Viva la Union
(Page 2 of 4)
Utne Reader March / April 2007
Hannah Lobel, Utne Reader
From shop floors to Washington headquarters, unions are waking up to the immigrant workers in their midst, promoting their cause and tapping their numbers for strength. This shift marks a radical turnabout from the 1980s, when the old guard AFL-CIO lobbied for companies to be penalized for employing illegal immigrants, and blue-collar workers and union stewards alike shunned them as usurpers sinking wages.
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In recent years, immigrants have shed the yoke of infiltrator and donned the cape of tenacious underdog, revitalizing an anemic labor movement struggling to maintain its relevance. Immigrants have provided the backbone for high-profile successes such as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Justice for Janitors campaign, which ensures fair wages and benefits for the workers who clean up after corporate America.
Outside the union fold, immigrants are at the forefront of new strategies to protect workers, most notably the 'worker centers' multiplying across the country. Leaving behind labor's primary tool of collective bargaining (and the legal strictures that accompany it), these organizations are focusing on servicing immigrant communities. They educate workers about their rights, provide language training and educational opportunities, give legal assistance, go to bat for workers seeking back wages or fair pay, and push public policy reform -- all within an organization that places a premium on developing leaders and ensuring that all members' voices are heard. In a sign of the groups' growing import, the AFL-CIO announced strategic partnerships last year with two worker center networks, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network and Interfaith Worker Justice.
Immigrants have made such gains despite uniquely high barriers -- language, culture, the threat of deportation -- and especially exploitive conditions. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, foreign-born workers not only earn less than the native born, they're also more likely to die or be injured on the job.
'Hazards that most Americans think we got rid of in the 1920s are routine for immigrant workers,' says Jennifer Gordon, associate professor of law at Fordham University and the author of Suburban Sweatshops: The Fight for Immigrant Rights (Harvard University Press, 2005). And companies get away with it. Though undocumented immigrants are entitled to the same workplace health and safety protections as all workers, they often fear that they'll lose their jobs or be tipped off to immigration officials if they complain or report injuries. What's more, explains Gordon, since the U.S. Supreme Court's 2002 ruling in Hoffman Plastic Compound, Inc. v. National Labor Relations Board, companies can act with impunity against undocumented immigrants trying to shore up their rights by supporting a union drive. Unlike other workers, illegal immigrants fired for union organizing are not protected by the National Labor Relations Act's guarantees of reinstatement or back pay -- the two major disincentives for union busting.