Each morning, Tutu takes part in a tradition of her adopted homeland – rush hour traffic.
With thousands of other commuters, she and her ’91 Mazda battle slowdowns on the Kennedy Expressway between her home on Chicago’s Far North Side and the factory in northwest suburban Wheeling where she is an assembler.
Cassie and Shawn, coworkers of Tutu’s on the 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. shift at Shure Electronics of Illinois, also make the long drive out from the city. Another colleague, Jane, comes in from nearby Buffalo Grove.
Those aren’t the names they were born with. When they started at Shure, they were given, or gave themselves, nicknames that are easier to say than Misrak, Bouavanh, Hisham and Yevgenya.
Like increasing numbers of the nation’s factory workers, they are recent immigrants – Tutu from Ethiopia, Cassie from Laos, Shawn from Iraq and Jane from Russia.
But what most sets these four people apart from other commuters, other workers, is not so much their names or languages. It’s what they’ve gone through before they came to this country. To many of us, traffic jams may seem the height of stress. But people who have survived grinding poverty, ethnic discrimination or the devastation of civil war can put a gapers’ block – or any of life’s irritations – into perspective.
Such shattering past experiences also make many immigrants grateful to have a fresh start in this new land, a gratitude that shows up on the job as a work ethic as old-fashionedly positive as a Frank Capra movie.
“I would say I was born again,” Hisham (who became “Shawn” when his fellow workers said his name quickly) replied when asked how he felt about his 2 1/2 years in this country.
His path from his native Iraq was such a tortuous one that he is adamant that his full name not be printed, lest that might endanger those who helped him along the way.
During the Persian Gulf War, he had been in the Iraqi army, stationed in Kuwait. As an Assyrian Chaldean, a Christian, he was in a minority both in ethnicity and religion in Iraqi society and had little taste for that war.
“I still remember every scream from every man who died,” Hisham, 30, said.
He got rid of the two heat-seeking anti-aircraft missiles he had been issued by firing them at the sun, determined to make his way to the U.S. Leaving a trail of bribed border guards and officials, of whispered passwords at checkpoints, he finally made it to Albania, from where he planned to cross into Greece. He was, he said, “running from death.”
Only 500 meters into a desperate trek through the rugged mountains where Albania borders Greece, Hisham stepped into a hole and tore something in one ankle. The guide, who had been hired for $1,000, told him that if he were to turn back, the other refugees in the group likely would lose their will and turn back as well. If he stayed where he was in the snow, he would die of exposure. He had no choice but to continue.
And so Hisham eventually limped into Greece, and in Athens cornered a member of the U.S. Embassy staff and told him of his odyssey. The embassy arranged for him to resettle in the U.S. on a refugee program. His mother, sister and brother were in Chicago, so he came here and now operates a machine that solders computer boards.
The common early morning destination for Hisham and his coworkers from scattered points on the globe is the parking lot behind a modern, cinder-block building in an industrial park. Shure builds electronic devices from the circuit board up in this plant that most people would pass without a glance.
For its immigrant workers, however, the factory is a gateway promising to open onto secure lives for their families in split-level homes with nice lawns — just like the houses that beckon to them every day as they drive through the suburbs on their way to work.
Shure’s management is as pleased with its foreign-born workers as the workers are to be there. Production manager Barbara Ball estimates that up to 90 percent of the company’s 270 employees are immigrants. She thinks that they remind native-born Americans like herself of a dedication to doing a job right, a dedication that is largely forgotten.
A 29-year employee at Shure, Ball says there are good reasons why so many immigrants have been hired there in the past decade or so.
An honest day’s work
“There’s never any problem with attendance with these people,” she said. “They’re very devoted workers. They come in and give an honest day’s worth of work.”
She said that, during a crunch period, if those employees are asked to work extra hours or extra days, they are happy to do it. Many are sending a good portion of their paychecks to their families in the old country. Comparing the newcomers to American-born workers, Ball said they seem to appreciate more having a decent job with good pay (starting at more than $8 an hour there, about $1 above the industry average) and benefits.
“We Americans are spoiled,” she said.
It’s not just at Shure where that sentiment prevails. At Beltone Electronics near Chicago’s northwest edge, director of manufacturing Paul Kero estimated that as many as 75 percent of the work force is foreign-born. Because of that, Beltone has developed an extensive network of translators so that no new hire is linguistically isolated. Despite having to go to such extra efforts, the company seeks out foreign-born employees.
“We find these people come to work to work every day,” Kero said. “I am inspired by the work ethic of our employees.”
By the time Misrak D’esta — “TuTu” — sets off for Wheeling, her husband, H’guall, has already arrived at the U.S. Steel plant in Gary, Ind., where he is a technician. During the workday, they are 60 miles apart. That separation, however, seems minor to them compared with the two years H’guall, a social worker in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capitol, spent in jail as a political prisoner.
“I had no contact with him all that time,” said D’esta, 31, at one time a photographer for the Ethiopian Minister of Internal Affairs who took photos of her boss with visiting dignitaries. Now she hand-assembles various electronic devices that Shure produces at the Wheeling plant.
The couple have been in this country five years, and in that time have come to know one thing for certain about life in modern America. “To survive,” D’esta said, “you must have a good education.”
For them that has meant sending their 9-year-old son Kaldand to a private school. In order to pay tuition and keep two cars running so they can work, they have needed to make sacrifices. By far the greatest of these has been to leave their younger son, Robal, a 1st-grader now, back in Ethiopia with D’esta’s mother.
“There isn’t any way we could pay someone here to take care of him,” she said, “and my mother loves him and takes good care of him. But it’s hard,” she said, her eyes tearing. “Hard.”
`Go see Jane’
D’esta says she hopes the family will be back together soon and, when asked if she will ever return to her career in photography, says without hesitation, “I will.”
“When I was looking for a job, somebody told me, `Go see Jane,’ ” Bouavanh Meo — “Cassie” — recalled, not referring to her coworker of that name but unwittingly echoing a phrase from the city’s past. A hundred years ago, when immigrants were settling into Chicago’s Near West Side and needed jobs, they, too, found a Jane.
At the end of the 19th Century, it was Jane Addams whom immigrants sought out. Addams was co-founder of Hull House, a settlement house where generations of immigrants found jobs and housing and made their first steps into society. Today, it’s 35-year-old Jane Vellinga, employment coordinator of the Vietnamese Association of Illinois in Chicago’s Uptown area. Every immigrant there seems to know the woman with long, blond hair, a visual standout in the primarily Southeast Asian communities. She has become, says Eric Dougal, a job developer at the association, “the patron saint of job seekers.”
Though many benevolent organizations help immigrants find work, the Vietnamese Association is one of a few to offer training. In addition to Vietnamese, the association, which works with a wide range of ethnic groups, has found jobs for Cambodians, Ethiopians, Nigerians, Bosnians, Laotians and others. It’s part of what Vellinga calls “a one-stop shop for newcomers to resettle in Chicago.”
A program called REACT (Refugee Electronic Assembly Classroom Training) meets each weekday evening for six weeks and is intended to impart entry-level skills in soldering and recognition of electronic components. The electronics industry is one for which workers with minimal English language skills can be trained by largely visual instruction methods.
Classes are made up of men and women who, a short time ago, may have been farming a small patch of land in Bosnia or teaching elementary school in Bombay. Many come from cultures that frown upon accepting charity, which some were forced to take as they were bounced from one refugee camp to another. When they finally make it to the United States, they are eager to find work. A job means more than a paycheck to them. It’s a way of rebuilding their self-esteem.
The Vietnamese Association came up with the REACT program when employers’ interest in non-skilled applicants diminished. It places some 400 people a year in a variety of jobs — manufacturing jobs, secretarial jobs, white collar jobs. For some, it’s a first step into the job market while others are moving up to better opportunities. About 120 immigrants graduate each year from the REACT program, and more than 90 percent find work in the electronics industry, which desperately needs trained, reliable workers.
Though not every immigrant turns out to be an ideal employee, the association’s placement history is a good one.
“They’ve given us what we needed,” Barbara Ball said. “Most applicants from there score over 95 percent on the soldering test they take prior to employment.”
Up the employment ladder
Switchcraft Inc. on Chicago’s Northwest Side has a work force of around 600, more than 70 percent of which is foreign-born. In the past three months, the company has hired 24 immigrants through the Vietnamese Association. Says Amanda Vogel, of Switchcraft’s human resources department: “In the past three years, we have had 100 percent retention of the people we’ve hired through the association. We’ve found their skill level and their work ethic are at the highest level.”
“The whole idea,” Vellinga said, “is to get them in the door at better companies. Later, with more learning, they can advance.”
Each evening after work, Yevgenya Goykhman, the 45-year-old Russian immigrant her fellow workers at Shure have dubbed “Jane,” takes computer classes. Although she worries about not having enough time to spend with her 15-year-old son, Alexander, she thinks extra training will eventually improve the lot of her family, maybe easing the load of her cab driver husband, Lev, a recent immigrant from Ukraine who is working 16-hour days.
Her father, mother and herself were all trained as engineers, but her mother died, her father became ill and she couldn’t find a good job in the post-Communist economic chaos in Russia. But, she says, leaving her homeland to join a sister already in Chicago was not a decision based primarily on finances.
“It was a not a matter of economics,” she said. “We could handle that. But I had to think about my son’s future.”
She was reading that future from her family’s past. During the Stalin era, her father couldn’t work as an engineer because he was Jewish. Goykhman knew that, historically, troubled times often lead to waves of anti-Semitism in Russia. So much so that her parents had tried to protect her by keeping her ignorant of much of Jewish culture. They spoke Yiddish; she does not.
“A few weeks after we arrived in America, my father died,” Goykhman said, “and I realized I didn’t know how to do a funeral. I had been cut off from knowing Jewish rituals. The funeral director taught me.”
Coming to America has freed her son from the dilemma the family faced in the old country. Alexander, 15, attends Jewish religious school on Sundays and thinks of himself as an American.
“He loves America,” Goykhman said, adding a thought as old as immigration. “I am living for my child,” she said.
More foreign-born workers
Almost 10 percent of the U.S. population, nearly 26 million people, is foreign-born, a term the Bureau of the Census defines as including both legal and undocumented immigrants, those born elsewhere who have become citizens as well as those who have not and people here temporarily on student or work visas. Their number is growing. Nearly 5 million people came here in the 1970s, some 6 1/2 million in the 1980s, and 7 1/2 million in the first seven years of the ’90s. Among them, some 15 million are in the U.S. work force, about 11 percent of all workers, a number also likely to grow.
As politicians and media pundits debate whether a multiethnic future would be a good thing, this factory and others — as well as some schools and neighborhoods — already are living that future.
Bouavanh Meo came to this country from Laos in 1982. She finds working surrounded by people of so many nationalities “very interesting. We talk about how we live. It makes the day go by.”
Food often whets the appetite for knowledge of another’s culture. When, at Christmas time, everyone brings a treat to set out at a common table in Shure’s lunchroom, there is great anticipation, especially for the egg rolls made by some of the Asian workers and the Middle Eastern meat pies. Occasionally, a coworker’s wedding thrusts some employees into a culture completely foreign to them. Barbara Ball recently attended a Cambodian wedding, the marriage of one of the workers she supervises.
Such cultural interchanges are not new. Since the arrival of the Industrial Revolution in America more than a century and a half ago, factories have run on immigrant labor, enabling this nation to become that “Mother of Exiles” celebrated by Emma Lazarus’ sonnet inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty. In the Pullman plant on Chicago’s Southeast Side, Germans, Swedes and Italians worked side by side building railway cars, and, no doubt, sharing the lunchbox delicacies of their native countries. Poles and Yugoslavians did the same in the steel mills of northwest Indiana.
So, too, today, no second-shift worker at Shure can ignore the exotic aromas emanating from the lunchroom table shared by a group of Cambodians. Each of a half-dozen men and women daily prepares and brings a dish. At 5:30 p.m., they come off the line and gather around the table. They eat pot-luck style, digging into sour soup with pork and water chestnuts, Chinese sausage and fish soup in a vignette of Southeast Asia that is played out each evening in a factory in Wheeling.
By the time that the second shift is sitting down to eat, the first shift has made it home, having fought traffic for the second time that day. They are tired and have families to attend to, after which some will trade lunch pails for textbooks and head for classes they hope will enhance their value to employers.
Like generations of immigrants before them, they firmly believe that hard work pays off, that it will lead to better lives. And if the payoff doesn’t come to them, they still won’t think it was a mistake to have come to this country. As did the newcomers who came through Ellis Island in another era, those who arrive at O’Hare International Airport today take the long view. For the sake of their children’s futures, they set their alarm clocks early and get up to do it all over again.
“We work hard, we try our best,” Goykhman said, speaking for Tutu, Cassie, Shawn and, indeed, all immigrants. “Someone has to be first.”
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The Series
In the weeks to come, the Gateway Chicago series will examine: immigrants in the suburbs; the first days of a new arrival; pushcart entrepreneurship; and keeping in touch with the old country.
