We Made Them Rich and They Called Us Criminals

By David Bacon, TruthOut.org. Posted June 23, 2009.

Nevertheless, she got a termination letter too. She went with union representative Armando Espinoza to talk with Yolanda Diaz in human resources. "I gave her the letter, my Social Security number, and showed her my green card [immigration visa]. But Diaz said I was fired anyway because when I was hired I'd given different information to the company. I said the company knew about the change, and said it was fine a year ago. She said I was still fired."

Workers have a different explanation for the firings. They accuse the company of hiring workers who don't receive the benefits in the union contract. In the last contract negotiations, the union agreed that Overhill Farms could hire as many as 25 percent of its employees on a part-time basis. Such workers wouldn't belong to the union and wouldn't get vacations, holiday pay or a medical plan. "By getting rid of the regular workers, to whom they have to pay benefits, they're saving a lot of money," Vasquez charges.

Auerbach denies this. "The employees being hired to replace [the 254 fired workers] will be full-time employees, members of UFCW Local 770, with the same pay and benefits as other employees" including paid sick leave, vacations and health insurance. However, one worker, who asked not to be identified because he still works at Overhill, says "they hire part timers, who are only supposed to work 4-6 hours, but they get no benefits, no overtime, holidays or vacation." And another worker, who also asked not to be identified for the same reason, says he was hired at the end of May, at $8.15 an hour. "I have no benefits - no vacation, medical plan or anything," he says. "They call me a part timer, but I've been working 45-50 hours a week. I work every Saturday."

The company is obligated to give the union a list of all hires, regular and part time. But as of the time this article was written, Local 770 hadn't received a list of those hired since the terminations.

Whether or not immigration status is a pretext for terminations motivated by economic gain, however, the firings highlight a larger question of immigration policy. "These workers have rights," Nativo Lopez emphasizes. "They've not only done nothing wrong, they've spent years making the company rich. No one ever called the company's profits illegal, or says they should give them back to the workers. So why are the workers called illegal? Any immigration policy that says these workers have no right to work and feed their families is wrong and needs to be changed."

Lopez refers to an immigration policy called employer sanctions, part of the Immigration Reform and Control Act passed in 1986. It says that employers may not hire people who are "not authorized" to work in the US - that is, people who have no legal immigration status. In effect, it makes it a crime for those workers to work at all.

Starting in the mid-1990's, the Clinton administration began an indirect program of enforcing sanctions. It had the Social Security Administration send letters to employers listing the names and numbers of employees that didn't match its database? assuming that the reason for the mismatch was that the workers had no legal immigration status. Many employers then began firing those workers, especially when those workers were protesting bad or illegal conditions, or were active in joining unions. Under pressure from labor and immigrant rights groups, Social Security then included a statement in the letter warning employers not to conclude that the reason for a "no-match" was that the worker was undocumented. A further decision by an arbitrator in San Francisco concluded that, under a union contract, a "no-match" was not a just cause for firing a worker.

In 1999 in Los Angeles, the AFL-CIO reversed its earlier support for employer sanctions and called for their repeal. Instead of making work a crime, labor activists argued, the government should enforce overtime, minimum wage and other labor standards, and protect the right of all workers to form unions. Today, most unions with immigrant members don't ask them about their immigration status. A worker is a worker, they hold, and all workers have rights.

In 2007 the Bush administration proposed a regulation that would have forced employers to fire any worker listed in a "no-match" letter. Faced with the potential termination of millions of workers, including union members and workers trying to join unions, the AFL-CIO, several labor and building trades councils, the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Immigration Law Center won a federal court injunction stopping the proposed regulation from taking effect. That injunction still stands. But Bush also began developing a database called E-Verify, which employers would check to verify whether an existing or prospective worker has a legal immigration status. The main source of information for E-Verify comes from Social Security.

Many expected the incoming Obama administration to drop the effort to overturn the Bush "no-match" injunction and put E-Verify on hold. Instead, incoming Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced that DHS will work "to maintain a legal workforce through training and employee verification tools like E-verify, which improve the accuracy of determinations of employment eligibility and combat illegal employment," according to the ICE Worksite Enforcement Fact Sheet. The sheet says prohibiting the employment of undocumented workers will "target the root cause of illegal immigration." And the White House web site says President Obama "will remove incentives to enter the country illegally by preventing employers from hiring undocumented workers and enforcing the law."

See more stories tagged with: labor, immigration, unions

David Bacon is the author of several books, the most recent of which is Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants.

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