Helping Hands Center
(Los Manos que Ayudan)
Rosa Sutton, organizer
107 E. Second St.
Siler City, N.C. 27344
919-742-6100

In 1989, two Episcopal priests in Siler City, concerned about reports of exploitation of low-wage workers in the region's large and growing poultry industry, got a small grant from Durham's Institute of Southern Studies to set up Helping Hands, a grassroots organization that would seek to organize workers around workplace rights and mobilize public opinion in support of those rights.

At the time, the poultry workers were predominantly African-American and mostly poor. Today, they're still poor, but the payroll is now heavily Latino, and Helping Hands has added the Spanish title "Los Manos Que Ayudan" to its name plate and added bilingual organizers to its staff.

Organizing focuses in three broad areas: (1) Working with poultry workers themselves to educate them about their workplace rights, including OSHA, workers compensation and information about carpal-tunnel syndrome, a disabling repetitive-stress injury that's endemic in the poultry industry.
(2) Working with plant management and local political officials. (3) And, perhaps most significantly, working with the pastors of area churches to heighten their awareness of poultry industry problems and to win their support.

It's a long and difficult road, as many of the poultry workers are recruited from Mexico, El Salvador and elsewhere in Central America, and they're dubious about their rights and fearful of losing their jobs; organizers doubt that many of them are properly documented or have "green cards." A fair amount of Helping Hands' work goes beyond the workplace to immigration and advocacy issues and, perhaps when a new worker is hired to replace a Spanish-speaking organizer who left the group recently, they'll get into literacy training and ESL.

Meanwhile, with the staff temporarily down to just one and a budget of under $100,000, there's a lot of work to be done. It's a matter of social justice, Rosa Sutton says; times have changed a little in rural North Carolina, but a lot of change is needed still.

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