This article is the first of a two-part analysis of the relation between unions and immigrant workers. In an upcoming issue, the focus will be on campus unions at UIUC and their efforts to protect international students and undocumented workers.
Since the country’s inception, immigrants have been the backbone of free labor in the United States. Until recent decades, organized labor’s relations with immigrant workers have been decidedly mixed. This article offers a brief historical overview of these relations and a more detailed discussion of unions’ current efforts to support immigrants, documented and undocumented, and their communities.
In or Out: The Past Record of Organized Labor’s Attitudes and Treatment of Immigrant Workers
Not surprisingly, a critical component of unions’ past relations with immigrant workers was racism and ethnic prejudice among union leaders and members, but another important component, often intertwined with racism, has been the structure of unions themselves, namely the distinction between craft and industrial unions.
One particularly distressing example of how racism mixed with job competition comes from California. Stereotypes of Chinese workers and perceived competitive threats from these workers in mining and railroad building motivated California unions to call for the exclusion of Chinese workers from the country and offer strong support for workingmen’s parties and clubs that made exclusion a central component in their platforms. Unions were thus a major factor in the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
Craft unions in the nineteenth and early twentieth century typically barred black and immigrant workers from their organizations. Craft-union organizational structure was based on reducing competitive pressure and maintaining higher wage levels through strict control of the labor pool. That the labor pool was comprised largely of native white workers demonstrates how racism was also at work. The American Federation of Labor, comprised of craft unions, supported the 1924 Immigration Act, which offered the highest entry quotas to migrants from northern and western Europe and lower quotes for those from southern and eastern Europe, whose populations at the time were thought of as being not racially pure.
With the rise of industrial unionism in the 1930s, a new organizational structure emerged that sought to bring not just craft workers into the fold, but all production workers in an industry. This meant including the black and immigrant workers that comprised the ranks of the unskilled laborers in target industries. Industrial union leaders began to not only organize the unskilled but also to disseminate a message of racial and ethnic unity among members.
Labor support helped to secure passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1963, which ended the unequal quota systems for immigrants from Europe but established for the first time numerical restrictions on legal entry from nations in the Western hemisphere, including a 20,000 annual cap for Mexican migrants. Prior to this law’s passage as many as 400,000 migrants and temporary workers were admitted in the prior decade. This law thus set the stage for the growth of unauthorized migration from Mexico and other countries south of the border, and its criminalization.
Despite that criminalization, however, employers’ expanding demand for unskilled labor kept migratory flows high. Largely initiated within their own communities, campaigns to unionize immigrants escalated from the 1970s onward. From the United Farm Workers’ efforts to unionize agricultural workers to Service Employee Industrial Union’s Justice for Janitors mobilizations, often led by first and second-generation members of immigrant communities, the wider labor movement came to the realization that in immigrant communities lay the future of unionization in the United States. In 2000, the national federation of labor, the AFL-CIO, called for the protection of workplace rights for all workers, including the undocumented, and amnesty for immigrants.
The Current Scene
Today unions are arguably the most important institutional force working to protect immigrants and their communities. Negotiating contracts that improve wages and working conditions for immigrant workers certainly remains the staple approach. But as the Trump administration’s wave of cruel detentions and deportations, often to countries which house deportees in horrific prison conditions, grows ever-larger, union-movement resistance to the Trump Administration efforts has escalated and extended, e.g., in Los Angeles, and faced federal government counteroffensives, including the use of military reserves and active-duty soldiers.
That L.A. should be the locus of intensive resistance to Trump’s campaign is not surprising, given the vital history of community organizing and institution-building within the city’s Latino districts. Unions have played an outsized role in efforts to block deportations. Daniel Huerta, a beloved Service Employees International Union (SEIU) leader, was physically assaulted and arrested during a raid in downtown L.A., suggesting how the attack on immigrant communities can conveniently overlap with the effort to undermine unions. Huerta was part of a union-organized “rapid response network” that embraced other immigrant rights and faith organizations. Its purpose was to resist lawless arrests by requesting warrants; inform the arrested of their rights; record the raids to document which government entities were present among the personnel conducting the raids (a task made difficult given the agents wore masks and had no identifying clothing or badges and that their vehicles were unmarked); and through recording to potentially temper the use of physical force in the raids.
Unions have been at the forefront of rapid-response and anti-detention rallies beyond L.A. A protest rally was organized in Maryland, for example, by the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation Workers (SMART) on behalf of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was erroneously deported to an El Salvador prison, and was an apprentice in the union. A protest letter to the government on his behalf was also signed by Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO labor federation; James Williams, Jr., president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, or IUPAT; and Gwen Mills, president of the hospitality union Unite Here.
Unions are also increasingly negotiating contract provisions to protect immigrant workers. The Chicago Teachers Union negotiated a “sanctuary” provision prohibiting ICE raids in public schools. Other unions have negotiated contract language to limit employer internal audits, which can be used by ICE to target the undocumented, and to require employers to disclose in writing any inquiries into employee documentation as well as and to protect workers’ jobs for 120 days while any documentation issues are resolved.
Outside of contracts, unions increasingly hold workshops educating immigrant workers on their legal rights. Also, to the extent that too many rank-and-file members have bought into the right wing’s messaging on immigrants, unions are increasingly tackling the myths that are being promulgated and emphasizing the importance of solidarity with all those who contribute to the US economy.
Of course, not all unions have come on board in protecting union immigrant workers, not least if few immigrants are present in their membership; but as the solidarity statement from Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, suggests, protection of immigrant workers has become increasingly widespread within the labor movement. This development is hardly surprising given that immigrant labor is increasingly the future of the labor movement; an attack on immigrant workers is truly an attack on organized labor itself—and an attack that is just one dimension of the Trump Administration’s undermining of unions.
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