What's Labor's Role in Immigration Reform?

By Tiffany Ten Eyck, Labor Notes. Posted July 7, 2009.

When you say there must be a “secure and effective worker authorization” mechanism, what you mean is that employers may not hire undocumented workers, and if people are already in the workforce, they must leave.

LN: That brings us to amnesty. This platform offers up the adjustment of status for current undocumented workers.

DB: Amnesty is important, but it is not going to eliminate the effect of worker authorization. Because people are going to continue to come so long as this economic inequality exists—they will be in our organizing drives, they will be members of our union.

So the real question for us is, are we going to defend our sisters and brothers who don’t have work authorization?

We just had a good example at Overhill Farms down in LA. Management fired 254 people on May 31 for not having good Social Security numbers. These people belong to UFCW Local 770. What is the union going to do?

If the union was following the protocol in the AFL-CIO-CTW position it would say, “OK, you don’t have work authorization; I guess you shouldn’t be here." That basically gutted the union. How can you have a union in which 254 members out of 800 get fired and you don’t defend them?

LN: Part of the platform calls for an independent commission that determines the number of foreign workers admitted to work. I wonder if the folks who charted out this new platform would argue, “There’s going to be plenty more work visas and people can come in legally.”

DB: This is the heart of the employers’ proposal. Employers have been proposing guest worker programs since going back a long way.

But we now have 10 percent unemployment. So proposals for allowing employers to recruit 400,000 or 500,000 workers a year under work visas and bring them to the U.S. are not politically realistic. Congress is not going to pass them.

So what employers have proposed is to kick the ball down the road: if in the future employers want to claim there are labor shortages, they can go to a commission and if the commission agrees, then the commission will allow them to bring people in on temporary work visas.

Now, there are a lot of things wrong with work visas. First of all, people are recruited by employers. That means a system of corruption and recruitment in the countries that people come from. People have to pay someone off in order to get visas.

The workers at the Signal shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi, paid $20,000 apiece for those visas to come to the U.S. People have mortgaged everything their family has in order to send someone here.

The other big problem is that these are all visas that say you can only stay in the U.S. if you are employed. If you are thinking about signing the union card or you want to make a complaint about unpaid wages, if your employer fires you, you become deportable. So people are not free in this status. These are not visas that lead to permanent residence or citizenship, they don’t carry political rights, these folks are never going to be able to vote or receive social benefits. They’re not the social or political equals of the people living in the community around them. This is what employers want. Because this is the way of forcing people to work for cheap.

If you believe that there have to be full rights for immigrant workers, then you would not support work visas or guest worker programs. If there’s work for 400,000 people a year in the U.S., why not give people green cards instead of work visas?

Besides that: what is a good union supposed to do if there’s a labor shortage? If an employer is having a hard time finding workers, what do you do? You go on strike. You use that as a way to force wages up. So why are we being bad trade unionists?

LN: Why did the AFL-CIO soften its stance against guest worker programs?

DB: The AFL-CIO agreed to a position that is much closer to Change to Win’s, specifically to SEIU’s. So you could say that this is the price of unity.

But the rationale always given for this by union lobbyists was that this is just political realism. That we are not going to be able to get any kind of immigration reform without the support of the employers, and the employers are not going to support any reform proposals that don’t include guest workers. So this is surrender to that logic.

See more stories tagged with: labor, immigration, unions, illegal immigration, afl-cio, change to win

Tiffany Ten Eyck, a veteran of the successful Taco Bell Boycott campaign, is Promotions Coordinator for Labor Notes, where this piece originally appeared.

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