Hoping to replicate the success of their brothers and sisters in Los Angeles, carwash workers in New York City are launching a unionization drive in a bid to clean up labor practices in their troubled industry. Kirk Semple reports for the New York Times:

At a carwash in an industrial patch of Astoria, Queens, Adan Nicolas, a Mexican immigrant, is preparing to open the newest front in New York City’s labor battles.

His bosses have often paid him and the other carwash workers less than minimum wage and have cheated them on overtime pay, Mr. Nicolas said. The workers, he said, are not provided with protective gear but are forced to use caustic cleaners that burn their eyes and noses.

Community organizers say these kinds of violations are rampant among local carwashes.

So for the past several weeks, under the tutelage of immigrants’ advocates, Mr. Nicolas, 31, has been briefing his colleagues in rudimentary labor law and the language of organizing. Out of the sight of bosses, similar conversations have been unfolding at other carwashes around New York City.

“We’re all ready to fight for our rights and have a dignified place to work, and not to be abused like we are today,” Mr. Nicolas said.

On Tuesday, a coalition of community and labor organizations plans to introduce a citywide campaign to reform the carwash industry. The union advocates, in turn, hope to use the campaign to unionize carwash workers across the city, most of whom are immigrants.

Similar campaigns in Los Angeles have so far yielded collective bargaining agreements at three car washes.

[Photo credit: Nyer82, Creative Commons.]

We at the Sidney Hillman Foundation are very pleased to announce that The Fifth Estate has won the 2012 Canadian Hillman Prize for “Scout’s Honour,” a groundbreaking documentary about how the Boy Scouts of America and Scouts Canada failed to stop known pedophiles preying on boys in their care. For more than 50 years, Scouts Canada kept what they called “the confidential list” of accused pedophiles who were kicked out of the movement. But the police weren’t always notified and some offenders were able to travel from troop to troop, abusing boys. Scouts Canada claims that all allegations have been reported to the police, but victims say this isn’t true.

The fifth estate combed court records to find men who had been involved in scouting and who were eventually convicted of child abuse. After the story aired last fall, Scouts Canada publicly apologized for failing to protect boys.

“The fifth estate’s “Scout’s Honour” is a triumph of investigative journalism,” said Canadian Hillman judge Jim Stanford. “The reporters undertook an investigation that was complex, detailed, international, and expensive - far superior, in fact, to most police criminal investigations of the same sort of crimes. Their findings have made a concrete difference in the lives of hundreds of people, and helped make Canada a safer place for children. All Canadians owe the CBC, and this program, a huge debt.”

Last March, Yusril, a 28-year-old expectant father from Indonesia signed up to work on a commercial fishing vessel of the New Zealand coast, a major source of seafood for the U.S. market. The recruiter rushed Yusril through the paperwork so quickly that he didn’t notice that the fine print made him a de facto prisoner aboard a South Korean fishing boat.

The contract was set up to trap him: The company reserved the right to send him home and bill him $1000 if they found his work unsatisfactory. He wouldn’t get paid for the first three months, so there was little chance he could cover the fine. If he jumped ship, his family would have to pay $3500, a sum that exceeded their net worth. Yusril had already mortgaged their land to post the $1000 bond.

E. Benjamin Skinner reports for Bloomberg Businessweek:

What followed, according to Yusril and several shipmates who corroborated his story, was an eight-month ordeal aboard the Melilla 203, during which Indonesian fishermen were subjected to physical and sexual abuse by the ship’s operators. Their overlords told them not to complain or fight back, or they would be sent home, where the agents would take their due. Yusril and 23 others walked off in protest when the trawler docked in Lyttelton, New Zealand. The men have seen little if any of what they say they are owed. Such coerced labor is modern-day slavery, as the United Nations defines the crime. (The South Korean owners of the Melilla ships did not respond to requests for comment.)

The experiences of the fishermen on the Melilla 203 were not unique. In a six-month investigation, Bloomberg Businessweek found cases of debt bondage on the Melilla 203 and at least nine other ships that have operated in New Zealand’s waters. As recently as November 2011, fish from the Melilla 203 and other suspect vessels were bought and processed by United Fisheries, New Zealand’s eighth-largest seafood company, which has sold the same kinds of fish in the same period to distributors operating in the U.S. (The U.S. imports 86 percent of its seafood.) The distributors in turn have sold the fish to major U.S. companies. Those companies—which include some of the country’s biggest retailers and restaurants—have sold the seafood to American consumers.

If you’ve ordered squid at a P.F. Chang’s Bistro, there’s a good chance that you’ve eaten fish harvested by indentured laborers. The chain buys it squid from United Fisheries, a giant New Zealand-based seafood company that bought and processed the catch from the Melilla 203 and other boats using indentured labor, as recently as November, 2011.

Skinner, a fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, spent months investigating indentured labor on commercial fishing vessels off of New Zealand for Bloomberg Business Week.

Hat tip to E.J. Graff.

[Photo credit: Hit thatswitch, Creative Commons.]

Sidney picks the best of the week’s news:

• Nancy Pelosi keeps her Lenten promise to be kind to Republicans by appearing on the Colbert Report to discuss why SuperPACs are ruining democracy.
• It’s not a schlocky movie, it’s a political opportunity! How domestic workers are using The Help to create social change, by Rinku Sen of Colorlines.
• Goldline International, Glenn Beck’s favorite sleazy gold company, has been ordered by a court to refund $4.5 million to customers and stop telling the rubes that the feds are coming for their gold, Stephanie Mencimer reports for Mother Jones.
• Greg Kaufman, author of the “This Week in Poverty” column for The Nation, on why the unemployment benefits extension doesn’t go far enough.