The National Labor Relations Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Office of Special Counsel for Immigration-Related Unfair Employment Practices ruled in January that the workers had been fired illegally and discriminated against. The hotel agreed to pay each one $8,000 in back pay and compensatory damages. But that was little consolation to the workers, who were certain they would be deported—without a job they could not support their families or send money back home to relatives who needed help. "I am the only one who is able to help my mother back in Mexico," Norma Del Toro, 29, says through an interpreter. "We were very worried."

Their union, HERE Local 17, and the AFL-CIO took up their cause and argued that the eight should not be deported because they helped the federal agencies investigate charges of race bias, retaliation and document abuse at the hotel. The investigation and settlement "sent a powerful message to workers and employers across this country that unlawful discrimination in the workplace will not be tolerated, regardless of a person’s immigration status," AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said. But that message was in danger of being undermined if the workers had been forced to leave the country.

	Bruna Alvarez and her 2-year-old daughter Delia are congratulated by HERE Local 17 Secretary-Treasurer and Principal Officer Jane Rykunyk (left) April 25 after a deportation hearing in Bloomington, Minn.

The INS agreed and, on April 25, allowed seven of the eight to stay in the country.

"I was crying the day we were arrested and I was crying the day they said we could stay, but those were tears of joy," Del Toro says.

According to the INS, about 1.1 million people immigrate to the United States every year. Of this number, about 275,000 are undocumented. Today, about 10 percent of the U.S. population is foreign-born—a figure that hasn't changed substantially since the turn of the 20th century, when about 15 per cent of the total U.S. population was born in another country. Forty percent of undocumented immigrants enter the country legally on student, tourist or other temporary visas and are classified as "illegal" after their visas expire.

More than 25 percent of new entrants into the labor market are foreign-born, coming primarily from Mexico, China, India and the Philippines, and most work in low-wage jobs. In some areas of the country, 75 percent of the low-wage market is made up of immigrants working in jobs that are less attractive for native-born workers as real wages in the low-wage sector decline.

"Many new immigrants take the jobs that Americans do not want: the dirtiest, the lowest-paid, the heaviest jobs and probably the jobs where people get hurt the most," says AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Linda Chavez-Thompson, herself the granddaughter of Mexican immigrants.

Roberto Lostaunau, 38, works around huge ovens at J.J. Cassone Bakery in Port Chester, N.Y., that get so hot workers faint from the heat. There is no air conditioning and he has to work for 12 hours, sometimes 14 hours a day, six days a week, for only $6 an hour. "They make us stay until we finish all the work," he says. He has to work such long hours just to put food on the table that he doesn't spend much time with his three young daughters. "I don't have time to see my family," he says.

Tony Valdez, the son of immigrants, during a Laborers Local 872 organizing campaign among primarily immigrant workers at Precision Concrete in Las Vegas.

"When I first came here from Peru in 1996, I had a hard time," Lostaunau says. "I didn't speak English, and I was treated badly at work." One time, Lostaunau's boss fired him after claiming that he was an illegal immigrant. Lostaunau, after producing his work authorization, was rehired.

But the abuse did not stop. "The bosses scream at us and harass us," he says. He is not allowed to go to the restroom, even after working five hours straight. But he and his fellow workers, many of them illegal immigrants, are afraid to give up a steady job, even if the pay is low and the conditions unbearable.

U.S. employers have a long history of exploiting fear and differences to drive wedges between workers. Today, they use the threat of exposing undocumented workers and sending them back to their home country to force them to work long hours, often in poor conditions and for poor wages.

But as history has shown, whenever one group of workers is denied access to workplace protections, all workers' rights are in jeopardy. "Any action to deny benefits to any workers, whether they're immigrants, women, minorities or white men, is a threat to all workers," says AFL-CIO Vice President and UNITE International Vice President Clayola Brown. "Working people don't have the luxury to be divided."

Working people such as Siaka Diakite, who, until he and 240 of his fellow workers at Hudson Delivery and Chelsea Trucking voted for a union in February, worked at least 60 hours a week delivering groceries for $1 per delivery plus tips. Diakite's pay averaged about $110 a week, more than half of it in tips.

"We were treated as slaves," says the 32-year-old Ivory Coast native. "You're not allowed to say anything. You're not allowed to give opinions. You have no dignity."

	Until he joined RWDSU/UFCW, Ivory Coast native Siaka Diakite pushed 90- to 100-pound loads of groceries through Manhattan in a job where he received little pay or dignity.

Diakite was required to push 90- to 100-pound loads of groceries for as many as 12 blocks in rain, snow or heat, without a back brace and without being allowed to take a lunch break. "We wanted to strike, but the majority got fired," he says.

Lostaunau and Diakite were among the workers who testified at the first of four AFL-CIO forums on immigration. The first two forums were in New York City April 1 and Atlanta April 29. The final two forums will be in Chicago June 3 and Los Angeles June 10. The forums bring immigrant workers, community and union leaders together for in-depth, full-day sessions to discuss potential solutions to the workplace problems and exploitation immigrant workers face in America today.

A huge loophole in immigration regulations makes it easy for employers to violate workers' rights. The law punishes only employers who "knowingly" hire undocumented workers. In the real world, especially with a tight labor market for low-wage jobs, employers illegally, with a wink and nod, hire undocumented workers and say nothing—so long as the workers do not complain. But when they assert their workplace rights, the employer conveniently becomes aware of their undocumented status and fires them.

"Employers have the best of all options: They can employ undocumented workers without any real fear of sanctions as long as the workers are compliant. When the workers become inconvenient, they can be discharged with no threat of retribution. This is an ideal outcome for a sweatshop employer," says Muzaffar Chishti, director of UNITE's immigration project. "In effect, employer sanctions have proven to be sanctions against employees who get abused by employers."

Some employers take advantage of immigrants with a "malicious ferocity," says Don Turner, president of the Chicago Federation of Labor, "by denying health care, by denying decent wages, denying hope, and most of all, by denying the means to assert dignity."

The race to the bottom

Immigrant workers come to the United States for many reasons: to flee political oppression, civil war or famine, or to escape religious persecution. But many come to escape a cycle of poverty created by today's corporate-driven global economy, in which employers compete for profits by locating operations where labor is cheap and workers are exploitable.

HERE President John Wilhelm chaired a committee that recommended changes to the AFL-CIO's immigration policy.

Developing country governments, desperate for foreign capital, oppress workers by opening their doors wide to multinational corporations which profit from low wages, exploiting workforces without basic rights or protections in countries with little, if any, environmental regulation. Simultaneously, such international lending institutions as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have saddled developing countries with such massive debt that they spend far more repaying loans than meeting basic needs of the citizenry. The result has been a resurgence in sweatshops, child labor and prison labor, forced labor and growing income inequality. Three hundred million more people live in extreme poverty around the world than 10 years ago, according to the United Nations.

In this country, the restructuring of the world economy has caused a decline in manufacturing jobs and a huge increase in low-paying service jobs. As corporations move jobs out of the United States seeking the lowest wages and least regulation, standards sink for workers here and abroad.

Against this backdrop, workers in every nation are victims of corporate greed. Coming to America seems the only way to create a better life for many people in developing countries slaving for pennies an hour.

To counter the effects of corporate greed, the AFL-CIO Executive Council launched in February a Campaign for Global Fairness that will mobilize union members to insist that core workers' rights be included in all trade agreements, IMF and World Bank loans, export subsidies and import preferences.

To accomplish these goals, the campaign will include:

• Educating our members and our leaders, our allies and the general public on global inequality.
  
  
• Mobilizing union members and our allies to make workers' rights and human rights a mainstay of our trade and investment agreements and international institutions, with the defeat of permanent Normal Trade Relations with China our most immediate goal.
  
  
• Building international solidarity with our brothers and sisters in developing nations as well as in developed nations to create equitable, democratic and sustainable growth.
  
  
• Launching aggressive new initiatives to hold multinational corporations accountable by demanding that the employers with which we bargain adopt the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions code of practice for their global operations and disclose the location of their affiliates, joint venture partners and contractors internationally, especially in China.

The council also pledged to work for debt relief, canceling the debts of poor countries that can never be repaid. "In Ethiopia, more than 100,000 children die every year from diarrhea that can be treated and prevented," AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said, speaking before a crowd gathered in Washington, D.C., for the April 9 Jubilee 2000 rally. The faith-based demonstration called on the world's industrialized nations and global financial institutions to break the staggering chain of debt afflicting the world's developing nations.

"But the government of Ethiopia is spending four times as much on debt payments as on its public budget for health care."

Contributing to the American Dream

	In Los Angeles, janitors in SEIU Local 1877 ended a weeks-long strike in April, winning a strong new contract.

As poor workers emigrate here to seek a better life, the communities they join often face rapid growth and change. Residents of small towns and even big cities, especially in California, Texas, New York, Illinois and Florida, now walk down their streets and see large numbers of new neighbors who speak different languages and have distinctive cultures.

Some native-born residents react with fear and suspicion to their new neighbors, especially as such changes happen quickly and can strain public services in communities unprepared for rapid population growth. And in some communities, the funding of such services as health care and schools already is inadequate to meet the needs of all residents, whose wages all too often are inadequate to support their families and strengthen their communities.

Yet, when immigrants settle in a community, their contributions are significant: Immigrants provide more to the nation's economy and government services than they use, adding about $10 billion each year to the U.S. economy and paying at least $133 billion in taxes, according to a 1998 study, A Fiscal Portrait of the Newest Americans, by the National Immigration Forum and the Cato Institute.

Communities become stronger and the balance between income and public services is restored when employers provide better-paying jobs, health care and safe working environments for all workers, says Kent Wong, director of the University of California-Los Angeles Labor Center. Those workers, in turn, are able to purchase more goods and pay more in taxes, generating more revenue and better enabling communities to afford increased public services.

And it is through unions that workers, including immigrants, gain better wages and are able to contribute even more to their communities, Turner says. "The middle class was not created by corporate interests, but by the union movement. Today, as 100 years ago, the union has the ability to lift up an immigrant worker and his children so they can benefit from the American Dream."

Taking a bold step— A new AFL-CIO policy

		From America@work, May 2000.

The new realities of a global economy that destroys the economies of developing countries and subjects immigrants here to harsh working conditions, harassment and fear create both dilemmas and opportunities for the union movement.

In 1999, delegates to the 23rd AFL-CIO Biennial Convention formed a Special Committee on Immigration, chaired by HERE President John Wilhelm and made up of union leaders from every sector, to study and recommend changes to the AFL-CIO's immigration policy. Adopted in 1985, the policy endorsed the creation of the current system of immigration enforcement, which includes employer sanctions for hiring undocumented workers.

In February, on the committee's recommendation, the council boldly called for replacing the 1985 policy. The system, the council said, is not working because some employers skirt the law, and the federal government often is lax in administering the rules.

In its place, the council sought a new system that is orderly, responsible and fair, and urged amnesty for about 6 million undocumented workers and their families who are contributing members to their communities.

The council statement did not support illegal immigration. Instead, it called for better regulation of legal immigration. Once here, all workers, documented or undocumented, should have full workplace rights to protect their own interests and the rights of all American workers, the council said.

The council also called for unions and businesses to work together to design cooperative ways to allow law-abiding employers to satisfy legitimate needs for new workers in a timely manner without compromising the rights and opportunities of workers already here. The council also said workers should be trained and educated to upgrade their skills, so that all workers can share in the nation's economic prosperity.

For Wilhelm, standing up for the rights of immigrants is good for workers, unions and communities. "We weren't trying to do anything special—we just wanted to do what was right," Wilhelm says.

Because unscrupulous employers systematically have used the current immigration process to retaliate against workers who seek to join unions or improve working conditions, the council proposed a new system of immigration enforcement strategies that focuses on criminal behavior by the employers, such as those who recruit undocumented workers from abroad, directly or indirectly. The new system would have strong penalties against employers who abuse workers' immigration status to suppress their job rights and labor protections.

Employer sanctions, as a nationwide policy applied to all workplaces, have failed, the council said, and need to be replaced with a new policy that would include:

• Reducing undocumented immigration and preventing employer abuse. A new policy should prevent employer discrimination against people who look or sound foreign; allow workers to pursue legal remedies for workplace violations, including supporting a union, regardless of immigration status; and avoid unfairly targeting immigrant workers of any particular nationality.
  
  
• Providing whistle-blower protections for immigrant workers who risk their financial or physical well-being to speak out against workplace violations.
  
  
• Granting amnesty to hard-working immigrants who make significant contributions to their communities and workplaces. Many of these men and women are parents of children who are U.S. citizens by birthright. They should receive amnesty and be allowed to change their status to permanent residents and become eligible for naturalization.
  
  
• Halting the expansion of the guest-worker program, which allows companies to recruit foreign workers when there is a shortage of workers with a particular skill. Too often, these programs are used to discriminate against American workers, depress wages and distort labor markets. A better solution would be to train American workers for the jobs that exist.

A union of immigrants

César Chávez was among union leaders helping the union movement to accept its responsibility to represent all workers.

In many ways, the new AFL-CIO immigration policy signals a return of the union movement to its historical roots. The union movement was formed by mainly European immigrants seeking a better life. Immigrant workers were in the forefront of important early battles for workers' rights, such as the Haymarket Square explosion in 1886, which led to the eight-hour workday.

Although trade unions welcomed European immigrants, for many years they worked to exclude immigrants from South America and Asia and freed former African slaves. Employers used immigrants of color and freed slaves as strikebreakers and as surplus labor to drive down wages. Employers also used the resulting suspicion toward immigrants of color as a wedge to prevent worker solidarity—and they were successful. Unions supported legislation in the 1880s and early 1900s to ban Chinese labor. In 1919, the AFL convention passed resolutions favoring the prohibition of immigration of Mexican workers and Asian labor.

World War I unleashed a fear of foreigners and a fear of radicalism that employers and the government used to effectively attack unions, especially those with foreign-born members. But by the 1930s and 1940s, the political landscape of the United States changed. Labor, particularly industrial unions, strongly supported Franklin Delano Roosevelt's re-elections, as did children of turn-of-the-century immigrants and African Americans who had migrated to the North to take industrial jobs. The unions that helped organize the African American community for FDR established links that later facilitated organizing in the industrial sector. Union membership surged, particularly in auto, steel, mining and textiles. Many of the new members were people of color, immigrants and women.

Anti-labor politicians and employers launched a counterattack against the new surge in organizing and drove a wedge between workers by playing to fear over the spread of Communism and a suspicion of foreigners. Some union leaders were accused of being Communist agitators. Employers also hired private police to help put down strikes.

The union movement grew again during World War II, when the nation's industries were working at full capacity to support the war effort. After the war, the combination of reduced production and the return of thousands of veterans seeking jobs led to a labor surplus and unemployment. In response, unions sought to protect the jobs of their members and create new jobs. In 1947, the AFL opposed the admission of immigrants from war-ravaged nations for fear they would create what a convention resolution that year called an "unemployment problem."

Throughout the latter half of the 20th century, the union movement continued to monitor immigration laws with an eye toward protecting the interests of its members, who were predominantly white and of European origin. But as an important part of the civil rights movement, the union movement also took up its moral obligation to represent all types of workers. One of the leaders who helped the union movement accept this responsibility was César Chávez, founder of the Farm Workers.

In 1985, the AFL-CIO convention passed a resolution calling for "substantial" employer sanctions for hiring undocumented workers, stating that jobs were a "lure" inducing people to enter the country illegally. Support for the sanctions was conditioned on providing protections against discrimination based on national origin and on granting amnesty to "settled, contributing members of their communities" who were undocumented. The new AFL-CIO resolution, passed in February, replaces the 1985 statement.

By the end of the decade, the AFL-CIO responded to documented reports of widespread discrimination against workers who appeared to be foreign by calling for increased enforcement of anti-bias laws.

More recently, the AFL-CIO has played a key role in strengthening workplace rights in the enforcement of immigration laws, including persuading the Labor Department to stop inspecting workers' immigration papers while examining complaints of labor standards abuses. The AFL-CIO also has led the fight against efforts by members of the far right to blame immigrant workers for economic problems. The federation and many affiliated unions campaigned against Proposition 187 in California in 1994 which, among other things, would have denied children of undocumented workers the right to attend school and reduce available health care services.

Unions and immigrant supporters were instrumental in persuading Congress and the White House in 1996 to partially restore some basic federal benefits that had been taken away. But for workers such as Estella Granda and Roberto Lostaunau, it's clear more needs to be done.

'When one worker is cheated, all workers are cheated'

The plight of immigrants has a direct impact on all U.S. workers. Because undocumented workers often are afraid to speak up for fear of being found out, employers use them as a wedge to force down standards and pay throughout an industry. If employers believe they can get away with treating immigrants poorly, they will find ways to pit these workers against higher-paid, often union workers, and try to force down the pay scale.

Although native-born workers may blame immigrant workers in low-wage jobs for lowering wages, immigrants share the same problems as other workers in traditionally poorly paid positions—women, young African American men and workers with little education. In Houston, where one-third of the population consists of immigrants, building trades unions began to organize immigrants after they found in 1998 that contractors were paying Latino workers less than the prevailing wage.

"The union movement generally bemoans that our jobs are taken away by immigrants. I've heard that for 30 years," says Richard Shaw, secretary-treasurer of the Harris County (Texas) Central Labor Council. "But the reality is that these immigrant workers are being cheated. And when one worker is cheated, all workers are cheated."

In Florida, where much of the workforce is agricultural, employers use temporary guest workers to maintain a pool of surplus labor and force down wages, says Florida AFL-CIO President Marilyn Lenard. "A lot of unscrupulous employers are using the guest-worker program to bring in workers who are not really needed," she says. "Employers in the farm industry like to say that when there's a surplus of workers, supply and demand push wages down. But the truth is that whenever they see that labor surplus being reduced, they cry to the government that they need to recruit more immigrant workers rather than pay a decent wage to the ones who are working here."

The value of a union

Unions once focused much more on organizing high-wage jobs in which there were few women and minority workers. But because of their strong connections to the civil rights movement, unions took up the mantle to represent all types of workers. Following the shift in the U.S. economy from high-wage manufacturing jobs to low-wage service jobs, unions were well-positioned to reach out to the workers in the service sector. In making organizing a top priority, unions sought to represent those workers, including immigrants and women, who are among the fastest-growing groups in the workforce.

	"The union changed my life," says Maria Petrosova, who immigrated from Slovakia in 1995.

Maria Petrosova knows the value of a union contract. Petrosova, 45, immigrated from Slovakia in 1995 and got a job as a housekeeper making $6 an hour. She taught herself English, and as her language skills improved, she sought and gained a higher-paying job in 1997 in asbestos removal.

Unlike her housekeeping job, the asbestos removal work is unionized. Before the asbestos workers gained a voice on the job with the Laborers, they made $13 an hour and had no face masks or protective gear to prevent exposure to the carcinogenic asbestos. Now, they have all those protections and make as much as $21.45 an hour. "The union changed my life," Petrosova says.

Siaka Diakite and his fellow workers no longer have to carry those heavy loads of groceries for little or no pay because they won the right to choose the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union District Council/UFCW and signed a new contract. "Now with the union, we can say what we want to say without fear." The workers have eight-hour shifts, a lunch break and medical insurance. "But most of all," Diakite says, "now we are being treated with dignity and respect."

More than 600,000 workers joined unions last year, for a net increase of 265,000, the largest increase in two decades, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This milestone represents a turning point in rebuilding the union movement. For the movement to grow and increase union density, unions need to organize a million workers each year—400,000 more than were organized last year.

By organizing new groups of workers, the union movement will be able to increase the overall influence of working families in politics, in the economy and in the workplace. "It's plain and simple: Numbers are power," Turner says. In Las Vegas, the building trades signed up more than 7,000 new members, mostly Latino, between 1997 and 1999, through a two-year organizing campaign. In the 1998 elections, pro-worker candidate Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was re-elected by 5,000 votes, a margin he attributed to the building trades' support and unions' renewed strength in numbers.

New immigrant workers have an intensity and passion about joining unions that energize the entire union movement, says Miguel Contreras, president of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. In California, thousands of mostly Latino janitors walked out in April in an unfair labor practice strike, demanding a raise of $1 an hour. The janitors are members of SEIU Locals 1877 and 8028.

Immigrant workers organizing at Kukurin Concrete in Las Vegas waged a successful strike in 1998, winning agreement that the company will provide water on the job and observe meal breaks.

In Las Vegas, HERE has organized thousands of hotel, restaurant and casino workers, many of them immigrants. In 1991, members of Culinary Workers Local 226 and Bartenders Local 165 went on strike against the Frontier Hotel and Gambling Hall in Las Vegas. Throughout the six-and-a-half-year strike, not one of the 550 mostly immigrant strikers crossed the picket line. The workers won a new contract when the property was bought by a new owner. In October 1998, the union won another tough struggle when the new Bellagio Resort Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas agreed to recognize HERE as the representative for some 4,300 workers.

"Immigrant workers are leading the way," Contreras says. "Just like immigrants did in the early 1900s on the East Coast, they look to unions to help give them a better life for their families. And they are militant, and that gives energy to the rest of the union movement."

Julio Garcia symbolizes that passion and energy. The 23-year-old Las Vegas construction worker and his two brothers were among the 130 workers who walked out on their own in July 1998 to protest nonunion Kukurin Concrete's unfair labor practices. When some of his co-workers returned to work, Garcia refused. "I wanted to go union. I told them I would make this company go union by myself." He volunteered to work 18 hours a day to organize. He even brought two of his children, now 4 years old and 22 months old, to the job site. Now a member of Plasterers and Cement Masons Local 79, Garcia says he would do it again. "Whatever I lost during the strike, I won back when I got the chance to join the union."

As an advocate for social and economic justice for all people, the union movement has declared the freedom to choose a union the civil rights issue of the 21st century. Unions also have a responsibility to fight for good jobs for everyone, because unions provide a good living for workers and help build better communities.

The Carpenters union is among those reaching out to immigrants. In Cincinnati, the UBC and community groups set up an immigrant-owned construction company that hires undocumented, nonunion immigrant workers, helps them become documented and assists them in becoming union members. The immigrant workers become U.S. citizens, pay taxes and get pensions. Because the undocumented workers were paid less than market wage and now receive union wages, the pressure to lower wages in the area's construction industry is lessened. And contractors, who were facing a skilled labor shortage, gain new, trained workers.

Recognizing our common bonds

How the union movement reaches out to immigrant workers cuts to the heart of what unions are all about. Many union members, ambivalent and unsure of the AFL-CIO's policy on immigration, are uncertain as to whether the changes they see in their workplaces and in their communities are good for them and their families.

In a global economy, in which employers pit workers against each other, the fate of both native-born workers and immigrant workers are linked. Employers that try to exploit immigrant workers are the same ones that fight all workers' rights. The most effective way to counter the strength and financial resources of exploitative employers is through a strong union movement that includes all workers, regardless of where they were born, their race, gender or sexual orientation. Unions can most effectively advocate for working families when we recognize our common bonds and work together to tackle tough issues.