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Immigrant Workers &
the AFL-CIO Split
by Andrew Pollack /
September 2005 issue of Socialist Action
On July 18, the week before the AFL-CIO split convention, John
Wilhelm resigned as head of the federation’s Immigration Committee.
Wilhelm, president of the hospitality industry division of UNITE HERE, led
the committee at a time when the federation had changed its long-standing
opposition to the rights of the undocumented.
In his resignation letter to federation head John Sweeney, Wilhelm
underlined the importance of that change and the new-found unity behind it,
and continued: "By that same hard work, the Immigration Committee led
the labor movement in the critically important job of finding the right
path to protect
immigrant workers after 9/11, including the historic Immigration
Workers Freedom Ride in 2003, which united the labor movement with immigrant
advocates, the religious community, and community organizations."
But Wilhelm then complained that "sadly, you and the AFL-CIO
staff took control of the AFL-CIO's immigration work. That work suffers
from the 16th
Street focus." He claimed that Sweeney had sent out memos and
statements, cancelled meetings, and taken other actions without committee
involvement.
The Las Vegas Sun quoted Wilhelm as saying that Sweeney
"appears threatened by the committee, which is made up of a dozen or
so ranking union leaders across the country. … ‘The bureaucracy in
Washington has always felt uncomfortable with the fact that the immigration
committee was a real committee of real union leaders,’ said Wilhelm."
Sweeney’s Response
In his response the next day, Sweeney paid tribute to Wilhelm’s
efforts in helping to bring about "historic change in the labor
movement’s approach to immigrant workers," but he slammed UNITE HERE
for allegedly having "unilaterally abandoned its support for
[protective] standards" without consultation, "prompting
objections from almost every other AFL-CIO
affiliate and prevented a consensus from forming around early drafts
of the McCain-Kennedy immigration reform legislation."
Sweeney even claimed that three of UNITE HERE’s Change to Win
partners—the UFCW, Laborers, and Teamsters—objected to the former’s
"abandoning
prevailing wage standards and allowing for expanded temporary worker
program without effective labor protections." What’s worse, complained
Sweeney, is that Wilhelm’s obstinacy forced their mutual friend Ted Kennedy
to step in to ask Sweeney to put a halt to Wilhelm’s obstruction to his
bill.
Unfortunately, continued Sweeney, Wilhelm sabotaged those
discussions and continued his "acquiescence to the corporate demands
of the Republican sponsors of the bill," making it difficult to secure
meaningful protections in the final form of the Kennedy-McCain bill.
Since Wilhelm didn’t respond to Sweeney, the truth of the details of
Sweeney’s allegations aren’t clear. But leaving that aside for the moment,
let’s look at the
bill Sweeney is so concerned about.
In a June 1 letter by Sweeney to AFL-CIO affiliates, he claims it
would provide legal status and an opportunity to work for 12 million
workers, and pledges to expand its labor protections. Following his cover
letter is a five-page letter from Ana Avendano-Denier, Director of the
Immigrant Worker Program—which consists of exhaustive detail on the
horrendously anti-immigrant nature of the bill (without characterizing it that
way, of course).
Avendano-Denier starts by calling the bill "an important
legislative accomplishment" because it is bipartisan and because it
contains a way for the undocumented to earn permanent legal status. Then
she gets to the real meat. The bill, she says:
• could result in employers firing millions of workers using its
documentation requirement — and then rehiring some of them at starting
wages;
• would let employers escape from back taxes owed for current
immigrant employees;
• would force workers to endure exploitative conditions because they
must prove they have a job waiting in order to get entry into the U.S., and
will
put them at the whim of recruiters who sell them such jobs;
• puts workers at the whim of employers, because a gap of 45 days
unemployment means deportation, and employers will use that fear to harshly
exploit them;
• creates incentives for employers to hire from countries other than
from where the undocumented mostly come—meaning the latter will continue to
come
without documents;
• sets up a meaningless administrative process under the Department
of Labor for labor protections;
• requires employer sponsorship for green cards, withholding of
which will be used to kill organizing efforts.
In short, the bill contains the worst features of the bracero
program of the mid-20th century, and of Bush’s recent "guest
worker" proposal.
In 2003, Charles Walker wrote in Socialist Action about an earlier
example of labor support for a guest worker program, that of the United
Farm Workers, which had broken with its longstanding opposition to such
programs by supporting a bill allowing up to 500,000 undocumented
farmworkers to potentially gain temporary U.S. residency and maybe even
become eligible for
permanent residency, leading to citizenship.
Walker reminded readers that legal status doesn’t provide protection
or resolve discrimination in federal and state labor laws—and that the bill
might
actually weaken the fight for immigrant rights for more than
6,000,000 migrants, ignored by the law’s provisions.
Walker speculated that the UFW might have switched its position
because even though the growers would now find it easier to import a
surplus labor supply to keep wages and benefits depressed, and thus to
fight unionization, "[p]erhaps the union’s allies in the Democratic
Party, including Sen. Ted Kennedy, refuse to help them further on this
issue or have told the union that the growers can’t be resisted, and the
union should settle for what the growers are willing to offer—that is,
political support for the legalization of undocumented migrants currently
in the agricultural workforce."
The impact of NAFTA may have also played a role, said Walker:
"changes in the guest-worker law will not lessen the economic
pressures stemming in part from cheap U.S. agricultural exports that are
driving desperate small landholders off their plots and across the U.S.
border, in a life-and-death search for the bare necessities of life."
The same causes—i.e., the pressures of NAFTA and the arm-twisting
from "friends of labor" in Congress—may now be behind labor
support on both sides of the AFL-CIO split for broader guest-worker
programs and immigration "reform." But ironically, in the years
before this change there had occurred an even bigger—and positive—shift in
labor’s approach toward
immigrant workers.
Labor’s policy shift
For decades the federation refused to support the rights of
undocumented workers, ignoring the role of early waves of immigrants with
and without papers in building its core unions, including in heavy
industry, and instead yielding to the wishes of the most conservative craft
unions. Its dramatic reversal in 1999 was part of the broader Sweeney-era
reforms, stemming from the same objective pressures—but suffering from the
same bureaucratic limitations.
The federation had supported the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control
Act (IRCA), which created new tools for bosses to use documentation
requirements to threaten rebellious undocumented workers (the tools
were called "employer sanctions," but with workers paying
the real price).
As David Bacon explains in his report on the 1999 AFL-CIO convention
("The AFL-CIO reverses course on immigration," Oct. 17, 1999), in
the years since
IRCA’s passage immigrant workers nonetheless showed heroic
willingness to fight back: immigrant janitors, drywallers, carpenters,
harbor truckers, garment
workers, factory hands, and tortilla drivers all organized and struck—including,
most notably, the widely-publicized strikes and sitdowns of SEIU-organized
janitors who faced down police beatings in Los Angeles in 1989.
Day laborers, domestics, and gardeners even built independent
organizations without the protection of the law or union support. These
heroic efforts came
despite raids by La Migra, including some in which dozens or even
hundreds of workers were fired in the middle of organizing drives.
This included workers in packing houses, asbestos removal, and other
industries where unions like the Teamsters and Laborers had gained
important toeholds in organizing nonunion sectors of what had previously
been well-organized industries, and where employers had tried to
evade unions by opening up new, immigrant-staffed subsidiaries or brand new
companies.
Recognizing the new demographic realities of the workforce and
seeing these struggles, local unions and central labor councils began
passing resolutions
calling for the repeal of employer sanctions. And finally Sweeney and
the federation’s "International" union heads saw the
light—realizing as well that the
impact of IRCA, and the prior decades of ignoring the ever-growing
immigrant workforce, were threatening gains in their own core sectors.
Even in the building trades there was a growing recognition that the
booming unorganized, mostly immigrant, workforce required a new approach.
What’s
more, sectors with the most immigrants looked to be the easiest
pickings for boosting declining membership rolls.
Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride
In addition to formal policy statements adopted at the convention
recognizing the rights of the undocumented, and the new impetus given to
organizing drives, the most visible fruit of the federation’s new approach
was the 2003 Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride (IWFR), spearheaded by
Wilhelm’s Hotel Employees & Restaurant Employees (later merged with
UNITE).
The themes of the Ride included the right of immigrant workers to
gain legal status, to have a clear road to citizenship, to reunite their families,
to be free to
form unions without regard to legal status and to enjoy full civil
rights protection.
Starting in 10 major cities in every corner of the country, their
buses converged on Washington, D.C., New Jersey, and New York in October,
where tens of
thousands rallied. The Freedom Riders, who were both documented and
undocumented, built new alliances along the way between immigrant workers
and Black workers, students, and community groups—and at more than 100
stops along the way held rallies and other events with workers
seeking to organize.
The Ride did not just include workers from sectors or unions most
commonly thought of as heavily immigrant—and not just from those unions
that split
this year from the federation. The AFL-CIO report on the Ride
interviewed a Trinidadian from the Operating Engineers in New York and a
Taiwanese involved in organizing Chinese newspaper workers into the
Communications Workers of America, as well as highlighting struggles of
sheet-metal workers in Syracuse, asbestos workers and parking attendants in
D.C., janitors in New Jersey, hotel workers in New York, and many others.
In promoting the Ride, the federation even took on to a certain
extent the post-9/11 anti-immigrant hysteria, pointing out the illogic and
injustice in victimization of immigrants, and quoting Arab-American
activist Mazin Qumsiyeh on the tens of thousands deported since 9/11.
The Ride also made big strides in linking African Americans and immigrants,
especially in the South, with special jointly sponsored events. It garnered
support from union officials who had either been inactive or even
opposed immigrant workers’ rights, such as Building Trades leaders in
Buffalo who had
previously organized raids against undocumented workers.
The Ride experienced hostile confrontations with the INS, and, to
the surprise of top federation officials, apathy from the Democrats: none
of the Democratic
presidential candidates spoke up to support the Freedom Riders. But
as a result of the Rides, local immigrant rights coalitions were born or
strengthened
in many cities.
Aftermath of the Freedom Ride?
Since 2003 there has been no visible nationwide activity in the name
of the IWFR or its sponsors. But there have been many local struggles
around the issues raised, such as fighting attempts to take away driver’s
licenses from immigrants without Social Security numbers.
And since the Rides, several unions, including especially those in
what has become the Change to Win (CtW) group—but not only those—have been
busy
organizing new immigrant workers. They’ve also used the courts to
secure millions in back pay for immigrant janitors cheated out of overtime
and minimum wage by contractors working for national supermarket and other
retail chains, and to stop the practice of locking them in the stores
overnight.
There have been nationwide efforts at laundry giant Cintas and
landmark victories in North Carolina (FLOC) and in Florida (the Immokalee
Coalition). Hotel workers in Los Angeles and San Francisco have been
involved in prolonged struggles for decent contracts, including efforts to
begin coordinating national hotel contract expiration dates.
Struggles have also occurred among the lowest-paid, mostly immigrant
parts of the airline industry (SkyChef, the biggest competitor of Gate
Gourmet,
whose workers recently sparked a shutdown of all British flights,
called in the INS to try to crush the union at its Seattle facilities a
couple years ago).
Unions in both camps of the split have significant
immigrant memberships—both recent and
long-resident—and there are huge numbers of immigrants
in each side’s prime organizing targets (which often
overlap in any case).
While the numbers are more overwhelming for CtW members SEIU,
UNITE/HERE, Laborers and UFCW, they’re also highly significant for those
unions staying with the AFL-CIO—even the building trades, where a nonunion
Latino workforce has grown rapidly and suffers not just low pay and
lack of protection, but the worst workplace injury and fatality rates of
any group in
the U.S.
Members of AFL-CIO affiliate USW at Asarco’s copper mines in the
Southwest—a mostly Chicano workforce—have been on strike since the beginning
of July. This strike raises two further issues. These workers are
mostly longstanding residents or citizens, reminding us that
immigrant workers’ struggles are (or should be) linked to those of older
Latino communities and other workers of color.
More broadly, it brings us back to the turmoil in recent decades in
the federation. The Asarco strikers walk in the footsteps of a similar
workforce whose union was crushed in 1986 at Phelps-Dodge (with the
crushing final blow from a National Guard called in by Arizona’s Democratic
governor). The crushing of this strike was one of several body blows in
that decade to the labor movement, which eventually forced a section of the
union officialdom in 1995 to decide it was time to dump the Old Guard and
install the Sweeney team.
And this brings us back to the Sweeney-Wilhelm spat. The recognition of the importance of
immigrant workers to the labor movement that inspired the changes described
above were just a slice of a broader recognition of labor’s plight—declining
membership, lost contract battles, busted unions—that led to the Sweeney
team’s ascendancy and its announcement of various reforms and new
initiatives. But before long the reforms turned out to be few and shallow
and the initiatives lost steam.
And the same characteristics dooming the Sweeney team’s
initiatives—its bureaucratic approach and its lack of a militant and
politically independent
program—are shared by the unions splitting to form CtW. This will
hinder not only their organizing drives, which are heavily focused among
immigrant
workers, but also the way in which they approach immigrant workers’
other concerns (if anything the CtW unions are MORE even-handed than the
federation in their willingness to support capitalist politicians
regardless of party).
Wilhelm claimed that Sweeney was "scared" of the
involvement of other union officials in the Immigration Committee. But
Wilhelm himself, and his allies, are just as scared of too many voices
being involved.
There was no indication that Wilhelm called on his members, or even
local or regional officials, to mobilize behind his efforts to reform the
committee—in
the same way that none of the CtW unions sought to mobilize such
forces to reform the AFL-CIO. Instead they simply walked away, with no sign
that their own practices or politics would change.
For instance, SEIU, the union behind the Justice for Janitors
struggles in LA and similar ones around the country, is every bit as
bureaucratic as any
federation union—and in fact placed the LA janitors’ local into
trusteeship when it dared to elect a new, more militant more leadership,
and has recently merged it into a statewide building services local.
The creation of statewide or even multi-state locals has become
common practice for SEIU throughout the country. And SEIU shares with the
other CtW unions a class-collaborationist approach to both contract
bargaining and electoral politics.
The CtW unions will certainly do more organizing among immigrant
workers, and are likely to stay more active, in their own way, around the
political and social issues facing the undocumented. Yet, as pointed out
above, immigrant workers waiting to be organized exist in large numbers
among the AFL-CIO unions’ likely targets (and as has already been seen in
the fight between SEIU and AFSCME over California day-care workers, those
targets are likely to be the subjects of competing drives and even raids).
Moreover, for the CtW unions to succeed in their own efforts they’ll
need the support of workers in other sectors and from the fed’s unions: the
UFCW’s efforts to organize Wal-Mart, for instance, will require forging
unity among Latino and Black workers but also with huge numbers of poorer
whites in rural areas—and will require mobilizing support from all unions,
whether CtW or AFL-CIO.
The list of issues facing immigrant workers grows longer every day.
In addition to the workplace pay and conditions and immigrant status
problems discussed
above, they include higher unemployment rates, lack of health
insurance, and higher rates of illness, discrimination on the job, higher
enlistment and death
rates in the military, post-9/11 state terrorism and attacks from
fascist groups like the Minutemen, increasing deaths during Southwestern
desert border
crossings, etc. etc.
Official recognition of the objective pressures and the massive
defeats of the 1970s and 1980s led to significant, if mostly formal,
changes toward
immigrants’ issues in particular and workers’ concerns in general.
But nothing fundamental was changed in the officialdom’s politics. In that
sense the
Wilhelm-Sweeney spat stands as a symbol for labor’s larger impasse.
For immigrant workers to win victories, whether on the shop floor,
in contract struggles, in community battles, or in the political arena, a
new militant
leadership will need to be forged—one that will fight in an
uncompromising and politically independent way. And such a leadership will push forward the struggles of all
workers.
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