Labor urges amnesty for undocumented workers

By Diane E. Lewis, Globe Staff, 9/11/2003

Aware of the growing importance of immigrants to their dwindling ranks, labor unions are demanding amnesty for 10 million undocumented workers, and they're taking their message on the road.

The AFL-CIO, a federation of 60 unions, has joined with clergy and immigration rights groups in launching a cross-country push to build support for undocumented immigrants. Labor specialists said the effort, called the Immigrant Workers' Freedom Ride, is meant to evoke the Freedom Ride buses of the civil rights movement.

Sponsors hope to raise $2 million for buses, food, and lodging for several thousand immigrant workers and supporters from nine cities, including Boston. The riders will stop in 90 cities during their trips starting Sept. 28, before converging in New York next month for a rally expected to draw about 150,000 people. Some participants will stop in Washington, D.C., to lobby Congress for more flexible immigration laws.

"Right now, the reality is that immigrant workers are suffering from laws that do not provide for legalization or a quick path to citizenship," said Brian Lang, the director of organizing at Hotel Restaurant Employees and Bartenders Union Local 26, which is coordinating the effort in Boston. "The freedom rides are a way to bring more awareness to the public about immigrants' contributions and their concerns, especially at this point in time."

The immigrant labor force is growing as overall union membership has declined, from 27 percent of the US work force in 1953 to 13.2 percent last year. At the same time, the country's foreign-born population increased from 19 million in 1990 to about 32.5 million today, according to labor economist Vernon Briggs. He said 16 million immigrants are employed in the United States, representing about 12.5 percent of the overall labor force. The Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University has estimated that at least 20 percent of all workers in low-wage service sector jobs are immigrants.

Robert J.S. Ross, a sociology professor at Clark University in Worcester, said the influx of foreign-born workers has reinvigorated the labor movement.

"Immigrants are a necessity to unions because the manual working class is now significantly immigrants and people of color," said Ross. "Also, significant factions of white-collar workers are immigrants. For unions to grow, they have to organize new workers, wherever and whoever they are. Labor sees amnesty as the first step to organizing immigrants and getting legal and enfranchized workers into unions."

Not surprising, some of labor's biggest recent efforts have involved immigrant labor.

Last year, Justice for Janitors, an arm of the Service Employees International Union, waged a high-profile struggle in Boston to extend health benefits and gain higher wages for office cleaners, many of them Latinos. They won a five-year contract.

In January, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, widely known as UNITE, unveiled a union organizing campaign to attract an estimated 17,000 laundry workers from Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean and the United States. The campaign is directed at Ohio-based Cintas Corp., an industrial laundry company with more than 300 US sites.

Kate Bronfenbrenner, a labor professor at Cornell University, said 15 percent of the workers who vote in union elections surpervised by the National Labor Relations Board are immigrants. She said unions have seen significant membership growth in industries where immigrant workers are in the majority. In retail, where immigrants are employed by grocery stores and warehouses, unions won 58 of the 81 elections held in 2000. In healthcare, which employs immigrants as janitors, food service workers, nurses aides and technicians, unions won 62 of the 188 elections held that year.

In the past, unions fought against opening US borders to immigrants and even backed sanctions against employers who hired undocumented workers.

Labor's stance changed in 2000 when the AFL-CIO reversed its position against amnesty and approved a resolution supporting protection from deportation. The organization was later criticized by economists who feared that a large influx of low-wage foreign workers would depress US wages and negatively affect the economy.

Some economists are still concerned. "When massive infusions of labor come into the bottom pool of the labor market, it makes it very difficult to organize those workers and just as difficult to raise their wages," said Briggs, author of the book, "Immigration and American Unionism."

Diane E. Lewis can be reached at dlewis@globe.com.