- There's always that thought of what can we do more to survive?

Because the ones that I talked to also have two jobs, you know, and like, dude, we can't survive out here with working all the time because that literally leaves like no time for your family.

- People work so incredibly hard everywhere, but definitely obviously in this county that I know well.

And they do everything that they can and they do almost everything as right as possible.

And yet it still means that they have to consider going without food for medical care or have to go forego medical care for food or rent.

- The farmers, the dairy farmers, chicken, beef, the restaurants, hotels.

In reality, I think most of California, most of Sonoma County runs on immigrant labor.

[speaking Spanish] - And again, they still have to deal with all of the inequality that people of my privilege already have to deal with, and then all of that horror.

It's unfathomable.

- Magnetic North brings neighbors together to explore the issues shaping our lives.

Through personal stories and honest conversation, we listen across differences, seek common ground, and ask what we can change together.

[solemn music] - My name is Rafael, but most people know me as Junior.

My day starts at 5:00 in the morning.

I get my food ready and go to work at the winery.

At 2:30, I finish there and rush to my second job where I start working again till 3:30 to 10:00 at night.

My wife lives in Mexico.

We have 15 minutes to talk.

How do you fit a marriage into a 15 minute phone call?

My family is the reason I keep going, but working to take care of them leaves me so little time to be with them.

I know I'm not the only one.

I hear it from my coworkers.

- My parents raised me to be self-sufficient.

Work hard, take care of yourself, and don't depend on somebody else if you can help it.

I took that seriously.

I worked while I went to school.

I still work hard, but there was a time when I wanted to work and I couldn't because I was waiting on my own immigration documents.

That's when I decided to go to law school.

Now I meet people who believe in hard work just as strongly as I do.

I recently met a couple raising three children.

One parent worked full-time in healthcare and the other worked three jobs, five people living in a one bedroom apartment, and they still were struggling.

When I hear somebody say, "They just need to work harder," I think about that family and how much harder.

And then there's the fear people carry to work, the worry that when they get there, will they get paid?

Whether they can speak up if they're mistreated, whether their family will be there when they come home.

One of the most satisfying moments in my work is seeing someone's relief when I tell them, "You don't have to be treated that way.

There are people who can help.

I believe in taking care of yourself, but I also believe we should take care of one another.

- California is the only home I've ever really known.

I've lived here since I was two years old.

I'm 42 now, and I still rent an apartment in downtown Santa Rosa.

We're told that we find a good job.

If we work hard, we'll be able to build a life.

But for too many people, I know work only pays for survival.

It doesn't leave much room for anything else.

I think about a coworker who does so much to help the rest of us.

He's one of the best workers I've ever known, and still his family has to consider changing healthcare providers, moving away and adding a longer commute.

And with gas prices the way that they are, he's doing his best.

And why that isn't enough to feel secure, I don't know.

What gives me hope is seeing people show up for one another.

When I was asked to support the workers in Sebastopol, I called my friends.

A small group of us grew into a much bigger one.

People came because they believed those workers deserve to be heard.

That experience stayed with me.

You don't have to work with someone in order to stand in solidarity with them.

I want us to have more than the strength to get through another week.

I want us to have the time, the security, and the confidence to build something together.

[piano music] - I know I'm struggling.

I know my coworkers are struggling, but there's other people out there, like out in the fields, and then they're the real backbone of this community and this county and they are being overlooked and I see it and it's hard because I also have family members who are out in the fields and you know, they, I had a cousin who was doing grapes and now he has to go and move trailers across the country just to make a decent pay to provide for his family.

But we come back to the thing that he doesn't see his family at all.

- Wages, I think, I definitely don't think that they're keeping up with the inflation that we're seeing.

So we're seeing a lot of families, immigrant families, mixed status families where you wouldn't have maybe an undocumented parent, documented parent, and then their children struggling to, to make ends meet.

- Growing up, my dad decided to work three jobs.

He worked from 6:00 to 4:00 PM, his primary job.

Then he would go help my uncle who has his own business from maybe like 5:00 to 9:00 PM.

And then from 9:00 to 10:00 we would all go clean a laundromat.

- We were just at that budget meeting and everyone's like, they're saying that the affordable housing, the threshold's too low now.

- Can't afford it.

- The workers are not making enough to continue with the high rising housing crisis and everything.

- There's always something that's always a requirement that is just out of their reach, and so they're constantly cutting.

[speaking Spanish] That means that people, humans, don't have the ability to find a, a better, more profitable job for them or something that could be safer for them.

That prevents that kind of mobility for everybody and makes it that much more difficult for people to get out of poverty and to have prosperity.

- In September of 2020, the Marathon Martinez Refinery made the switch to becoming a renewable facility.

With that, 350 people lost their jobs.

As we phase in renewables, we also need to phase in supports and safeguards for ourselves as employees and at a larger sense as well for the community.

- The, the kids are just so much more afraid.

The, the, you know, the older ones when they start to kind of understand what's happening out there, one of the baseball moms who's a US citizen and her son is a fantastic baseball player, he always, she told me that he asks every day, "Do you have your passport, mom?

Do you have your passport?"

- The fact that you can't even, you know, like when you go to work, you can't enjoy the benefits of, you know, like a decent healthcare or, you know, like you go out with fear.

You can't go to work safe because you're like, "What if I get pulled over or what if, you know, like see all the, you know, ICE comes over and then I'm at work and like what am I going to do?

Like what's my family going to eat?

You know, I'm the one that provides."

And a lot of them just provide, they come over because they want to provide.

And if they can't provide, the fear comes of who's going to provide for them, you know?

So, and it's, it's tough for them.

It's very, very, very tough for them, you know, for the whole family, not just like the workers themselves.

- You, you don't have to be treated like that.

But then on the flip side, they'll say, "But I have to work, so I have to put up with this."

And those are the other parts, and those are the parts I can't help with.

Assuming that this large, large corporation in Sonoma County will not accept the documents that I have provided for an employee that already works there.

They are threatening to let her go and they do not have the legal right to do that.

- And then I wish there was a way for them to see how real struggle is happening in their workplace instead of just from, you know, from a window outside an office.

So it's like, they're like, "Oh, they're doing great, but you see it for a minute.

Come and sit in my shoes for a week and you'll go home on Sunday tired, not wanting to get up for the following week."

But unfortunately, that's the reality for, I want to say what, like 80% of the workers in the company.

- Welcome to Magnetic North and welcome to everyone watching at home.

In an earlier episode, we asked what it takes for the people who make a community work to afford a home.

Tonight, we're asking what it takes for work itself to provide a secure life.

Behind the businesses and services we rely on are people balancing rent, groceries, healthcare, and time with their families.

For some immigrant workers, those pressures come with another burden, fear about what might happen when they leave home for work.

Public media gives us a place to hear experiences we might otherwise miss, understand the choices facing our neighbors, and bring a little more perspective into our own lives.

That's what we hope this conversation offers tonight.

Joining us are Rafael Malfavon, sharing his experience as a worker, Robyn Mancini, an immigration attorney working with Vidas, and Joel Berger, a union steward and labor organizer.

I'm glad you're all here.

You've each shared something personal with us and I appreciate that.

Let's start there.

Junior, you spoke about showing up for your second job exhausted.

- Yeah.

- But still showing up with a smile.

What do you wish the people that you're interacting with or even your employers were able to see behind the curtain of just your everyday life?

- I wish they could see the actual physical work that goes into it.

There is a part that you show up to work and it's customer service, so you have to be like, "Oh yeah.

Hey, how you doing?

I'm doing great."

But the fact that there is a very exhausted person behind that smile, I wish they can really see what goes in behind that smile.

It's not just like greeting people and yeah, I'm doing great, but there's real struggle behind everybody's eyes and I wish that people truly got to see that.

- What happens mentally and emotionally, if you're working six days a week and you have one day to reset and that keeps going over and over again, what is the mental and emotional toll?

- Yeah.

It's when you work six days and you work from five in the morning to 10 at night and then you still have to go home and shower, get everything ready for the next day.

Sometimes I end up going to sleep at 12:00.

That one day, that Sunday doesn't really feel like a rest day.

It just feels like another day.

- Robyn, you're seeing people showing up frightened all the time.

How does that fear affect the way that people work or the way that people think about even coming into work?

- I think that even getting them to come in to ask for help is even harder than them leaving to go to work.

I feel that the fear that is out there that something may happen on their way to work, they don't want to take their children to school.

It saddens me, but then when they actually are able to come and ask for help, that sort of opens the door.

Can we actually maybe fix this situation?

Is there help out there for us?

And coming in to see us is the first step in actually opening that door to help people.

- Joel, what struck me about what you were saying is this idea of cutting essentials for essentials.

When people are just thinking about a baseline of survival, what does that really look like?

- Fear, unfortunately.

It's one of the things that we see consistently for everyone, regardless of what job that you have and that struggle that you know that you have, it ends up tearing you apart inside.

It becomes something that doesn't allow you to sleep.

It turns into ailments.

It turns into worry and concern.

It can affect your job performance, which could lead to you having less if you lose your job.

It is something that can lead to terrifying aspects and it's all very preventable.

- You describe yourself as working full time in your 40s and you're still renting and you say that you're still struggling, even though you do describe yourself as someone who is privileged.

When you think about others who are also struggling even just to make ends meet working two jobs, how does that affect your perception of your own life and the people you're organizing with?

- It's a shock to reality that if somebody that had a privileged life growing up that is still unable to even consider buying a house or improving my general quality of life is having this level of difficulty.

I'll tell you, there's something that is really pretty rough about a car.

Everybody needs one in society and I went into debt because of it and then I went into debt due to a lot of other reasons because that's just what we do.

My mother had to die for me to become debt free, and that was because of the life insurance policy that she had.

When I realize that and I tell people that story, it not only brings that sense of privilege, but I can't even imagine the horror for people that don't have a life insurance benefit that they can claim when a loved one dies, and that's beyond depressing.

- Wow.

Thank you for sharing that.

Junior, are there other invisible parts and invisible costs that seem to stack up when you're working one job, two jobs, just trying to stay afloat?

- Oh yeah, there's 100%.

One of the things is that your mental health is part of it, but also your physical health.

So when you work so much, you tend to always want to be like, "I can't get sick.

I have to keep going.

I keep going.

I keep going."

And when you get to the point where your body literally breaks down and you have to take that time off, then that's when you're like, "Now how am I going to make rent at the end of the month?"

So it's a real struggle.

And then sometimes for you just to try to get by and not make that mistake, you're so worried about not making a mistake, you can really hurt yourself at the work site and people don't see the mental health behind it and the strength that you have to have to keep going.

- I'm hearing something striking from all of you.

Junior, you're explaining almost every hour that you're awake, you're working.

- Yeah.

- Joel, you're seeing people struggling and you're working to organize with these people.

Robyn, your clients are coming in, they're struggling, there's fear, it's palpable.

Has work always been this precarious?

What's new and what are things maybe that have been previously invisible that are coming more to light now?

- I wouldn't say that the fact that everything, obviously prices is going up on everything.

Like you mentioned on the gas, like your coworker, and it's like people don't realize how every small amount adds up to a bigger amount.

So you say, "Okay, I spent an extra 20 bucks on gas, big deal, 20 bucks."

But then when you add groceries behind that, when you add rent going up on that, when you add all this other stuff, that's when you start realizing how did those 20 bucks become 500, $600 extra a month?

And that is the part that people have, tend to be blind to those small rising prices, even though they look so small, when you add them all up, they accumulate quick.

- And something that, from my being an immigration attorney, it's a privilege to be able to afford an attorney.

It's almost an unreachable privilege for most.

And so I'm so grateful to be able to be a part of VITAS where we do offer low income and also grants for so many people who qualify so that we can at least take that off their plate when they are seeking to be able to work in the United States with legal documentation so that there's one less expense that they have to come up with.

And I'm proud of the strides that VITAS has made in being able to service so much of our population here in Sonoma County and many of the other counties around just Northern California.

- I feel that there's kind of a difficulty of realization based on time.

I think we can kind of all agree that the American dream, we've heard many kind of jokes in the modern era about the American dream, but that's because it feels like it is effectively unattainable now.

And I think what's changed is I had an expectation because I was told it.

I worked at the Apple store during the Great Recession and I just kind of said, "Oh, well, I work in retail.

That's not enough.

I need to move higher."

And I moved higher, became a technician, and I was in that job for nine years in a retail job.

But I remember reading books where people had worked as a standard cashier, even a manager at a McDonald's, and they could support an entire family on that income.

And I believed that the same thing could happen to me.

And well, time kept going on and I work in a very well paid government job as an IT technician and I still can't afford that dream.

I think that reality is really sinking in for everybody.

- Right.

And when we think about everybody, employers are also feeling that squeeze.

So Junior, when an employer tells you, "We can't give you benefits anymore," or, "We have to lower your wage because we can't afford it," what's fair and how do you respond to that?

- I can only speak on a personal experience.

So there's companies that do say, "Oh, we can't afford to pay you."

So we have to cut costs, but when you see in every company, the first cost that gets cut is always the worker.

So the management and the owners, I mean, I'm happy for them.

Yeah, it's their company, but you have to worry about your workers too, which are the ones that are providing for you.

And so I think that the big issue there is that the companies are not looking at the workers themselves.

And I feel that... I kind of lost track of my train of thought, but I feel that the companies don't really realize how of an impact it is when you cut people's wages instead of taking that little sacrifice for the people that are actually making you the work.

- And Robyn, I see you nodding your head.

You're speaking with people all the time that are doing this work that have very strong opinions.

What keeps them from speaking up?

- The people that come to see me generally are mixed families.

So a mixed family is somebody who is documented and undocumented.

And I feel like the undocumented spouse in that position is just grateful to be able to work.

And that's sort of the saddened part.

So they'll just take whatever is going to come at them in order to be able to bring something home, to pay for the groceries or to pay for the gas, because our society at the way it is right now does not lend itself to a single family income.

And that's the saddest part that we, or I grew up with a mom that stayed home and that doesn't exist any longer.

And so everybody has to work and everybody sometimes has to work two jobs.

- Do either of you have anything to add about what you're seeing, the fear of speaking up from workers?

- Oh yeah.

There is a big fear on speaking up because they have a belief that most workers believe that the company or some companies truly do give their best for their workers.

But when you start to see and organize with other workers and you start having these small conversations, "Hey, well, the company's doing this.

The company's doing that.

Why do we keep getting affected?

Why are we the ones being affected?"

So when you start seeing that companies start targeting the workforce before they start actually managing the company, people start getting together.

And when people start getting together, that's when they start to have a voice and everybody, everybody's voice counts.

- I will say that that rings so true to me.

And kind of going back to another level of privilege that I have is that at the job that I work at, not only am I a part of a fantastic union, SEIU 1021, but I'm also a union steward for that union.

I help embolden and protect my fellow workers, my peers that work with me.

And it is something that I did take for granted at times, but now working with Junior, working with the community organizations that I have and just regular, honest, hardworking people that don't have the protection of a union, I have learned how powerful being together and being in solidarity as workers can truly be because when you have that protection, a lot of the worries and the concerns and the threats that can come from higher management immediately disappear because the concern of dealing with the whole of your workforce rather than the single individual that you can fire is something that they just do not want to deal with.

- Robyn, I wanted to go back to, as you were mentioning, mixed status families, differing levels of fear.

How much does status or documentation come in when workers are talking about fear?

Is it just undocumented populations?

- I could speak for the people who come to see us, which are the majority.

We're helping one of the spouses in order to obtain legal documentation.

And I think that the fear can come from the other side of that, the spouse that's going to work and potentially leaving their undocumented spouse, whether they're at home or where they're headed off to work themselves, what is going to happen?

Are they going to come home?

Are they just not going to show up?

What's going to happen if they are detained for the day?

Will I ever actually find out where they are?

Those are the fears that I see coming from the population that is documented that are in these mixed status families.

- If employers and workers do have shared interest to work toward more affordable living wages, what seems to be standing in the way?

- Greed.

- Yeah, - Agreed.

- Yeah, agreed.

Sometimes people or companies in general want to act like they see your struggle.

But like I said before, it's just them seeing at you from a window and they come down, say hello, "Oh, we're doing great."

But they never really see deeper.

So when you speak up and they're like, "Oh, you're just being greedy.

You want more of this, more of that."

It's like, "No, I just want to live comfortably.

Right now I'm just surviving."

- So what's at stake then if nothing gives, workers are not able to make a livable wage, what do we really have to lose here?

- I mean, nothing.

The idea is we have been struggling for so long.

You can look at the statistics or historical records, but 50 plus years is kind of where things have started to really stagnate just in this country alone.

And it is becoming something that is so difficult to grapple where people again have been told over and over again that if they just keep working hard enough, and yet we have been for effectively a generation or more, and that has not rung true.

And so I think people are now waking up to realize that no matter how much of this lie that they're being fed, that it's not good enough.

I think the solutions though are where people are getting mixed messages.

- We've heard about the problems.

Now we're going to take a look and learn a little bit more about the solutions.

In our next video, that's what we'll see.

And when we come back, I want to understand a little bit more about how we might do some more building and make that happen.

[uplifting music] - Individually, it's like the satisfaction that you do have a voice.

You're not alone.

There's other people that are in my same situation.

I'm not saying I'm the only one, but some of my coworkers that are speaking up, we feel that empowerment.

When the company starts to give you that respect, you're like, "What do you think of this?"

It's like, "Hey, we have a voice.

We're not just here and working with our heads down.

We have a family.

We have a voice that we can speak up.".

[speaking Spanish] - We do have the ability to report wage and hour violations, which can actually allow somebody to become, allow them for a humanitarian visa.

So we do, or California does have those provisions in place to help undocumented workers or sue their employers too.

You're not prohibited from recovering under workers' comp for failure of an employer to give you a safe work environment in order to recover against them.

So I mean, I have heard the stories of a employer in, I can't recall the state, but where he hired undocumented workers, it was to build a fence.

And after the fence was completed, he called ICE so that he did not have to pay them.

Thankfully in California, that wouldn't happen.

- I think a lot more transparency is definitely something I would like to see more from employers.

I think that there is a automatic bias that when a business owner becomes a business owner and starts to employ people, that they almost think that is by nature that they have to be an adversary against the worker because there is a barrier there.

And I think that that is a huge misnomer.

You can be an ally to your own workers.

You can understand local policies, things that you can inform your workers that they should probably vote on to make things easier on the employer and on the business as a whole.

But instead of having that, we have that adversarial nature that says, "I'm the employer and it's my job to kind of push back on you and not help you."

- A new Senate and a new Congress.

This fall, I think we have to cut off the money, the funding to ICE, and that would be the first thing that might help people get back into the workforce and not be afraid, especially when people have work authorization and ICE is still attacking them and arresting them and detaining them.

- In this area particularly, I would say an increase in public housing.

I would say some strategic repeal of Prop 13 when it comes to the housing crisis that we see here in California, but certainly in our area.

The inability for people to not just afford housing in an ownership sense, but even afford rent is something that is so antithetical to human existence.

[speaking Spanish] - So if companies and the community and the people that live here were to back up those workers, it would be such a good place to live.

When you go to work without that fear, when you go to work and you know that you can provide for your family, it'd be such a beautiful place to live.

It'd be like a gem if everybody was treated with respect.

- The fact that they know that they have a community that has backed them, I think they're going to think very hard about the next time that they argue against that or they consider going into impasse immediately off the bat, because these are things that people remember.

When we stand together, when we stand firm in solidarity, not only do we bolster ourselves, but we also earn a greater part of that prosperity that we are owed due to the work that we do.

- I know people all over the US and all over the world can hear what we're doing.

And if we start changing the fact that all over the world, the workforce is always being overlooked, we can plant a little seed.

We might not change the world, but we can plant a little seed and let the next group of people know it's like if they raised their voice and they made this, we can also do it.

- We are calling on the consumers to support and to back up workers.

- We've heard several ways forward.

I'd like to ask which would make a difference here, what it would take to put them into practice and where you see room to work together.

Joel, you're an organizer.

Tell me about a moment when you realized this works.

- There was something that really struck me when I went to the Bird House, which is a organizing group for Jobs with Justice or a local North Bay Jobs with Justice.

And it was, I think, the very first time that I met Junior and the organizer said, "Hey, we're inviting you all here because we want to let you know that we need to help some workers organize and it's for a winery."

And there were so many people from all of the other organizations that I've had the pleasure of working with from North Bay Organizing Project to SoCo DSA to SEIU.

The list goes on and on.

And when that meeting was done, when we said, "We're going to fight back, we're going to get a contract, and we're going to make sure that these workers are protected."

And at the very end, we all chanted yes we can.

But the sound in that room and the way that people belted it, it felt so real.

And then weeks later when we had our first actual picket and hundreds of people showed up, I knew that this works.

- Robyn, Joel is saying speak up, organize, come together as a community.

And you're speaking about a lot of people, a lot of families who are worried about their status, worried about their families.

What would need to change or to exist for you to see this as a realistic option to speak up?

- Thankfully, we live in California and California has protections in place for undocumented people as well as the documented.

We have crime humanitarian visas that are given to people who, when their employers violate their rights under the labor code, the department or California will sign that they qualify for humanitarian visa.

It's called a U visa.

If they're labor trafficked, we can get them what's called a T visa.

So thankfully where we are, well, the federal law has made that available to workers, but it's up to the individual states to see if they will enforce it.

And California is really good at protecting people from being trafficked, labor, or being exploited within their jobs where a house falls on them and all of a sudden they didn't work there that day.

I have a very sad story of a family who up in one of the remote towns, they are on a dairy farm and they are provided housing on the dairy farm by the employer and there was faulty wiring in the house that the employer provided.

The house burned to the ground and took two of his children with it.

And it was the most heartbreaking story.

A girl that was eight and her sister that was 10 died in the blaze.

But the positive that came out of that was that because the employer had violated the code within providing safe housing, if you're going to give your employees housing, it must be safe, that we were able to have the labor board here sign a case and will allow the mom and dad to pursue a legal status in the United States.

- What happens to this fear that you were speaking about when people come to you and they realize, "Oh, I have rights, I have support, I am backed."

What changes?

- The smile that comes across their face.

A lot of them come from countries where there's absolutely no, they don't take care of their labor force and them understanding like, "Oh, so I can actually do something and be protected."

Their shoulders will come down and sort of they exhale.

And that's the nicest thing to see is when they sort of relax and exhale that there's something that maybe we can do to help them.

- Junior, you spoke that some days you're working upwards of 15 hours to get sometimes just 15 minutes with your wife on the phone.

If it was a normal weekday and you came home at a normal time, let's say 5:00 or 6:00 PM and you could spend the evening with your wife, what would you do?

- Definitely watch movies with her.

Watch movies with her and have some nice dinner, actually wind down, relax and let that stress from the daily stress go and be like, "You know what?

I'm going to kick my feet up for a little bit and cuddle under a blanket with my wife and watch a movie while we drink a nice cup of tea or coffee."

Yeah.

So that would be ideal for me.

- Yeah.

When we're talking about a lot of these struggles that feel so far out of hands, either at the federal level, at the federal level or at a corporate level, what can people do as a community?

- I want to say that raise their voice.

I want to raise their voice, get together.

Because as you know, we've been organizing in my workplace and man, the support the community gives is unimaginable.

So when you are going, like what I'm going through, working all the time and not getting the proper respect and a livable wage, and if I didn't speak up, nobody would know.

But then when I started speaking up, people heard me and they were like, "Hey, I'm going through the same thing."

So when we got together and we trying to organize the power that comes behind the community, and a lot of most of them are undocumented, the support that we get is tremendous and I want other people to feel that.

And if you're undocumented, I want you to raise your voice because you will be heard and there's people out there in the communities that are going through the same thing that you are and will listen and support you because there is a lot more of us than there is of the wealthy.

And when we all get together, it's a powerful, powerful thing.

- I'm hearing you and Joel explain the importance of community and of not just workers coming together.

What would make somebody who isn't struggling themselves feel connected to a cause like this, like livable wages in a community?

Why is it important?

- I think that one of my favorite adages, which is a rising tide raises all ships.

Knowing that just because an immigrant community or even a community that is less fortunate gets a little bit more, you also get more out of it as well.

You feel less stress.

You feel like you can save for a vacation that you've been wanting to take or buying maybe that thing that's a hobby like a 3D printer or something that you couldn't afford before.

It's all of that rises up to allow you to enjoy those, what were before, considered luxuries and now is something that a standard person can just be able to afford and not worry about making rent or having to cut for cut's sake.

I think that seeing that those people can realize that we can have that.

It's not just about me.

- This dynamic between survival and luxury and what those terms mean now, thinking beyond just what a livable wage is, what else would matter as a worker?

- Safety.

Safety and peace of mind.

Knowing that when something goes wrong, you can say something and you will be heard.

Also safety.

When you don't have that amount of stress of always working or am I doing things wrong?

When you don't have that fear behind, you focus more on what you're supposed to do.

You're more proactive.

And so besides just the livable wage, you get maybe a good healthcare.

If you get a good healthcare, you're like, "I can take a day off and go to the doctor if something is hurting and I can afford it."

So that sometimes it should be a luxury and everybody should have it.

Everybody should be able to go to the doctor and be like, "This is going on."

So there's that part as well.

It's not just about making a livable wage, but also have that security that you can go out there and work and know that you can focus on your job or focus on whatever it is that you do and come back home safe.

So that's another part.

- And even after that where you have a livable wage and you have healthcare, and then actually getting to save for the future to be able to retire, I don't even know if anybody can think about that in this, the way we are right now, especially the immigrants who are undocumented.

That's not even something that they can consider that you can actually save for the future.

We're struggling day to day.

Do we actually have anything?

Or if something were to happen, my car broke down, can I pay for the small things that just wouldn't, that don't come up on the regular?

- I've heard each of you in different ways talk about them or they tonight when we're thinking about employers versus workers.

Is there a situation where workers are able to make a living wage and nobody has to lose?

- There certain is.

- Absolutely.

Yes.

- Yeah, there is.

The thing about it is that, I want to speak a little bit on this, is that big companies always want... It's not even sometimes the company, sometimes it's more like management.

So like the owner, when management does good, the owner says, "Oh, management is great."

But then management forgets to focus on the worker.

So sometimes management gets in the middle between the workforce and the owners.

So if the owners were to actually see what the workers are going through, the owner can actually do something about it and worry about the workers, and there is a possible balance in there.

- I'd like a final thought from each of you.

What is one action you want our community to take next and what would make it possible for working families?

Robyn, we can start with you.

- Dignity for undocumented workers, allowing a path to legal status.

This administration is closing those doors and taking those rights away that are drafted into the legislation.

And in order for us to stop that, the community needs to contact your congressmen, contact your senators and say, "We have to give these people who are here and working a pathway that they can get on to be legal because doing it the right way is the motto and we actually need to follow that."

- Joel?

- Yeah.

I think one thing that everyone in our community can do very easily right now is to start being a community, to remove the insular idea that we all have as a people and to talk to so many more people, people you've never met before, people that you interact with all the time but never really get to know your barista, your coworkers, just random people on the street.

"Hey, I like your blouse.

"Just start a conversation and get to know them.

The more that we get out of an insular community and the more that we become a true community to talk to each other and get to know each other, we can protect each other more.

- Yeah.

I want to give you the right.

What I want is the community to come together and actually start helping each other out.

So when you start building a strong community and everybody is supporting each other and something goes wrong, one voice won't be heard, but many will.

So if we all support each other and we worry about from the immigrants all the way to the privileged, everybody deserves a happy life and not just survive on a daily basis.

- I'd like to thank our panelists for sharing their experiences and considering what comes next.

We've heard about how the pressures of work can reach into every part of a family's life.

And I want to thank each and every one of you for showing up tonight and really being vulnerable with a tough conversation and looking at how these conversations improve the conditions that matter.

For those watching at home, we hope tonight has offered something to think about, something new to understand, and a closer connection to the people whose work sustains our community.

You may agree with some ideas and you may question others.

We hope that you'll keep the conversation going.

Thank you all for your time tonight.

Robyn, for your comments, Joel, for your perspective and Junior for really showing us what it looks like on the day-to-day.

Thank you to everyone and to Audacity Rising, our partners.

I'm Shandra.

Thank you for joining us for Magnetic North.

[applause] [uplifting music] [uplifting music continues] - Let's keep the conversation going.

For more information about Magnetic North, tickets for future episodes and streaming content, visit norcalpublicmedia.org.

[light music]