Undocumented - illegal immigration in NYC

What's the Union got to do with it?

After years of neglect, unions are making overtures towards incorporating the concerns of undocumented workers.

Shomial Ahmad

“Buy American” was a rallying cry for many Americans and unionized workers in the 1980s. “Protect American jobs” was an echo of this nativist sentiment. It was within this climate that the largest federation of American labor unions, the AFL-CIO, backed the employer sanctions provision of President Ronald Reagan’s 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). The act granted amnesty to 2.7 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, but also imposed new fines on employers who hired illegal immigrants. Congress wished to “close the back door on illegal immigration so that the front door on legal immigration may remain open.”

But the back door remained wide open. Instead of illegal immigration going down, it has increased many-fold since then. From 1980 to 1984, before the passage of employer sanctions, 40,000 undocumented Mexican immigrants entered the United States each year. Now, two decades later, 485,000 undocumented Mexican immigrants come to the United States each year, according to Pew Hispanic Center.

Advocates of the law thought illegal immigration would decrease because hiring undocumented workers would become illegal, but that dream never became a reality. Many loopholes made penalties infrequent; employers were given several warnings; raids were prohibited without a warrant. In 2002, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) collected $2.6 million in fines from 320 employers. With millions of dollars spent on protecting the borders, only 36 agents are used to inspect 300,000 businesses.

The AFL-CIO has had to make changes in order to deal with the needs of America’s changing workforce— especially its undocumented workers. In the years of the upsurge of undocumented workers, the U.S. economy shifted from manufacturing to more of a service-sector economy. Companies began outsourcing manufacturing jobs abroad, and more new immigrants worked in the service sector. Union membership declined. In 1975, the New York City union had two million members. Now, they have only one million.

Many undocumented immigrants work in industries targeted by unions: building services, healthcare and delivery services. So in the early 1990’s union leadership didn’t just become conscious of the declining membership, but that it needed to meet the demands of a restructured economy. Two labor unions within the AFL-CIO-- Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE)—began to lobby the Executive Council of the AFL-CIO to rescind employers sanctions. These two unions organize in industries with large concentrations of undocumented workers—janitors (SEIU) and garment workers (UNITE).

Their argument was that employer sanctions essentially hurt employees not employers, and ultimately hurt the ability to fight for labor rights in these industries. In 1995 John Sweeney, a former president of SEIU, ran for president of the AFL-CIO on a New Voice ticket. He advocated for sweeping change in the labor movement, and among his suggested reforms was the removal of support for employer sanctions. He was elected, but it wasn’t until four years later that delegates at a national convention voted to repeal the AFL-CIO support of employer sanctions.

What took the AFL-CIO over a decade to recognize many immigrant labor groups realized at the time of its passage. In New York City, Chinese Staff and Workers Association (CSWA), Center for Immigrant Rights and the AFL-CIO’s local DC 65 were among the groups that opposed employer sanctions.

With sanctions, employers of undocumented workers are likely to act like they are doing the worker a favor by hiring them. The undocumented worker will work for less, and will not complain against the boss for fear deportation. Before employer sanctions, the policy was: “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” Now, it’s: “Tell and don’t complain.”

In New York City’s Chinatown, Wing Lam, an organizer with CSWA railed against the passage of employer sanctions in 1986. Through the years he has watched the AFL-CIO change its position.

“[The union] says that the law promotes discrimination,” said Lam, sitting at his desk filled with papers. “We say it's not just a discriminatory labor practice. It's a slave law.”

After the passage of the law, employers only asked for immigration papers from foreign-looking job applicants. Civil rights organizations rallied that it was a discriminatory, unevenly applied measure. But according to Lam, the more pernicious form of the law is that it gives the power of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to the employer. It creates an underground economy, where undocumented workers are criminalized for selling their work, and thus are stuck working for one employer, or in CSWA’s words, “one plantation.”

Lam has seen how the passage of employer sanctions has affected Chinatown workers. From 1988-1993, the largest number of Chinese illegals ever, entered the US. Entire ships set sail from China, smuggling thousands of Chinese to America. American employers, who want to drive down wages in their factories, formed alliances with the smugglers, to ensure a constant stream of a docile workforce. In Chinatown it created a curious situation where undocumented workers were paid more than documented workers. Because employers don’t pay taxes for undocumented workers, they can lure them to work by offering higher wages.

“It’s even worse than a credit card,” said Lam, explaining how many employers save up to 40 percent by hiring undocumented workers, while only a fraction of that saving ends up in an employee’s pocket. “Why don’t they give the extra ten percent to the undocumented?”

Employer sanction also caused labor standards to deteriorate. Even now, where 90 percent of Chinatown’s garment shops are unionized through UNITE HERE, the working conditions have plummeted in the past two decades. In Chinatown’s garment industry, garment workers in the 80s spent 35 to 40 hours a week at work, and made close to $400 a week. With more undocumented workers coming and being pitted against documented workers, the working conditions for all garment workers has gone down. Today’s garment workers work an 80-hour workweek, sometimes making only $2.00 an hour.

CSWA formed when a restaurant union failed to meet the needs of its members. Second to the garment industry, the restaurant industry is the largest employer of Chinese Labor.

In the 1970’s, a few waiters frustrated with their working conditions in Chinese-operated restaurants in the Upper East Side approached AFL-CIO’s Hotel and Restaurant Employees and Bartender Union Local 69 in order to join. Many restaurants in the Upper East Side soon became unionized, but the union would frequently refuse to enforce contracts. As a result, many Chinese labor activists formed CSWA to act as a union watchdog and also to encourage unionization among a workforce that had previously been betrayed by union officials.

Lam had previously worked as an AFL-CIO organizer and had seen the limits of working within a mainstream union. Instead of being a grassroots organization, where the union would meet the needs of the rank and file, decision-making came from the top down. Union leaders, who were out of touch with working conditions, would make decisions. Workers would only be mobilized every two or three years once a contract expired, otherwise their day-to-day concerns would not be met. When he and others founded CSWA, they wanted to create an organization that fought for better working conditions—wages, hours, workplace safety—and quality of life issues as well.

Initially the organization was seen as bridge between the community and the union, and now twenty-five years after its foundation, it functions as both a community center and a labor group.

Labor groups like CSWA are an immigrant’s answer to a union. While the AFL-CIO has been inching towards recognizing the needs of new immigrants, the neighborhood-specific and ethnic-specific labor groups have filled the vacuum. Union officials previously worked within the confines of labor law. While it is not illegal to organize undocumented workers, in order to be a union member, one has to have a social security card. For many union organizers, undocumented workers are too difficult to organize, as reflected in statement by one AFL-CIO official: “Illegals seldom join unions and they almost never go on strike.”

But this isn’t the prevailing sentiment of all AFL-CIO unions. “Justice for Janitors” in the 1980s was one of the SEIU’s most public campaigns ever. They organized janitors who worked for large corporations. Soon the companies began hiring nonunion subcontractors instead. Most of these janitors were undocumented workers. In 1991 during an SEIU campaign in Silicone Valley, union leadership saw the power of employer sanctions. Just as workers were beginning to organize, the INS showed up, raiding the employer, and thus union-busting.

CSWA along with other labor, immigrant and African-American groups are still campaigning for repealing employer sanctions. For Lam repealing employer sanctions is a more pressing issue than asking for amnesty for the nation’s undocumented workers. But since 1999, when the AFL-CIO voted against employer sanctions, the AFL-CIO’s major resources have been directed to raising consciousness for amnesty for the nation’s 8 million undocumented immigrants. In 2003, AFL-CIO organized the Immigrant Freedom Ride. Where over 900 hundred immigrants traveled in eighteen buses across the country. Their final destination was Queens, New York.

Now two years later, there are no signs of the demands of the Freedom Ride being met: legalizing the status of the nation’s illegal immigrants, increasing visas for family reunification and stepping up protections for immigrant workers.

“I was betrayed. When we started this thing, we made history,” said Armughan Asar, a Pakistani limousine driver who helped organize the Freedom Ride. “I was in the newspaper and on television, but after that now maybe [the union] doesn’t have interest in it.”

Two years after the Immigrant Freedom Ride, it seems that the AFL-CIO’s gains in organizing undocumented workers are symbolic rather than real. In November 2005, President George W. Bush outlined his immigration policy with a billboard in the backdrop stating in all capital letters, “Protecting America’s Borders.”

“We're going to create a temporary worker program that will take pressure off the border, bring workers from out of the shadows, and reject amnesty,” President Bush said.

All the slogans and calls of the Immigrant Freedom Ride fell on deaf ears to the nation’s policy makers. In fact in the months preceding Bush’s speech Senators John McCain and Edward Kennedy reached a bi-partisan consensus by introducing the “Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act of 2005,” which would create a new guest worker program, where three-year temporary visas would be issued to prospective immigrants. Instead of granting amnesty to the nation’s undocumented immigrants the bill would give these immigrants a chance to become temporary workers with precarious labor rights.

Many immigration advocacy groups compare guest worker programs to indentured servitude. If a guest worker gets fired from her sponsoring, she has 60 days to find a new job. The specter of getting fired also limits efforts for these guest workers to fight for their labor rights. Yet again, the AFL-CIO has remained silent on the issue.

Immanuel Ness, a Political Science professor at Brooklyn College, has studied the organizing campaigns of undocumented workers in both worker’s centers and unions. He studied the success of the SEIU’s Justice for Janitors campaign. In New York City, the Unite Local 169 organized undocumented Mexicans workers employed in Korean-owned greengroceries and delis. They fought for better wages, but the campaign soon ebbed with intra-union conflict. Another AFL-CIO union, UFCW, claimed that Unite 169 was organizing in their sector, and the labor organizing suffered. With union bureaucracy and infighting stymieing organizing efforts, workers' centers try to address the needs of America's changing labor force.

“I consider workers’ centers to be critical to a reinvigorated labor movement,” said Ness, sitting in his office filled with political posters. “They give people the sense that they have the power to overcome their hardships of their grueling work.”