Wages of Welfare War

For Perera, a 28-year-old who has degrees in economics and developing-nations studies, a social consciousness was formed while growing up in a heavily black, working-class neighborhood in South-Central Los Angeles. As a student at the University of California at Berkeley, he mentored reform-school inmates. Romano's commitment to the downtrodden developed later in life. "I grew up in a vacuum," says the 30-year-old about his upbringing in suburban Atlanta. His social awakening came when he helped organize a summer camp and after-school program for Southeast Asian refugees while he attended Harvard University. "The classroom for me was just the sidelines," says the anthropology major who later taught in South Africa. "After that I pretty much took the route that any typical Harvidian would take," he adds in frenzied laughter.

The two men met while unionizing textile factory workers in the South. They arrived in Miami about five years ago with the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE) to organize nursing-home workers. Four years into his job, Romano became disillusioned with UNITE and left. A year later Perera followed. "We felt it was critical for the workers to take leadership in the fight, and we didn't see development of those skills as part of the process in UNITE," says Romano. "The bottom-line needs of the union often contradicted what the workers wanted to fight for."

With that ideal, a $5000 New World Foundation grant, the intellectual support of the National Employment Law Project, and the guidance of a few other activists (including the two organizers from New York and San Francisco who attended the WAGES meeting), Perera and Romano founded the Miami Workers' Center last March. Perera took a job selling computer parts; Romano dedicated himself full-time to get the center up and running. The two rented a charming, wood-floor Buena Vista duplex and set up camp. Equipped with a laptop and a cell phone, they got to work.

While worker centers have been around for at least 25 years (one of the first popped up in New York City's Chinatown to protect exploited Chinese laborers who toiled in restaurants and sweatshops), the Miami Workers' Center is the first such organization in the area. "It's about time we had one," says attorney Valory Greenfield. "Smaller cities than Miami have them; it's long overdue." Still Perera and Romano have a long road to pave. Unlike cities with an industrial base, there aren't any strong ties to unions in Miami, let alone a tradition of organizing workers. "There is, however, a history of sporadic protests and violence in Liberty City," Romano points out. "Our concern is to try to organize folks to funnel that anger in a positive direction."

Like others across the nation, the Miami Workers' Center reaches out to a constituency that labor unions traditionally have ignored. Specifically Perera and Romano's mission is to organize former and current welfare recipients "without losing sight of the bigger picture of social justice," Perera adds. Like Romano he interprets WAGES's shortcomings through the filter of class struggle.

The duo uses phrases such as "the displacement of workers," "free labor," and a "revolving work force" to describe the working-class's plight against globalization, and what they see as the government's attempt to further bury the poor by cutting off safety nets that have been in place for 60 years. They refer to the local WAGES board as a "power coalition," because more than half of the seats are held by members of the private sector. "There are economic factors at play here," Romano asserts while standing in the hallway of his Buena Vista home. Sketched on each wall are Soviet-era style proletariat figures rising from the ground, their rough, mammoth hands reaching up to the ceiling. "At a time when unemployment is relatively low, the government decides to cut people's welfare and throws them into the unemployment pool. That in turn creates more competition among workers, wages go down, and profits go up. How deliberately it's done, I don't know; I'm not in the backrooms. But there's no doubt in my mind that the whole system is set up to encourage that people don't stay in jobs."

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In 1996, before Perera and Romano began flirting with the idea of mounting a battle against welfare reform, the state WAGES board created local coalitions to administer Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. The program replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) under the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. The law requires former AFDC recipients to earn their welfare checks, sets time limits for receiving them, and eventually pushes welfare dependents off the rolls by placing them in subsistence-level jobs.