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Title: Immigrants And Unions Author: Chuck Hendricks Date: 2002 Language: en Topics: Immigrants, unions, Northeastern Anarchist Source: Retrieved on March 24, 2016 from https://web.archive.org/web/20160324224519/http://nefac.net/node/121 Notes: Published in The Northeastern Anarchist Issue #4, Spring/Summer 2002.
I remember being on a construction site right after a strike by the
plumbers. One of the clearest things that stuck out was the hostility
between the Hispanics and the white workers. There’s always a certain
level, but this was worse than normal. I found out why after only a few
days. During the strike the boss hired Hispanic plumbers to fill their
spots, when the union realized that many of the scabs were undocumented
they called the INS on them. Pretty soon the strike was settled, and
scabs that had papers were allowed to stay and keep their jobs. They had
to join the union because the contract said so, but they hated the union
and the white workers for what they did to the undocumented workers. The
question that comes is, what would have happened if these scabs were
from Germany or Canada? Would the union have called the INS then? And
how did the union know that some of the scabs were undocumented or did
they at all? Maybe they just assumed that brown skin meant “ILLEGAL?”
This isn’t something that’s uncommon in America. For many years unions
have looked down on foreign workers and in many cases actually worked to
keep them out of the country. They believed immigrants would be willing
to work cheaper and undercut all that the unions have fought so hard
for. Unions helped institute laws that fined employers, but expelled
workers for not having the proper documentation and the laws themselves
were a sham. The best example, being the I-9 forms we all have to fill
out when we get jobs. A boss has to look at the paper work, but if it
turns out to be fake, that’s the workers fault. If they get busted all
they have to do is fire the person and nothing happens to them. But then
the worker is either out looking for another job or in jail waiting to
go back to their home country.
It’s this same sentiment that led unions to back a policy of “America
First,” or “Buy American.” Where workers were asking consumers to pick
products based on where the boss was located. All together what it
really meant was that unions were trying to protect American workers
from what they believed to be the horrors of hard working, subordinate,
cheap foreign workers.
This policy was played out in the fact that unions ceased organizing new
immigrants. What this meant for all of us was the death of unions and
the division of the working class into ethnic groups. And those that
spoke English had a chance for good jobs and those that didn’t would be
stuck working in low paying, unorganized industries.
However, it wasn’t bound to stay this way forever. Those industries
where workers where highly unionized like steel, auto, textile, and
electrical manufacturing, began to be moved completely overseas in the
70’s. There isn’t a single television made in America anymore. This had
two effects, unions were losing their base and young people had to find
new industries to work in. Many of these weren’t as high paying or
beneficial as the ones that their parents had enjoyed. These jobs are
mostly in the service sector, like hotels, retail, food service, and
technology.
At the same time new industrial plants are popping up all over Central
and South America, as well as Asia. The economy of those regions was
changing, just as Northern Europe had done a century before. The rapid
industrialization combined with the new world order of trade pacts and
massive loans, led to the change in society. Countries like Mexico
started doing whatever they could for these companies that were flooding
to their shores. Environmental, labor and social laws were relaxed, but
not without a fight. Unions, activists, and many others organized and
fought the change. However, it seemed that the companies were winning.
So in the midst of a changing economy and society many of the best
organizers, as well as many everyday people left their homelands in
search of a better life. Much like the European immigrants that built
the labor movement of nineteenth century in America.
For the most part, the recent immigrants (both with and without papers)
work in service sector, agricultural, and hospitality type jobs. Which
happens to be the only industries (besides prisons) that are on the up
swing. They are also the only industries where unions, that were once
dormant, are now focusing heavily on organizing. In the past five years
the only unions growing are ones that are in industries that are not
highly unionized, have a large amount of immigrants, and are in
non-mobile industries. These are just the type of jobs that recent
immigrants are likely to be found in.
This means that the labor movement, which was once a bastion of white
men, now has a new face. Unions had to learn how to organize and work
with people of other nationalities, cultures, languages, and different
ideas of what a union is. This meant unions had to change.
This isn’t to say that all unions have adapted to the new economy and
the new immigrants. Rather, ones that have are growing and are better
off for doing so. Obviously unions that will call the INS haven’t
learned that it’s just dividing the working class, when the real goal of
a union is to build those bonds. And many unions are now embracing our
differences and finding that they actually make us stronger.
Organizing immigrants is a challenge, but really organizing anything is.
Circumstances that immigrant workers face when trying to organize in
this country are different from other groups. Many had bad experiences
with prior unions, either in their old country or in this one. Other
times there are language barriers that keep groups of workers from being
able to effectively communicate with each other. In most workplaces
bosses try to divide the workers by playing favorites with certain
groups to keep them from trusting each other. Undocumented workers often
fear deportation, and documented workers fear for the loss of their
jobs.
However, these are things that can be overcome. In some ways organizing
with fellow workers is the only way to fix them on a permanent basis.
The biggest threat to undocumented immigrants is the INS. Bosses use
this as a threat all the time, and in some cases actually do turn
workers over. There’s one great example of a boss doing this and the
workers fighting back.
In Minneapolis, Minnesota workers at a Holiday Inn Express Hotel were
organizing with the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE). For
years the bosses had been hiring undocumented workers, believing that
way they would never speak up about the bad conditions. However, when it
became apparent that the workers were organizing, suddenly the boss
realized that the workers did not have legal papers. So he called the
leaders of the union into his office for a meeting and had the INS
waiting for them. All eight workers were going to be deported. The union
began filing charges with the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) and
the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) about retaliation.
Both agencies filed suit against the company. The union organized
community support from clergy and citizen groups of all nationalities
into civil disobedience. In the end the workers won the right to stay in
the country, each received thousands of dollar in back pay from the
company and they got their union recognized by the bosses.
The same year in Minneapolis the union organized a citywide strike of
over 1,000 people. In the city over 30% of hotel workers are immigrants
from all over the world. During the strike everything had to be
translated into twelve different languages. The workers struck over
common things, such as, wages, hours, benefits, working conditions, etc.
But the thing that made this strike different was that working class
people in this country, no matter whether they have lived here a week or
their entire lives, acted together. The negotiating committee for the
union had people that spoke all these languages and were many different
races, but what overcame all that was their class solidarity.
Both of these were great instances where the working class, both
immigrants and Americans, organized together and fought for the benefit
of each other, creating a true union culture. In many union contracts
workers win rights where the employer won’t hand over information to the
INS unless forced to do so. Many times there are free English classes,
and in some cases where the majority of the work speaks a language other
than English, the managers are required to be bilingual. Together all of
this really shows us one thing; the working class in America is
changing. It’s been happening over the course of decades, but like
anything else it takes time to come together. For the first half of this
century, the established unions in the country had forgotten that they
were not the entire working class and that they couldn’t pick and choose
who was going to be in it. But now unions and the American working class
are starting to look the same, with women, minorities and recent
immigrants are becoming the driving force behind the recent upsurge in
union organizing.
But this change in what unions look like also has had a change in how
unions act. Part of this is due to the fact that employers in the
service sector have been used to treating their workers like crap. When
you combine that with a determined and fighting union, you get a
militant struggle. Instead of being content to fight out the organizing
drive behind closed doors or through the Labor Board election process,
the workers are taking their union struggle to the streets. Unions like
1199, SEIU, HERE, UNITE and UE are doing more direct action. This means
standing up to the boss and in some cases to the government. A typical
1199 drive at a nursing home means, rallies, demonstrations, civil
disobedience, and recognition strike.
This change wasn’t just brought about because the union leadership
realized that it was the right way to do things, but rather it was due
to a change in who was being organized and what they were bringing to
the process. On HERE picket lines it’s typical to here chants in Spanish
or Creole. During the nursing home strike in Connecticut last month, I
heard chants to a reggae beat. The cultures of the unions are changing
to reflect the changes that are going on within our class as a whole.
But beyond how the unions are organized, how they fight and what they
look like, there are other things changing, like their stance on broad
social topics, such as, globalization, governmental regulations,
sweatshops, and US foreign policy in general.
When it comes to globalization for years unions in the US tried to stop
jobs from leaving, putting most of the blame on the foreign nations and
workers for the process. However, recently, most unions have shifted
their focus away from attack on foreign nations and instead focusing on
attacking the economic policy and institutions that allow for a system
whereby the working class the world over is being attacked. Instead of
fighting to boycott foreign made goods, unions are putting political and
economic pressure or companies and politicians to create global worker
rights standards. They are also trying to find new ways of working
together to forge a global workers movement.
For years unions had been trying to put pressure on the federal
government to raise the minimum wage, but they haven’t been very
successful. Picking up were community activists left off in the 1990’s
the labor movement has put a lot of money, time and resources into
fighting for and winning, local living wage laws. This is done not just
by the unions, but also by building coalitions of students,
progressives, church groups and the active involvement of the workers
themselves. This accomplishes two things, it does something good by
bringing up the standard of living for workers, but more importantly it
makes people begin to fight together. It lets working class people know
that their churches and community are behind them. This is especially
important in immigrant communities.
Finally and one of the best changes is the US Labor Movement’s change in
its stance on US foreign policy. For many years the labor movement in
this country has really done all it possibly could do to destroy
international solidarity, stop the growth of independent and militant
foreign unions and keep any sort of anti-capitalist agenda out of unions
and working class organizations the world over. The AFL-CIO’s Solidarity
Center (the unions foreign relations arm) is taking steps to bring
radical, communist, anarchist, and reformist unions together in a
working relationship. Not to mention individual unions are reaching
across boards and finding ways to help or in some cases even organize
with each other. For example, The United Electrical Workers (UE) and the
FAT (an independent union) are working on a cross-board organizing
project of the factories along the Mexican-American Border. Another
great example is the United Auto Workers, who routinely send members
from one automakers factory to a plant in another country to build bonds
within the rank and file. They are also trying to find ways to work
together on collective bargaining and collective action.
The truth is that all of these changes didn’t just happen because they
were the right things to do. It would be nice to think that people
operated that way, but the changes occurred because the working class of
the country was changing. Most the people that work in inner city
laundries don’t have connections to Germany or England anymore, the
working class in this country is not the steel-working broad-shouldered
white guy of the 1930’s. Our class is quickly becoming the international
working class, in hotel strikes where workers speak 12 different
languages, in laundries where the entire workforce is Black and
Hispanic, in clothing sweatshops where everyone is Cantonese or Laotian.
Our class is changing and that means that the unions we organize have to
be different, fight differently, and act differently.
It doesn’t work anymore for old white guys to work out deals with the
boss behind closed doors, that’s not what we need or want. What we need
is to build militant cross culture unions. And we can’t stop at the
oceans or the borders. The economic system that we live in has become
globalized. It’s not enough to organize with the folks who work with you
in the Hilton, because Hilton has thousands of hotels all across the
world. If we want to make our lives better it’s got to be done with our
coworkers and the rest of our class all across this globe.