The
take home is that organized labor may even be coming to its senses
and perhaps the same may be true for management. Discovering that
enforcing a monopoly wage deal or a monopoly wage cut merely opens
the door to competition everywhere else was a painful lesson.
Forcing an underground economy to exist means that you lose control
in terms of regulation and many other things that are valuable.
Thus
immigration reform is mandatory for everyone to prosper.
This
is a development that I do welcome having seen much of the long
historical grind that labor has passed through and how often they
have gotten it seriously wrong.
Why Immigration Is
a Top Priority for US Labor
Monday, 04 March 2013
00:00By Amy Dean,
Immigrants' rights are
workers' rights. These days, that idea is a principle held dear by
the US labor movement. But that wasn't always the case.
As recently as the
mid-1990s, many unions took protectionist stances against allowing
new immigrants to come to this country. It was only after these
unions saw the abuses that became prevalent under an employer-driven
system for verifying immigration status that the labor movement
embraced a new position. The movement recognized that for working
people to thrive, all employees had to have full rights in the
workplace.
Today, labor is one of
the key forces pushing for comprehensive immigration reform in
Washington, DC. To learn more about the movement's advocacy and more
about how unions transformed themselves into outspoken champions of
immigrant rights, I spoke with Maria Elena Durazo. A daughter of
Mexican immigrant farm workers, Durazo rose to become the leader of
the hotel and restaurant workers union in Los Angeles, the dynamic
UNITE HERE Local 11. And, as chair of the national AFL-CIO’s
Immigration Committee, Durazo is now a leading point person in the
national immigration debate.
Knowing that many
people are confused when hearing about union activism around
immigration, I asked Durazo a straightforward question: Why is this
issue a top priority for labor?
"It's bad for
American workers for there to be 11 million-plus people out there
working with no rights," Durazo said. "[These immigrants]
are subject to exploitation. They are subject, as a result of that,
to accept lower wages. They are subject to working in dangerous
conditions. That is bad for those immigrant workers, and it is bad
for American workers as a whole."
She continued: "We
cannot have a prosperous nation and recreate the middle class as long
as there is an underclass of 11 million people who do not have
rights. By fixing this and getting them all on the road to
citizenship, we address a huge issue that is the cause of enormous
exploitation - of wage theft and other massive violations of labor
laws."
"It's kind of
like why we support raising the minimum wage," she added, by way
of comparison. "Ninety-nine percent of unionized workers aren’t
directly impacted by an increase in minimum wage. But when the
standard is raised, when the bottom is lifted, that helps all
workers."
Continuing our
conversation, Durazo and I spoke about the benefits she anticipates
if immigration reform is successful.
"We are positive
that immigration reform is going to strengthen the middle class. One
of the studies shows that, just through citizenship, someone's income
grows by 15 percent. Employers know that they can't threaten and push
them down.
"We want to raise
the working standards for everybody. That is both self-interest, and
it is [consistent with] the values of the labor movement. That is
what we hope to live up to, that is what we believe in, and that is
what we have got to put into practice."
Noting that there has
been an almost 180-degree turn in the past 20 years, I asked Durazo
to speak about the internal changes that the labor movement has
experienced around its position on immigration.
"This year the
national AFL-CIO convention is going to be in Los Angeles," she
said. "I was remembering that, the last time the convention was
in Los Angeles - in 1999 - that was when there was a major break with
the previous policies on immigrant workers. [Former AFL-CIO]
President [John] Sweeney had recently come into office, and there was
a [shift] from basically blaming immigrant workers for a lot of
problems to saying, 'We stand with immigrant workers, and we want
immigration reform.'
"I think a number
of things lined up" to make that happen, she said. "One is
President Sweeney's election and his own experience as the head of
SEIU [which represents janitors and other service-sector workers].
Other unions had national leadership that had also become very
passionate about immigration. SEIU, [UNITE] HERE, the Farmworkers
Union, the United Food and Commercial Workers - and even the Laborers
at the time. Those national leaders stood up and backed up this
change in policy.
"It was delicate,
to say the least, but it happened. I would say that from then to
today, we have come a long way. It has been more constant, to the
point where, this year, President Trumka is in a position to say, 'We
are going all out. This is one of two national priorities for the
AFL-CIO to get done in 2013.' That is a remarkable change from 1999."
Knowing that
Republicans are pushing for some pretty odious compromises, I asked
what labor is willing to accept in an immigration reform proposal.
"It is premature
to say what we would accept or would not accept," Durazo said.
"What we are pushing for, and what is absolutely essential to
us, is that there has to be a path to citizenship. There are a lot of
details still to be figured out about this. But we say, ‘Don’t
play games about a “path to legalization,” which leaves
people halfway there, with half the rights.’ That is a game we
don’t want to play.
"We think both
the Democrats and the Republicans, who have been shaken up by the
surge in the number of Latino voters who went to the polls in
November, have got to understand why those Latinos care. They care
because if it’s not fixed the right way, then they are going to
continue to be singled out - under the guise of immigration laws,
which in fact turn out to be voter suppression laws [or]
discriminatory laws, like SB1070 in Arizona."
Concluding our talk, I
asked Durazo to speak about her personal experience with this issue -
and about how she sees labor's investment growing.
"I have been
working at this my whole life. My parents came to this country from
Mexico. My oldest sisters were born in Mexico. We worked in the
field. I personally know what it’s like to be singled out and to
not earn enough money to have a roof over our heads, to not make
enough money to have food on our table. It is wrong, period, in this
country to live like that.
"When I see in
the year 2013 - 40 years after I left working in the field - that
there are car wash workers who routinely do not get wages, do not get
paid for 8 or 10 hours of work a day, the only thing they get is tips
. . . When I see routinely that hotel housekeepers have to clock out
and then go back and clean a bunch more rooms . . . When I see that
stuff going on to this day, it angers me.
"Yet it is
extraordinary when those men and women turn around and take charge of
their lives," Durazo continued. "For me, this is not about
what happens inside of Washington, DC. What I am excited about is all
the organizing, all the connections that we are going to make outside
of Washington, DC., outside of the Beltway, in our communities.
Because not only will that organizing deliver the best immigration
reform, but it is also going to get a whole lot of other things done
for this country."
"Lord knows,"
she said, "we have got a lot of other things to fix besides
immigration reform."
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