UNIONS AND IMMIGRANT WORKERS: Organized Labor and Communities Work Together for Change

Abstract

In February 2000, the Executive Council of the AFL-CIO issued a statement announcing that its unions “proudly stand on the side of immigrant workers.”1 The significance of that statement has grown in the time since it was made, as workers have struggled to enforce and maintain workplace rights against increasingly unfavorable odds. As unions have reached out to immigrant workers, especially in the low wage industries where their numbers are substantial, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (and its predecessor, the Immigration and Naturalization Service [INS]) has begun to target interior immigration enforcement at the workplace, increasing the number of workplace raids.In the almost two decades following passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), the ability of immigrant and American workers to enforce labor rights and attain bargaining power with employers has been undermined. The attacks on labor rights range from employer manipulation of IRCA’s employer sanctions to ill-targeted workplace raids—and even include the Bush Administration’s attempt to cloak racial or ethnic profiling as national security. These actions are growing obstacles to worker solidarity and concerted action.