When I was a teenager, I came home from school to find my mom distraught and sobbing after losing her job of 27 years as a bank teller.
In the days leading up to her firing, she had been attempting to prevent a customer from doing an illegal transaction. During the interaction, the customer belittled and hurled racist slurs towards her as if his actions and decisions were because of my mother’s “incompetence” as a foreigner. Her new manager did not step in as my mom was being verbally assaulted and despite her twenty-seven consecutive years of employment, she was fired.
My mom’s name is Tess, short for Teresita or “Little Teresa” in English. Tess is from the Philippines and immigrated to the United States in the 80s. The intersection of being Asian, an immigrant, and a woman comes with the combined stereotype of settling for less and keeping our heads down. We have this word in our culture, “Hiya” or “shame”, encapsulating this feeling, ingraining this preconceived notion in our community. Because of this cultural value, many women, like my mom, internalized this mindset. My mom tried to take legal action after this incident but decided against it without knowing if she would win. Because of her hiya, we never spoke of the time my mom was fired again.
Many immigrants move to America to seek the “American Dream” of economic mobility, financial security, and safety. Filipinos and other Asians are, in a way, exported from their home countries to work with the cultural expectation that they will send money home for their families. Both of my parents are products of this expectation, and while moving and getting a job here provides a more sustainable living, you are not guaranteed better working conditions.
Throughout history, Asians have been mistreated and abused in their jobs. From how Chinese railroad workers were treated under the Chinese Exclusion Act, how farmworkers were treated in the 1960s, how New York Chinese garment women workers were treated in the 1980s, and when my mother was terminated from her bank job.
Before working at 9to5, I worked as a civic engagement organizer for a large and well-respected organization that served and was led by members of the AAPI and immigrant community. It felt like a dream to work for a diverse organization that touched multiple generations of people, from children with after-school programs to college students engaged in civic engagement efforts to elders who needed spaces to play mahjong together. Soon, a change in leadership flipped the organization on its head.
There was a rapid change in leadership and management that led to raising tension and conflict at the organization. Staff and some community members protested these changes, but were ultimately met with firings and third-party security escorting dissenters from the space. Over time, much of the staff was dismissed as leadership dismantled entire departments in retaliation or staff left voluntarily. We believe that leadership seemed to select staff of a particular ethnicity to keep their jobs.
We had put so much work into our jobs and our community that I couldn’t believe it was ending. I looked at my coworker, a Korean mom of two who was about the same age as my mom when she was fired. Many of these women employees being fired felt like family and it felt like history was repeating itself. They would bring food to work for me and younger staff and culturally this is the biggest form of love and care for us. I knew I had to do something for her and for all of us.
I realized that we did not know our rights as workers – just like my mom didn’t when she was fired all those years ago. I knew that if we could unionize, we could equip ourselves to know our labor rights as workers. Collective action together could be our form of protection, love, and care for each other.
It was a lengthy unionization process. For eleven months we searched for unions who could support us, power mapped carefully, and calculated the probability of winning knowing that the number of staff was constantly changing due to turnover and layoffs. It took tears, delusion, and a lot of post-work karaoke to deal with the toll of psychological warfare from the opposition during the unionization process.
Staff members were emboldened knowing that their rights were violated and filed “Unfair Labor Practice” or ULP charges against the leadership. We researched the EEOC, and learned about the NLRA and our Weingarten rights in case one of us were called in by HR. It took us a year to finally win a union with SEIU Workers United, but the win came with the cost of burnout. However, the one thing we took away from this process is that management did not expect us to fight back because they also fell into the expectation that Asians, immigrants, and women do not fight back. They were wrong.
When I joined the team at 9to5 Georgia it was to achieve economic justice and workplace protections that are needed for people like me, my former coworkers, and my mother. This past session, 9to5 Georgia worked to pass HB 381, which would have given statewide workplace protections from discrimination and harassment. The bill did not pass and Georgia still does not have statewide protections. We still have a long way to go to win workplace protections for all Georgia workers.
In the meantime, those who want to improve the conditions in their workplaces in Georgia can start by knowing their rights as workers. The Respect Georgia Worker Alliance, which includes 9to5 Georgia Organize workers and uplifts economic justice policies at the state level like HB 381.
There are federal agencies, like the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the National Relations Labor Board that are made to keep workplaces accountable in making sure that workers are treated fairly and compensated for their work.
Workers can also organize their workplaces to protect and empower themselves. Collectively, workers can tackle grievances and make changes together instead of doing it in isolation. According to the National Korean American Service & Education Consortium (NAKASEC), “Asian Americans are less likely to be represented by a union despite being the fastest growing racial group and working population in the US. Nationally, only 9% of AAPI workers are unionized– the lowest unionization rate among all major racial and ethnic groups”.
My mother will soon retire from her bank teller job of eleven years. Recently, she received a letter from workers from bank branches in different states about unionizing the bank. Mom told me that she threw the letter away because she would be gone by the time the workers would hold a union election. I reminded her of the importance of unionizing and workplace protections for Asian women like us. When she heard about the work my coworkers and I have done and the time it took to learn so many labor laws, she asked me “Do you think you could help take up my case from when I got fired from my old job?”, not knowing that there is a statute of limitations for the EEOC to take her case nor even knowing that the EEOC can take racially motivated cases. She recently told me she went to the Department of Labor instead. I wish I had known that so I could have helped my mother back then.