A new study shows that an immigration process with a pathway to citizenship —the centerpiece of the AFL-CIO’s immigration reform campaign —not only increases wages for aspiring citizens, but sows economic benefits throughout the entire economy.
The AFL-CIO is collecting stories of immigrant workers who seek to exercise their labor and employment rights and received threats from employers to report them to local law or immigration enforcement.
If you want to share your story, please contact Ana Avendano at blognews@aflcio.org.
The AFL-CIO and America’s union movement, along with a broad coalition of other groups, is mounting a new campaign to build a common-sense immigration process that includes a road map to citizenship and one that guarantees immigrant workers the same workplace rights and protections all workers deserve.
We know that immigration reform can be a controversial issue among our union members and all workers. But immigration reform with a path to citizenship and workplace rights doesn’t just benefit aspiring citizens and their families, it's good for all workers. Here are 10 reasons why.
The first edition of “We Stand in Solidarity with Migrant Workers” appeared on the AFL-CIO Now blog in 2010.
Dec. 18 is International Day of Solidarity with Migrants and marks the date the United Nations adopted the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families.
To commemorate this day, we have compiled personal stories of the immigrant experience at the AFL-CIO. As you’ll see, our colleagues’ collective experiences are a tapestry of the immigrant experience. Our co-workers have come to the United States from around the world for a variety of reasons—to escape war and repression, to work, to feed their families back home, to study and to marry.
"Shift Change: Putting Democracy to Work" is a new film , by award-winning filmmakers Melissa Young and Mark Dworkin, that documents employee-owned businesses that compete in the economy, while giving their workers secure and dignified jobs in democratic workplaces. The movie tells the story of several companies who are dealing with changes to the global economy by rethinking the way businesses run in order to promote more sustainable communities.
This is an excerpt of the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center's Human Trafficking Thrives Under Worker Exploitation .
Human trafficking thrives in an environment of worker exploitation and engenders forced labor, debt bondage and other egregious labor abuse. The most effective way to address this scourge, says Neha Misra, Solidarity Center senior specialist on migration and human trafficking , is by empowering workers to have a voice in their workplace and supporting their right to organize and join unions.
UNITE HERE sends us this report from Arizona.
After more than a week of protests that brought national attention to what Rachel Maddow called “Arizona’s Broken Electoral System,” Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett told the Associated Press over the weekend that he will seek an overhaul of Arizona’s ballot-counting process.
Bennett’s announcement comes just days after his initial insistence that, while not perfect, Arizona’s counting this year was customary and that protests were unnecessary.
The Austin, Texas, worker center Workers Defense Project worker center (WDP) celebrates its 10th anniversary later this month of battling against wage theft, spotlighting the dangers and winning reforms of the Texas construction industry and standing up for workplace justice and immigrants’ rights.
An in-depth article in the current issue of The Austin Chronicle traces the history of the WDP worker center, from its 2003 inception as a one-person staffed operation, helping low-income, mostly immigrant Austin workers pursue wage theft claims, to its present day incarnation as an influential 1,000-member force and partner with the union movement in the championing of workers’ rights, especially in the construction industry, with an estimated 60% Latino workforce.
This is a cross-post from A View from Left Field blog by Gregory Junemann, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE).
At its meeting in August, the AFL-CIO Committee on Civil and Human Rights was given a presentation from the committee’s chairperson, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker, on her recent trip to meet with the immigrant farm workers in North Carolina. Sister Holt Baker had been invited to visit the workers by Baldemar Velasquez, the president of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC). I, along with the other members of the AFL-CIO Executive Council, was invited by Brother Velasquez to travel to North Carolina to meet with the immigrant workers. I proudly accepted, and I made the trip late last month.
Adela de la Torre, communications manager at the National Immigration Law Center, sends us this.
The civil rights issues at the heart of S.B. 1070, Arizona’s notorious racial profiling law, finally had their day in court Tuesday. After more than two years of legal challenges mounted by our civil rights coalition and the federal government, we, along with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), MALDEF and others, presented evidence of what we all already know: S.B. 1070 was written with the intent to discriminate against Latinos and other people of color. This evidence was introduced as part of a request that the district court consider additional legal grounds that were not before the U.S. Supreme Court when it determined that section 2B of S.B. 1070, which forces police officers to demand “papers” of those they suspect are in the country without proper authorization, should be allowed to go into effect.
It’s been four years since low-wage workers got a raise. Sign the petition to tell Congress it’s time to raise the minimum wage.
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