Cambio de Colores -
Employment Panel
Immigrant Workers in the Global Economy
March 12, 2003
Judy Ancel, Director, Institute for Labor Studies
I am here wearing two hats. First as director of the Labor Studies
Program here at UMKC where we provide training and education for and about
unions, and second as an activist in two organizations - one local and one
international that advocate for the rights of maquiladora
workers in Mexico and try to build solidarity in North America. Those two
vantage points give me a unique perspective from which to view the issue of the
rights of immigrant workers. In working with unions I see both the historical
fear of immigrant workers as unfair competition and the growing attempts to
organize them, and in our work in Mexico I see how the process of globalization
of the economy is driving the amount and terms of immigration to the United
States.
One of the people I've had the privilege of getting to know in
Mexico is a young woman we'll call Dolores who when I met her was working at
Delphi's Alhambrados Automatrice in Nuevo Laredo making wire harnesses, some
of which end up on the shop floor at the GM Fairfax plant. She had come to NL
from San Luis Potosi with her brother at about age 18 because there were no
jobs at home. In 1998 she came here as part of a workers center delegation, met
GM union members, found out about the strike then going on against GM which had
closed GM across North America, went back and told her fellow workers why it
happened and Delphi fired her. After trying to make a living while being on the
blacklist, she decided to come to the US and is now in Iowa working in a
restaurant, undocumented, living in a trailer with a cousin, but surviving.
I tell you about Dolores because I think that for years we
Americans were so taken with ourselves here in the U.S. that we thought the
pull of our higher wages and living standards was the main reason immigrants
came here. But there's a tremendous push going on which drives people like
Dolores from San Luis, to the border and then to Des Moines and it's
exacerbated by NAFTA and the whole process of corporate driven globalization
which has bankrupted farming and small business in Mexico, destroyed their
domestic food production and dislocated millions who then come up here to pick
and process the food which then often gets exported to feed, among others, the
Mexicans. It's a vicious circle.
Not only is it a vicious circle for Mexicans but it is for
Americans too because as long as Mexico fails to respect labor rights so that
workers can raise their standard of living there and earn enough to become
consumers, until the issue of global labor rights is addressed, our jobs will
continue to be exported and undercut, and no worker in the United States
whether immigrant or native will be safe. When you go to the border and witness
the migration of multinational corporations there, you immediately understand
that our standard of living here is intimately connected to theirs.
What you also see is that their export of people here, that is
Mexican immigration to the U.S. is intimately tied to the problem of the maquilas and globalization. The maquilas
function as a magnet pulling people out of rural areas in Mexico to the border.
Many then, unable to get jobs or earn a living wage, simply jump off into the
U.S. We simply cannot understand the problem of immigration without putting it
in the context of corporate-driven globalization and the denial of labor rights
internationally.
But NAFTA's vicious circle is very
useful, and probably no accident, in providing cheap, servile labor to American
corporations from huge corporations like Tyson to our local restaurants. And
this is nothing new in our history.
America, of course, was built with immigrant labor - moreover, it
was built with immigrant bonded labor. The overwhelming majority of
workers who came to this country in its first 200 years didn't come to enjoy
the freedom or to escape persecution they came because they were either kidnapped
or forced out of their home countries with the only option of signing
indentures. The reason I bring that up is that I think unfree
labor - and today's undocumented workers are just a new form of unfree labor - is an American tradition which is coming
back.
Our immigration laws today make a distinction between economic and
political refugees. The former have virtually no rights while the latter have
some. We should keep in mind though that from 1840 to the 1920s when we
accepted wave upon wave of immigrants, the vast majority were the same kind of
economic refugees that Mexicans are today, pushed out of Hungary, Poland,
Italy, China, Russia, Ireland, and Germany by the market forces of expanding
capitalism which made it impossible to sustain their families on the land. The
main difference between then and now is that then, except for the Chinese,
immigration was legal if you could pass the medical exam and weren't a known
revolutionary.
These immigrants filled the same economic role they do today, entering
the economy at its lowest rungs, working like beasts of burden to build the
American infrastructure, die in our coal mines, and toil 7 days a week in our
steel mills. Employers understood the value of immigrants. NY's Journal of
Commerce argued in 1892 that people, like cows, were expensive to produce, but
immigration represented a gift of a costly commodity. And employers took
advantage of immigrants' lowly position using
them whenever necessary to undercut wages of the native born and defeat their organizing
attempts. This too is an American tradition.
Because of this, it is no surprise that the struggling American
labor movement had a love-hate relationship with immigrant labor. For over a
hundred years the AFL and then the AFL-CIO were on record as opposing
immigration. Such sentiment was strongest in the skilled trades where immigrant
labor was often used as strike breakers and brought in when companies were
introducing new machinery that replaced skilled workers. Yet immigrant workers
were constantly organizing, too and were key to the eventual victories of
unions in many industries from garment sweatshops, to mining, to the steel and
meatpacking industries.
Today immigrants come from different places, but they serve the
same function economically and we are just as dependent on immigrant labor as
we were a hundred years ago. When you look at the numbers it's astounding. Of
the 16 million new members of the labor force from 1990 to 2001, 8 million of
them were new immigrants. One-third of
these new immigrants found jobs in agriculture/forestry/fishing or in mining,
construction or manufacturing and 40% of them went into retail trade and
services. In these jobs they face some of the worst-paying, most unhealthy
working conditions in America.
In a survey done with 178 immigrant workers in the Kansas City
area last year by Melinda Lewis of El Centro, she found that although
respondents reported working an average of 40 hours a week in
2001, they made only $19,200 a year average to support a family of four. In
2002 working the same average number of hours, they made only $17,400.
Immigrants
in low-paying jobs tend to work long hours without benefits and basic health
and safety protections. In the garment industry where many immigrants are
employed, according to Sweatshop Watch, Department of Labor estimates show that
over half of U.S. sewing shops violate minimum wage and overtime laws. These
laborers often work in dangerous conditions that include non-ventilated
factories, blocked fire exits, and unsanitary bathrooms. As many as
seventy-five percent of U.S. garment shops violate health and safety laws,
according to Sweatshop Watch.
In
construction, immigrant workers generally do not have the protection of unions
and suffer from lack of safety equipment and training. In the meat packing
industry, repetitive strain injuries are epidemic and often lead to the
permanent crippling of workers. In a couple of workshops I've helped out in for
El Centro with immigrant workers, the most common complaint was unsafe working
conditions and failure to abide by the state workers compensation laws.
Historically,
the way immigrants improved their work lives was by organizing and unionizing.
There really wasn't any other way. We have a middle class in this country
because our parents and grandparents and before understood that they could only
counter balance the overwhelming power of employers by organizing and winning
collective bargaining. The same is true today, and for this reason, and despite
the fear of the INS, both legal and undocumented immigrant workers,
particularly immigrants from Latin America have begun to organize.
According to labor journalist David Bacon, lots of
immigrant workers have been organizing in the last decade: janitors, farm
workers, construction workers, meat packing workers, hotel workers, and many
others. Last May, four
hundred workers won a union election at the ConAgra beef plant in Omaha, a city
where the INS's Operation Vanguard had destroyed
immigrant-based union committees only a few years ago. Recyling
workers in New Jersey also won a union and joined the Laborers Union, which is
organizing other successful campaigns among asbestos removal workers in New
York. The Hotel Workers Union won a 22-year battle for a contract at San
Francisco's flagship Marriott Hotel, and last year roofers in Phoenix, most of
them undocumented, successfully organized.
All of this
organizing led a couple of years ago to the historic change in AFL-CIO policy
on immigration. Pushed from within its own ranks, the Executive Council called
for an end to employer sanctions, amnesty, and the according to all immigrant
workers of full labor rights. They see the system of employer sanctions as an
utter failure which instead of eliminating illegal immigration has exacerbated
it because employers can manipulate the system with little fear of punishment
and reap huge rewards by employing workers with substandard rights. They call
for a new system of targeting employers who try to use a worker's immigration
status to intimidate those seeking to organize or otherwise exercise their
labor rights. They also are opposed to guest worker programs which truly
resemble the indentured servant status of colonial days by tying workers to
specific jobs.
At its
Executive Council meeting last month, the AFL-CIO announced it was supporting a coalition of immigrant workers, community, immigration and union
activists in mobilizing for the first-ever Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride to
support meaningful reform of immigration policy, including a “road to
citizenship” for undocumented workers. The Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride will
take place this fall and is modeled after the 1960s’ Freedom Rides for civil
rights.
Of course,
the policy change of the AFL-CIO occurred before 9-11, and the response to 9-11
is a clear indication of the progress immigrant workers had made in pushing for
their rights and for amnesty. It's no accident that, in its zeal to protect us
from terrorism, the government has targeted many of the groups of immigrants
who were successfully organizing. Number one example are airport screeners, and
the repression has not just come down on the undocumented but also on all
non-citizen airport employees. In California, people with 10-20 years seniority
were summarily fired because they weren't citizens. By federalizing airport
screener jobs, the government not only busted the unions that represented them
as contract workers but also as part of homeland security, wrote into the law
that none of them has labor rights thus at least a hundred thousand workers
lost the basic labor rights recognized by the United Nations in the name of
"security."
Since 9-11,
pressure on immigrant workers has intensified because of the 750,000 Social
Security no-match letters issued last year which led to the firing of untold
numbers of workers, and of course by the Hoffman Plastics Decision last March
by the US Supreme Court which for the first time allowed immigration law to
trump labor law by denying backpay to undocumented
workers fired for their union activity. Some employers have tried to
argue that the Hoffman decision also disqualifies undocumented workers from
minimum wage, safety and health, and other labor standards and worker
protection laws.
Journalist Bacon has correctly pointed out that
"the wave of repression against immigrant workers hasn't just affected
immigrants themselves. Limitations on
workers rights affect all workers. But
because immigrants have been more active in organizing unions and fighting
sweatshop conditions, the threat against them has increased the danger that
these conditions will spread, and affect workers throughout the labor
force."
Yet despite all this, organizing continues. My
experience talking to immigrant workers even here in Kansas City is that they
understand what unionization can do for them, and many are anxious to find out
more about their rights and explore the possibilities of organizing. Part of
the problem here, however, is that the unions still need educating. Many of the
leaders understand what American and immigrant workers have in common, but they
think it's impossible to organize and lack the language and cultural knowledge
to help immigrant workers unionize. A process of mutual education is really
needed. Immigrant workers need to learn their rights and how to organize, and
our unions need to begin to communicate with them and overcome outdated
attitudes. For those of you whose work may bring you in contact with both
groups, I strongly urge you to put the achievement of labor rights for
immigrant workers on your agenda and do what you can to educate both sides. We
need to be building coalitions,
advocating for workers rights, educating and training, and working together for
immigration law reform. If we don't we will only repeat the sad history of
division and competition between immigrant and native workers which only the
employers won, only this time, with globalization, it will be far worse. Just
as we need to build solidarity internationally to stop the race to the bottom,
we must build it domestically as well. Please help us do that.