A ‘Yelp’ for Migrant Workers

Centro de los Derechos del Migrante

Rachel Micah-Jones, a lawyer for farm laborers in Florida, was in Mexico to give a talk on workers’ rights in a village in the state of Zacatecas when she found herself gazing at a sea of white cowboy hats.

She recognized dozens of faces she had met in Florida — men who, when she visited their American worksites to ask how things were going, would only stare at the ground in silence.

But on their home turf, they looked the lawyer in the eye. They told her about the wretched living conditions, hours worked without pay, and the threats and punishment they faced for speaking out. They were angry.

“It was so powerful,” she recalls.

Soon after, she got a phone call from a colleague at Florida Rural Legal Services. Back in the States, a court case was about to be dismissed because the colleague could not reach her witnesses.

They were all in a little Mexican village, and the single phone that served the village was out of order.

As it happened, that village was four kilometers from where Ms. Micah-Jones stood. She found the witnesses, they spoke with the other lawyer, and the case was settled.

“The workers were thrilled.” she says.

Ms. Micah-Jones realized that if migrant workers wanted to receive fair wages and decent treatment, they needed both access to information and a way to share their real-world experiences confidentially.

So, soon after her sea-of-white-hats speech, she created Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, or CDM, an international nonprofit that helps migrants fight for better working conditions and shape policy in the United States and Mexico.

“I tried not to start the organization,” Ms. Micah-Jones says. “I went to other organizations and pitched it, but it didn’t fit with their mission. So finally, I couldn’t not start CDM.”

Filling the Labor-Union Gap

Since its founding in 2005, the group, whose headquarters sits above an eyeglass shop in Baltimore, has recovered more than $5 million in stolen wages for the workers it represents.

It has also won support from a parade of big grant makers, including Echoing Green and the Ford, MacArthur, and Open Society foundations.

A key component of her charity’s work, says Ms. Micah-Jones, is collaboration: “We can sit with the workers and design solutions.”

She’s taken her cause to courtrooms on both sides of the border and to Capitol Hill hearing rooms. “I find that, on the Hill, most of the people know nothing about how these systems work in real life.”

Last fall, CDM unveiled Contratados, a system it calls “the Yelp for migrant workers” because it allows workers to rate employers and their recruiters anonymously.

The site offers a model for charities to tackle sensitive issues by giving people a safe place to tell their stories and call out abuses. More specifically, say experts, it’s one weapon in the war against income inequality, and one that can be wielded by a broad array of workers who feel exploited by the 21st century’s freewheeling “gig economy.”

Such online communities are responding to the challenges facing traditional trade unions, suggests Aaron Sojourner, a professor at the University of Minnesota’s Institute for the Study of Labor.

“To me this is the same old purpose — workers helping one another navigate the labor market and try to raise standards — but harnessing a new communication technology,” says Mr. Sojourner, who has studied the “value of employer reputation” in labor markets without contracts.

“So you don’t have to go to the [union] meeting hall anymore,” he says. “It’s maybe a lower quality of communication, but it’s also a lower cost.”

Anonymous Ratings

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation provided the biggest grant for Contratados, says John Slocum, who oversaw the award at the Chicago philanthropy. Since 2011, MacArthur has awarded more than $1 million to CDM.

Ms. Micah-Jones’s strengths, Mr. Slocum says, include “being very attuned to the law, the types of litigation that happen in the U.S., and the policy process.”

Support for her group’s work has helped MacArthur further its goals to improve the legal protections for migrants and foster a better understanding of the link between migration and economic development, he adds.

“We’re not besieged by these immigrants,” he says, challenging some American views of migrants. “We live in a world where there is poverty, and we have some jobs. And we want to make sure these channels are not either exploiting those people who come here or undermining U.S. workers.”

Contratados allows workers to rate their recruiters and employers anonymously, in a searchable online format. Workers leave audio messages (the easiest thing for people who usually don’t carry computers or smartphones) that other workers can hear to find out if, say, “Juan from Juarez” is recruiting for a real job or running a scam.

It is illegal for job recruiters to take upfront payment from job seekers, Ms. Micah-Jones says, but it’s common. Workers shell out thousands of dollars to come to the U.S. for a summer of crab or mushroom picking, and sometimes lose it all. In designing a website to help rectify situations like these, she says, CDM sought feedback from its clients. Their ideas were decisive in shaping the final product.

For instance, if most migrant farmworkers want to use the Internet, they go to cafes, where sluggish web connections can make pages load slowly. So Ms. Micah-Jones scrapped her original ideas of posting videos and an interactive map of the employers: too much bandwidth.

But while videos and interactive maps were nonstarters, audio novellas — short dramas telling workers about common job-market hazards and how to seek help — proved popular. Website visitors listen to the audio and can follow along with accompanying comic-book style illustrations. The site also offers informational posters workers can print out and post around their job sites.

Counting on Women

In his research, Mr. Sojourner studied an online community similar to Contratados: Turkopticon, a seven-year-old volunteer effort that gives workers who take temporary jobs advertised on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk website a look at how a site’s contractors pay — or don’t.

“Employers with good reputations attract workers at nearly twice the rate as those with bad reputations, with no discernible difference in quality,” his study found.

But what makes Turkopticon effective is its popularity: Half the Turk workers Mr. Sojourner surveyed used it. On the web, building a following is everything, and it is not easy even with tech-savvy, highly educated workers.

Contratados’s focus on migrants makes that job more challenging. “It’s not a broadly known and used tool yet,” says Sasha Costanza-Chock, a member of Research Action Design, the worker collective that helped develop the Contratados website. CDM, he notes, is planning to start an outreach drive this month, including radio and print ads and meetings where workers live.

“We’re certainly hoping that it will blow up,” he says. “But I don’t think that will happen through circulation online. I think it’s more likely to come through a combination of radio and face-to-face.”

Contratados’ creators hope at least half of its users will be women. To help draw more female users, CDM is expanding Contratados to include domestic workers, such as au pairs.

“Historically, women have not had much of a leadership role in the labor movement,” says Katie Fox, executive coordinator of the Berger-Marks Foundation, a CDM supporter. “And we still don’t see many women in labor organizations.”

Contratados’s focus on women might help the site catch on as it fills a niche, she says. Women are recruited to submit reviews of employers, Ms. Fox notes, and are asked whether they’ve experienced sexual assault or discrimination.

CDM has “a lot of dreams” for Contratados, says Ms. Micah-Jones, “and we need money to get that done.” Among the plans: to develop a mobile-friendly version.

Today, CDM operates on a bit less than $1 million a year and employs a staff of 14 in three offices on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. The challenge now is keeping up with the work.

“Ideally it would be five times its size,” says Sarah Paoletti, director of the Transnational Legal Clinic at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, who chairs CDM’s board. “Five times the size, with salaries that match the skills and expertise of the staff.”