Tantiado steps down as coalition president

Irene Tantiado, a vocal labor activist, is stepping down from her post as president of the United Coalition of Workers, citing a desire to work independently as an advocate on behalf of workers’ rights.

In an interview Wednesday, Tantiado said that she had submitted her resignation to the coalition the previous day but plans to continue her work alone.

“I will be in a better position, I think, to help if I’m my own because I will be working on an individual basis,” she said. “I will be able to act faster and make decisions faster.”

Tantiado won election to the coalition’s presidency earlier this year and devoted her term to addressing issues critical to the CNMI’s population of foreign workers such as the needs of foreign parents with children who have disabilities and the failure of some local insurance companies to pay workers money they are owned through surety bonds. She has formed close ties with key lawmakers and officials in the CNMI to lobby for workers’ interests.

A contributing factor to her resignation, she noted, was some disagreements within the coalition’s leadership.

“When you’re in a group, there are a lot of differences and that was basically one of the reasons, because of that, why I wanted to leave,” she said.

In one of her last acts as the coalition’s president, Tantiado yesterday sent two letters to federal officials on the pending federal takeover of local labor and immigration rules and the needs of alien worker parents whose children have disabilities.

In her Aug. 5 letter to the U.S. Department of Labor, Tantiado urged its officials to begin playing a more active regulatory role in the CNMI, saying foreign workers have found themselves subject to substandard working conditions and, in some cases, abuse by their employers.

Since the passage of the recently signed “federalization” bill, Tantiado says local labor regulators have told workers to hold back their complaints until federal officials take control.

“We earnestly ask that as the Department of Labor assumes increased responsibilities here, that the employees you assign here will be particularly sensitive to the fact that we guest workers came here to earn a living, doing jobs the local workforce could not fill,” Tantiado writes. “The wages we earn are higher than in our home countries, but none of us has become wealthy working here.”

In a separate letter to the Department of Homeland Security, Tantiado asked officials for help for alien workers who are the parents of mentally and physically disabled children. Many of these parents, her letter notes, are facing repatriation but their children are American citizens. Local officials have said the parents cannot stay but they could leave their children behind—a position most find unthinkable.

“If we go back to our country, most of us are from provinces where there is no medical facility available to provide the necessary medical care that our children need,” Tantiado writes. “Because of the economic condition of our own country, we might not be able to receive the same assistance from our government.”

Federal and local government officials could not be reached for comment on the letters at press time.