Labor's Rainbow Colors
Large numbers of immigrants are joining the U.S. labor force, gaining more political experience and becoming a powerful voice for all workers.
By Jon Melegrito
Brenda Muñoz was eight years old when she boarded a bus with her mother and sister in their Guatemalan village of Santa Rosa. Placing their fate in the hands of coyotes (smugglers), they traveled for 11 harrowing days to the United States. They were eventually separated to avoid suspicion, and young Brenda was hidden overnight in a trailer as it made its way under cover of darkness into San Diego.
"That's the only way we could come here," Muñoz recalls. "My family had to take a lot of risks to find work."
Staying with relatives in cramped quarters in the Inglewood section of Los Angeles, Muñoz and her sister went to school while her mother cleaned houses all day and washed dishes at night. Her father, who had crossed the border a couple of years earlier, worked as a gardener.
Muñoz — who became a U.S. citizen after an amnesty law was passed in 1986 — is now an organizer for AFSCME. She knows that her family's experience parallels that of countless Mexicans and Central Americans who have been crossing the border in search of jobs in El Norte. Here in the United States they have re-built their lives by working at often non-unionized, low-wage jobs such as dishwashers and house cleaners.
Not all immigrants, of course, come to the United States illegally. In many cases, foreigners who enter as "visitors" become "illegal aliens" when they overstay and don't legalize their status. Anywhere from about 7 million to 11 million of these newcomers are "undocumented." On the other hand, the largest proportion arrives legally and become "permanent residents" and often, after a five-year residence in the United States, naturalized citizens. It is estimated that 40 percent of the population growth in the 1990s resulted from this influx. Mostly Latinos, Asians and West Africans, they account for half of the new wage earners who joined the U.S. labor force in the past decade.
30 MILLION STRONG. According to the 2000 Census, there are over 30 million immigrants in this country, representing 11 percent of the total population. And the percentage is rising nationally. Fully aware of that trend, a handful of labor unions have mobilized to organize the recent arrivals — an especially important development when the United States and its unions have been losing manufacturing jobs. To AFSCME, the effort is vital in three ways:
First, we are helping many of the nation's most-exploited workers — especially in the food service and health care industries — win a voice on the job. Second, we have been adding significant numbers to our own ranks, increasing our political power; for example, Council 31 recently launched a campaign to organize a chain of eight private hospitals in Chicago, where more than half of the 2,000 registered nurses and 8,000 medical technicians and custodians come from Asia, Eastern Europe, Central America and Africa. Third, raising immigrants' wages raises the standards for all workers in this country.
Speaking at a convention of Latino labor activists last year, President McEntee underscored the union's commitment to the immigrant community: "We need you — and we believe you need us — because all workers deserve a seat at the bargaining table, and all workers deserve decent pay and good benefits, and job security and job safety."
UNION WELCOME. The Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) and the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE!) have pursued similar initiatives. Nationwide throughout the 1990s, the hotel industry employed 1.8 million Americans — a great majority of whom were newcomers from different parts of the globe. Today, recent immigrants comprise 75 percent of HERE's membership.
Studies show that this mass migration is redrawing the profile of our nation's workforce and in some cases transforming entire industries. That is particularly true in home care — a low-wage industry — and part of the economy's broader shift to low-paid workers. And who gets to fill these jobs that few others want? Immigrants. According to the National Research Council, almost 43 percent of them earn an average of $7.50 an hour. In the aggregate, however, they contribute impressively to the economy, while getting little in return.
Recognizing the growing impact of immigrant workers on the labor movement and the pressing need to help them get justice at work, the AFL-CIO Executive Council recently called for an overhaul of U.S. immigration laws, including legalization of undocumented immigrants (provided they have been duly employed for at least five years and have no criminal records) and full workplace rights for all, regardless of their legal status.
Although the AFL-CIO's declaration made headlines in newspapers across the country, the seeds for it were planted more than two years ago. In February 2000, the Executive Council made a historic decision to reverse its long-held view on the matter.
AFSCME's commitment, however, started years earlier. We were instrumental in the formation 11 years ago of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, which has advocated for the rights of Asian American and Pacific Islander workers.
Making its new policy highly visible, the AFL-CIO held rallies and press conferences across the nation in August 2001. And with labor's strong push to have a federal law enacted, it appeared as though immigrant workers' rights would be strengthened. But the prospects changed markedly a few weeks later, when terrorist attacks rocked the nation and the White House sidetracked a broadly liberalizing agreement that President Bush and his Mexican counterpart, Vicente Fox, were discussing.
NEW 'FREEDOM RIDE.' To regain momentum, the AFL-CIO is supporting a nationwide campaign this coming fall: the Immigrant Workers' Freedom Ride. Inspired by the civil rights movement of the 1960s, union leaders plan to fill buses with immigrant workers and coalition allies from eight major cities and bring them to Washington for several days of lobbying.
According to AFSCME Sec.-Treas. Bill Lucy, a leader in the civil rights movement and a founder and the president of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, "The struggle for social, economic and political justice was at the center of the civil rights movement. That same effort must now be made on behalf of new immigrants who seek as we did a better life for themselves and their families."
The Freedom Ride will build on last year's "A Million Voices for Legalization" campaign, an effort that collected 1 million signatures and sent them on postcards to President Bush and Congress.
In the early 1900s, as the labor movement struggled with whether to organize along craft or industrial lines, other divisions were drawn among groups of workers by race, ethnicity and gender.
Forgetting that the country was a nation of immigrants, some leaders — among them the AFL's powerful Samuel Gompers — drew artificial lines for inclusion. The movement commonly directed its prejudice against the Chinese and southern European immigrants — a convenient move since so many members of the AFL had emigrated from northern Europe. The 1913 AFL convention not only focused on labor's opposition to immigration but also agreed to lobby for a literacy test that would provide another barrier to permanent entry into the United States.
Anti-immigration sentiments were strengthened by industrialization's displacement of skilled workers — most of them members of the AFL — by unskilled and lower-paid new arrivals. Until recently, many unions that had fought hard for higher wages and better working conditions felt highly threatened by non-unionized immigrants who would work for lower wages than the unions' members.
Even women workers — now such a fundamental part of the American labor movement — were viewed with ambivalence early on, according to Ruth Milkman, director of the University of California's Institute for Labor and Employment and author of Organizing Immigrants. She explains: "The movement supported the 'Equal Pay/Equal Work' initiative in the 1940s largely as a way to protect male breadwinners. The thought was that if employers were forced to pay men and women equally, men would continue to be hired. Paternalism and protectionism were clearly behind labor's support."
Milkman is optimistic that newly unionized immigrant workers will be as integral to the future of organized labor as their female counterparts are today. If so, unions that have radically changed their attitudes toward both groups will deserve a substantial part of the credit.
DIVERSITY, AFSCME STYLE. Much of our union's own impressive growth results from the large numbers of immigrant workers who have joined in the last few years. Recent organizing victories for the union include thousands of university employees and home health care workers in California and blue-collar workers at University of Maryland campuses.
In San Diego County, more than 12,000 home care workers — 60 percent of them immigrants — took a big step toward getting justice on the job when they voted to join AFSCME's affiliate United Domestic Workers of America-NUHHCE in 2002. There are now 38,000 home care workers in California who are members of AFSCME. As workers and staff point out, many of those individuals were working in what amounted to indentured servitude. They were forced into these low-wage jobs partly because they lacked language skills. But workers who made $6.25 an hour will now make $8.50 — and will also have health benefits for the first time.
In California's Orange County, where the largest refugee population of Southeast Asians has settled, Vietnamese and Hmong home care workers are presenting unique challenges because of their history and culture. "From where they came from, they value respect for authority," says David Thao, a Hmong organizer for UDWA-NUHHCE. "So, joining a union could be viewed as defying authority, and they don't want to lose what little they have in this country."
To reach out to these communities, AFSCME drew on the experience and expertise of immigrants like Bao Vang, a member of Local 151 (Minnesota Council 6). "You need to know the clan system in the Hmong community," Vang explains. "Before you can talk to these workers, you need to meet personally with the elders and explain what joining a union means. Once the elders give the nod, the workers become more receptive."
Low wages and lack of respect also galvanized the mostly immigrant workforce of home health aides in New Jersey's Essex County. In early August last year, they formed a union at Chrill, a non-profit health agency, and won a voice on the job with District 1199J, National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees/ AFSCME.
Joe Franklin, president of NUHHCE/ AFSCME 1199J, says there's a growing militancy among home care workers, driven in part by people who come to this country expecting better treatment on the job. Half of the more than 1,900 certified nurse assistants, housekeepers and dietary workers in his union are immigrants who have joined in the last five years. Franklin notes with amazement the range of languages that fill union hall meetings — Patois, Hispanic, Czech, Tagalog, Farsi and Hindi — and he readily acknowledges the challenge of navigating across various cultures. "It is absolutely essential that we understand the cultural differences among our members and try to meet their needs while developing a common bond among them. Once they realize that they have the same stake in the workers' struggle, they come out fighting."
But first, they had to overcome a virulent anti-union campaign by the employer, Chrill. "Management's low regard for workers fueled our solidarity and allowed us to turn back attempts to pit ethnic groups against one another," says Olga Mederi, a registered nurse who immigrated from Yugoslavia and is a member of 1199J's bargaining team.
NEW FACTORY WORKERS. As light manufacturing declined in the United States — a steady trend since the late 1940s — nursing homes, hospitals and clinics became "the factory" for many new immigrants. According to Joel Millman, author of The Other Americans: How Immigrants Renew Our Country, Our Economy and Our Values, English-speaking immigrants fit well into positions that were essentially industrial in nature — scrubbing bathrooms, preparing meals, moving patients — but that also required an ability to communicate. It is thus no accident that in New York City hospitals, the two biggest groups of workers are West Indian and Filipino. They speak English proficiently.
At the Nassau University Medical Center (NUMC) on Long Island, hospital jobs have attracted dozens of Filipinos, Jamaicans and Liberians, as well as Peruvians and South Asians. George Walsh, NUMC unit president of the Civil Service Employees Association (CSEA)/AFSCME Local 1000, says that those immigrants comprise 40 percent of the 4,000-member NUMC unit. "It's like a League of Nations here," Walsh declares. "And all these people from different cultures work together as a team." Doris Ruddock, a Jamaican-born LPN, attributes the camaraderie to a shared commitment to quality care. Adds Julia Seymour, a lab technician from Liberia, West Africa: "We win respect by affirming our culture. It values all persons as human beings regardless of where they come from."
SECOND-CLASS CITIZENS. California Local 3299 has been in the forefront of organizing the 17,000 food service workers, custodians, medical technicians and licensed practical nurses on the various campuses of the state university system. It is estimated that 70 percent are immigrants from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Thailand, Philippines, China, India, Sierra Leone and Ethiopia. Forty years ago, only caucasians and African Americans filled those jobs.
Since a large proportion of the workers are non-citizens, they are subject to abuse from employers. And like other undocumented workers, they live in fear of being fired. After Sept. 11, the sense of fear was at an all-time high, and for good reason: The Social Security Administration had been sending notices to employers advising them of discrepancies in employee-reported Social Security information. A common employer response to "no-match" letters is to fire the worker — even though employers are under no obligation to do so. In one instance in Los Angeles, a supervisor fired a number of workers after tricking them into admitting that they were undocumented.
To ensure that workers are protected, Local 3299 has instituted educational programs about new Immigration and Naturalization Service regulations and workers' rights — together with community and civil rights groups. Moreover, the local has won job protection and health insurance benefits for both "casual" and career employees who have been treated like second-class citizens for years.
LANGUAGE IS POWER. Recognizing the needs of an increasingly diverse workplace, several AFSCME unions have hired bilingual staff members and organizers, provided interpreters and sponsored English-as-a-Second-Language courses. (Illinois Council 31's Local 3506 conducts such classes regularly). Local 3299's regular newsletter includes a Chinese translation, and occasional brochures are written in Spanish, Laotian and Vietnamese. Some unions have also strengthened their partnerships with community and immigrant rights groups as a way of increasing their members' involvement in the political process.
"These workers had been ignored in the past," says Craig Merrilees, Local 3299 director. "They are now getting active and generating more power for the union."
Last year, more than 100 UCLA food-service workers — mostly immigrants — were subcontracted out. But they decided to stand up and demand the same union contract that others in the same jobs have. They enlisted the support of students, many of them children of immigrants, who rallied behind their parents' cause. After winning their fight, they also helped other food service employees at UC Santa Cruz. They scored a big victory when the UC management agreed to terminate the outside Sodexho contract, paving the way for about 400 workers to become AFSCME members next year.
AFSCME leaders and organizers are sensitive to the challenges this kind of organizing poses and are learning the best ways of meeting them. Referring to Chicago's Latino, Filipino, Polish and Russian hospital workers, International Union organizer Johanna Puno Hester (a second-generation Filipino American) observes, "They have to see — within our ranks — people like themselves who are actively involved."
Adds Merrilees, "They may be skeptical at first, but once we break down cultural barriers and they gain more political ex-perience, immigrants can get involved in highly polarized fights and become a powerful voice for all workers."
