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Youth Who Stand for Economic Justice:
Protesting the South Asian Students Alliance, Supporting Hotel Workers
by Sejal Patel and Siddharth Desai
Summer 2005
"Workers rights zindabad, unfair wages murdabad!"
Attendees of the South Asian ?Students? Alliance's (SASA) annual conference, held over the Martin Luther King weekend, were awoken to chants of protest as young South Asians from around the country stood in solidarity with boycotting hotel workers at the Wilshire Grand Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.
For over nine months, union workers at the Wilshire Grand, the venue for this year's SASA conference, and eight other Los Angeles hotels have orchestrated a large and highly organized boycott of these five-star hotels in protest of inhumane workloads, inadequate health insurance, sub-standard living wages, and discrimination against African-Americans job applicants. In tradition with the message of this highly celebrated Civil Rights holiday, we stood as one and demanded to be heard.
The California workers have been able to sustain their organized agitation for over nine months in a political climate where the successful but unforgotten attack on affirmative action and the series of anti-immigrant propositions have, in effect, silenced the debate on social justice issues impacting immigrants and other communities of color. The situation has been further exacerbated by the political ascendancy of newly elected Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who, despite claiming to empathize with immigrant issues, has supported a host of initiatives harming immigrant communities such as Proposition 187. The fact that Schwarzenegger is an immigrant himself has not been lost on the large number of immigrants he serves and who have been negatively impacted by these measures. Despite their soon-to-be Governor elect having been an accused sex offender and admitted steroid abuser, Californians, immigrants and non-immigrants alike, from the Bay to San D. inexplicably went to the polls in droves to vote him into office.
And who do the media pundits blame for the Terminator's arrival to ultimate political status in California? The youth.
So, what does this have to do with a South Asian youth conference held in Los Angeles? It speaks volumes.
