrocities that happened to ours and so many other families.

But it can help heal the wounds they caused.

It can help give Essen’s young people a full understanding of their town and country’s history.

And it can be a part of helping those children grow into adulthood with the knowledge that what took place there need not do so again should they, like their teacher and parents, find within themselves the resolve to act with courage, decency and humanity.

Migrant Worker Forum Highlights Need for Reform

At Hoy we are engaged in a year-long project looking at Latino workers and communities in the Midwest and the degree to which enforcement agencies are, or are not, protecting them.

Thus far, we can say that at the federal level it’s not a pretty story.

Take Wright County Egg, for example.

The company from Galt, Iowa with roots in Maine had a more than 30-year history of nearly every kind of abuse before last year’s record-breaking recall of 380 million eggs.

We are talking extensive and repeated violations of workers’ rights documented by OSHA.

Environmental despoliation for which the EPA fined them.

In 2002 the EEOC punished the company after identifying and documenting a pattern of sexual harassment and even sexual assault of its female employees, many of whom were Mexican women.

That’s to say nothing of the more than $1 million the federal government fined them for hiring undocumented workers.

Yet, despite having enough red flags to blanket the world’s largest bullfighting stadium, the company did not have to shut down operations until some consumers got sick, prompting last year’s recall.

Here in Illinois, though, a band of advocates, family members and government agencies are working to create a different story.

Some of them gathered at a public forum at Northern Illinois University last Tuesday night to talk, to listen and to begin to formulate a plan for inter-agency collaboration.

The event came on the heels of an October 12 special state senate hearing about the condition of migrant workers convened by Sen. Mike Frerichs (D-52).

Part of the impetus for the meeting came from the work many of these people did to shut down the notorious Cherry Orchard apartment complex in Rantoul.

As our collaborators at Citizen-Access, a publication and project based at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign ably showed, the conditions in which the migrant workers were housed were horrific.

No legally functioning sewage system.

Holes in the wall.

No water or power for weeks at a time.

It wasn’t easy and took about four years, but this ad hoc coalition did succeed in closing Cherry Orchard.

But, as Julie Pryde, a self-described “accidental activist” and public health administrator in the area noted in an interview we published, this action, while a success, did not solve the larger problem.

Which is why people came together on Tuesday.

Facilitated by Susan Bauer, a longtime migrant worker advocate, the panel included Mattae Kamara, a family doctor based in Chicago who does medical work with farm workers, academic Bob Aherin, lawyer Miguel Keberlein, and representatives from the Mexican government and from OSHA.

As much expertise as they had to offer, though, each panelist talked about the emotional impact of the testimony they heard from relatives and friends of workers who died recently.

As you can hear, Kamara’s voice cracked as she offered her comments.

She was not the only one whose eyes watered.

Keberlein made the point after the panel ended that the deaths that occur are an extreme aspect of daily indignities and oppression the workers endure.

Several of the speakers took pains to emphasize that not all employers treat their workers poorly, and, further, that some formerly abusive bosses can change their practices.

At this point, the specifics of a legislative agenda and the form of inter-agency collaboration are not clear.

There is urgency to arrive at the clarity soon, according to Jovanna Chavez.

A 17-year-old high school junior who has friends who work in the fields, she declared that, absent concrete action, the articulate words offered by those in the room would be just that-words.

People in the room appeared willing to accept Chavez’s challenge.

We’ll continue to follow this issue and to report on the evolution of this new and potentially different approach toward worker and community safety.

In the meantime, we want to hear from you.

What should we be covering? What has been your experience with worker safety? How have you found the interactions between state agencies?

Jeff Kelly Lowenstein wrote this story with the help of the Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism, which is administered by the California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships, a program of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.