Thread: Immigration control group questions McDonald's hiring practi

Immigration control group questions McDonald's hiring practices

HARTFORD, Conn. --A group that wants stronger immigration controls is causing controversy with a study that claims McDonald's disproportionately hires Hispanic workers in Connecticut.

Topics: McDonalds, Illegal Immigration, workers, NAFTA, CAFTA, FTAA, jobs, illegal labor, Immigrants, Americans, Diseases and biohazards

9/29/2005
Boston Globe

State officials have declined to launch an investigation despite demands from Connecticut Citizens for Immigration Control.

And Fernando Betancourt, state commissioner for Latino and Puerto Rican affairs, said he finds it offensive that anyone would go to such lengths to monitor hiring.

"This sounds to me more like systematic persecution," he said.

Connecticut Citizens for Immigration Control held its first meeting in Danbury as tension over immigration mounted there earlier this year.

It has since held meetings around the state.

Members observed workers at 152 McDonald's around the state from April through November.

They found that people they identified as Hispanic accounted for 87 percent of employees in Fairfield County and 64 percent of employees in New Haven County.

Peter Goselin, an immigration activist and member of the state chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, challenged the study, saying that participants could not determine workers' ethnicity or immigration status by merely observing them.

Paul Streitz, co-founder of Connecticut Citizens for Immigration Control, said he believes the findings are evidence that Hispanic immigrants -- legal and illegal -- are displacing other McDonald's workers.

"This is to me occupational displacement -- all of a sudden, in places like Bridgeport and New Haven and Stamford, there aren't any African-Americans working there like there used to be? What's happened?" he said.

Streitz asked Gov. M. Jodi Rell and state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal to investigate. Blumenthal said he has seen the report but isn't planning to pursue it.

"At this point, we question its reliability and relevance," he said. "At most the claim is that a disproportionate number of Hispanics work at particular locations, but there's no claim that any other racial, religious or ethnic group has been disfavored or turned away because of discrimination."

Hispanics account for more than 10 percent of Connecticut's population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Officials at Oak Brook, Ill.-based McDonald's did not immediately return calls seeking comment Wednesday. Many McDonald's restaurants are owned by franchisees, who do their own hiring.

A press conference Streitz held at the West Hartford Public Library on Wednesday drew Goselin, three reporters, and a man who hurled a cream pie at Streitz and then ran away.

http://www.alipac.us/article757.html

I think McDonalds should change there slogan from "We Love to See You Smile" to "Would you like a side of TB with your value meal today?"

Another place I won't be eating at!

State officials have declined to launch an investigation despite demands from Connecticut Citizens for Immigration Control.

Shouldn't this be a normal function of the Department of Labor??

And Fernando Betancourt, state commissioner for Latino and Puerto Rican affairs, said he finds it offensive that anyone would go to such lengths to monitor hiring.

Connecticut has a commissioner for Lation and Puerto Rican affairs. Wow....

This siuation is obviously unfair. If the proportion of employees were reversed within one of the state of Connecticut's highly Latino demographic area the very same politicians and bureaucrats like Blumenthal and Betancourt who are refusing to do anything now would be taking action. I hope that Streitz does not give up the fight.

The franchisor should make the hiring of citizens and legals a required practice. The critical thing on the local level should be for the state to commence in counting the no match letters from Social Security in April.

The TB remark is 2+2=5 nt every Latino is illegal not every illegal has TB

http://www.courant.com

Founder's Immigration Study Splits Group



By MARK SPENCER
Courant Staff Writer

October 6 2005

Internal disputes in the state's most vocal organization seeking tougher immigration laws have pushed it to the brink of disintegration.

Two of the group's founders have quit, saying its third founder, Paul Streitz, has led it in a racially charged, divisive direction.

Mary Long and Peter Gadiel, who started Connecticut Citizens for Immigration Control with Streitz earlier this year, denounced a study that he released last week over their objections. Streitz said the study, based on observing but not interviewing workers at McDonald's restaurants in the state, showed Hispanics and undocumented workers were probably displacing whites and African Americans in McDonald's restaurants.

"This McDonald's thing he did is just nonsense," said Gadiel, whose focus has been border security since his 23-year-old son died in the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks.

Streitz said he felt he needed to "show the loss of jobs to American citizens and particularly African Americans" despite warnings from Gadiel, Long and others in the group that mere observation could not reliably reveal a person's ethnicity or legal status.

In an e-mail to members in August, Streitz solicited volunteers to "check some MexDonalds and observe how many workers are their [sic] and their ethnic origin."

Elise Marciano, president of the group's Danbury chapter, said, "We categorically turned it down and he went ahead and did it."

The Danbury chapter, the group's largest and most active, will decide next week if it will split from Streitz, which would leave Connecticut Citizens for Immigration Control, also known as CTCIC, as little more than a one-man show.

Long, Gadiel and Streitz met during the last legislative session while they were lobbying on immigration issues. They formed CTCIC, which held its first meeting in Danbury in April when tensions there were at a peak over a recent influx of immigrants.

Since then the group has held meetings and demonstrations statewide, often drawing noisy counter-demonstrators.

The group's political influence is difficult to gauge, but Streitz, who ran unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate in 2004, became its public face. On Tuesday, he was a guest on CNN's "Lou Dobbs Tonight" show, commenting on a proposal to be considered by New Haven Mayor John DeStefano Jr. to issue identification cards to undocumented immigrants.

"This is treason," Streitz said, according to a transcript of the show. "This is a Benedict Arnold mayor turning New Haven into a banana republic."

Long and Gadiel said they quietly resigned from their leadership roles months ago, but continued to attend some events and remained on an e-mail list that sufficed as the group's informal membership roster.

Both said they asked to be removed from the membership list within the last two weeks after learning Streitz intended to release the results of his McDonald's work. He held a press conference under the auspices of CTCIC Thursday at the West Hartford Public Library. No other members of the group attended the event, which was interrupted when a young man threw a cream pie at Streitz.

Despite the fact that Long and Gadiel resigned their leadership posts early in the summer, both were identified as co-directors in the group's August online newsletter. When Long and Gadiel became aware of the newsletter, they asked that their names be removed.

Streitz said a member who has since moved out of state compiled the newsletter.

But in a Sept. 17 e-mail by Streitz outlining the background of the organization, he identified Long and Gadiel as co-founders, not mentioning they had both left their leadership roles.

Streitz said he assumed they had returned to the organization when he saw them at a CTCIC meeting last month in Danbury, although he did not speak to them.

"I guess I'm trying to be as inclusive as possible and keep everyone going in the same direction," Streitz said.

Gadiel said the Sept. 17 e-mail was technically correct in identifying him as a co-founder, but left an impression that was "thoroughly dishonest."

When it comes to Streitz, Gadiel is not interested in inclusiveness.

"I have nothing to do with the man," said Gadiel, who also is a director of 9/11 Families for a Secure America. "I will have nothing to do with the man. I live on the same planet with the man, and that's enough."

Long said Streitz "sort of took over the group" and controlled the e-mails issued in its name. She said she no longer has any association with him and described the McDonald's study as "misguided, flawed, distracting and damaging."

"I guess I view Paul Streitz as sort of over the top, radical, not credible," said Long.

Streitz has continued to identify himself as a co-director in some announcements of events, including a meeting Wednesday night in West Haven and one Tuesday in Stamford. He said Tuesday he would now probably identify himself as director.

At an American Legion hall in West Haven Wednesday night, the CTCIC meeting followed a well-established pattern. More than 150 immigration activists protested outside as Streitz spoke to about 25 people in the hall, including journalists, plainclothes police officers and students from a West Haven High School government class, who had been assigned to attend. At the end of the meeting, four people signed up for the e-mail list.

Barbara Keidel, whom Streitz named when asked to identify a supporter in the group, said she liked and could work with Streitz, the other co-founders and the Danbury group.

"I'm still part of the group, but I also feel like I'm neutral," said Keidel, of Watertown.

It's sad that this has happened. Peter Gadiel is true friend and inspiration to our movement. His opinions should be treated with the highest regards.

W

http://magic-city-news.com/article_4775.shtml

Paul Streitz
McDonald’s Restaurants in Fairfield County, Connecticut
By Paul Streitz
Oct 17, 2005, 12:58



In the spring of this year, Connecticut Citizens for Immigration Control began a study of employment of McDonald’s Restaurants in Connecticut.

One hundred fifty-two restaurants in Connecticut were visited by CTCIC. Restaurant employees were observed and each was classified into one of the following ethnic groups: White, African-American, Hispanic, Asian or other. In total, over 1,000 employees were observed in the restaurants.


Overall, almost exactly 50% of McDonald’s employees were Hispanic. The distribution of employees in most of the counties reflected the composition of the population. In the rural areas, McDonald’s employees were overwhelmingly white and in the urban areas of Hartford and New London, the McDonald’s workforce was a diverse workforce that one might expect in this age of equal opportunity employment.

This was not the case in Fairfield County. Here 88% of McDonald’s employees were Hispanic. Along Interstate 95, McDonald’s employees were 91% Hispanic and in the City of Danbury, 97% of the employees were Hispanic. (Just to make sure, CTCIC went to the four MacDonald’s restaurants on two different occasions. On the first visit, 95% of the employees were Hispanic; on the second visit, 100% were Hispanic. No African-Americans were visible working for McDonald’s in Danbury.)

Critics of the study claim that you cannot distinguish Puerto Ricans (legal citizens) from other Hispanics. That is somewhat true because Puerto Ricans are largely Caucasians, so they would have been classified as Whites in this study. This would have actually overstated the number of Whites working in McDonald’s restaurants in the state.

The Open Borders and Amnesty crowd could only attack the methodology, but not the findings. But their criticisms mirror the beginning of the environmental movement. What if a 1970’s environmentalist group counted dead fish floating on the surface of a lake? The factory owners and towns along the lake would immediately respond that the methodology was faulty, the study was not “scientific�, etc. etc.

Next, the vested interest groups would slander those conducting the study: “tree-huggers, enviro-extremists.� These vested interest groups would not dare admit what everyone could plainly see: dead fish. This is the scenario with the McDonald’s Employment Survey. Criticize the methodology and slander the investigators.

However, the economic studies of the U.S. economy show a flood of immigrants into the country and the drying up of new jobs for resident Americans. A report by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University states, “Every net new job created is taken by an immigrant,� according to the director Andrew Sum. According to FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform) “Since 2000, about 3.7 million net new jobs were created by the U.S. economy and all of them have been filled by foreign workers, more than half of them believed to have entered the country illegal.�

The proponents of Amnesty and Open Borders into the United States want us to believe immigration has no negative impact on job opportunities for resident Americans and legal immigrants. Nothing could be further from the truth. Immigration does not create jobs; it takes jobs from current residents.

The incentive of increased profits to any chain of restaurants could be enormous. Let us say there are forty low-level employees per restaurants, working a forty-hour week. Let us say that they are paid the minimum wage, but employees at other restaurants who may start at minimum wage are eventually paid two dollars more per hour. Let us say this is a chain of forty restaurants. The math works out to 1,600 hours per restaurant, or a $3,200 per week savings in labor. For a chain of forty restaurants, that would be over $8 million dollars per year.

The argument that resident Americans don’t want to work at McDonald’s does not hold true in the State of Connecticut. In other parts of the State, where Hispanic labor seems less available, the restaurants are fully staffed. In parts of the State with a mixed ethnic population, the McDonald’s workforces are similarly mixed. Is McDonald’s violating laws requiring Equal Opportunity in Fairfield County? It would seem so.

CTCIC has asked the Governor, the Attorney General and the U.S. Attorney for a full investigation of McDonald’s. The Governor shuffled the matter aside and the Attorney General refused to examine the matter.

McDonald’s has a long history as an American institution. Millions of teenagers got their first jobs there. These first jobs were undoubtedly invaluable training in the essence of work for many low income Americans such as learning to show up on time, responsibility for a cash register and how do effectively deal with customers. But, McDonald’s in Fairfield, Connecticut seems to have turned its back on all that It has chosen to raise corporate profits over responsible employment.

Paul Streitz
Director, CT Citizens for Immigration Reform
ctcic@optonline.net

The full report can be found at www.ctcitizensforimmigrationcontrol.com