Blacks and Immigrants Bring in the Union December 21, 2008
Posted by rogerhollander in Immigration, Labor.Tags: afl-cio, afro-americans, anti-union, Civil Rights, david bacon, efca, free choice act, immigrants, labor, labour, latino, north carolina, roger hollander, smithfield, uaw, undocumented workers, union, union-busting, workers
add a comment
Workers at Smithfield win union contract after 16 year fight. (Photo: smithfieldfoods.com)
21 December 2008»
by: David Bacon, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
When workers at Smithfield Foods’ North Carolina packing house voted in the union on December 11, the longest, most bitter anti-union campaign in modern labor history went down to defeat. Sixteen years ago, workers there began organizing with the United Food and Commercial Workers. In 1994 and 1997, the union was defeated in elections later thrown out by Federal authorities because the company created an atmosphere of violence and terror in the plant. In 1997, one worker was beaten after the vote count. Company guards were given the ability to arrest workers, who were held in a detention center in the plant they called the company jail. Many workers were fired for union activity. And in recent years, immigration raids swept the plant in the middle of the union drive, adding to the climate of intimidation.
It was no surprise then, that the pro-union vote (2,041 to 1,879) set off celebrations in house trailers and ramshackle homes in Tar Heel, Red Springs, Santa Paula, and all the tiny working class towns spread from Fayetteville down to the South Carolina border. Relief and happiness are understandable in this state, where union membership is the lowest in the country. But Smithfield workers were not just celebrating a vote count. Their victory was the culmination of an organizing strategy that accomplished what many have said U.S. unions can no longer do – organize huge, privately-owned factories.
Five thousand people work in the world’s largest pork slaughterhouse, where they kill and cut apart 32,000 hogs every day. Efforts by the modern U.S. labor movement to organize factories the size of the Tar Heel plant have not been very successful for the last two decades. In fact, private-sector unionization has fallen below 8 percent of the workforce. The giant electronics plants of Silicon Valley have an anti-union strategy so intimidating that unions haven’t even tried to organize them for years. Japanese car manufacturers have built assembly plants and successfully kept workers from organizing, in spite of efforts by the auto union.
The price for labor’s failure to organize Japanese plants became clear in December’s Congressional debate over the auto bailout proposal. Southern Republican senators demanded that the United Auto Workers agree to gut its union contracts to match the non-union wages and conditions at Nissan, Honda and BMW. The presence of the non-union plants threatens to destroy the union, and the same dilemma exists in industry after industry.
Unions pin their hopes on the Employee Free Choice Act. This proposal would require a company like Smithfield to negotiate a union contract if a majority of workers sign union cards. It would avoid the kind of union election that took place at Smithfield in 1997, where workers voted in an atmosphere of violence and terror. EFCA would also put penalties on employers who fire workers for union activity. At Smithfield, the company rehired in 2006 workers it fired for union activity in 1994. But it was only obliged to pay the fired workers for their lost wages, and even then was allowed to deduct any money they’d earned during the decade their cases wound through the legal system. EFCA would substantially restrict the kind of anti-union campaign Smithfield mounted for 15 years.
But EFCA by itself will not build strong unions, which workers can use not just to win elections but to make substantial changes in the workplace. The union at Smithfield wasn’t created on election day. Workers had already organized it in the battles that preceded the vote. They did much more than sign union cards. They had to lose their fear, and show open support for the demands they’d chosen themselves, like lower line speed to reduce injuries, rehiring workers fired because of their immigration status, or giving workers a paid holiday for Dr. King’s birthday. Packinghouse laborers then had to learn to make management listen to those demands by circulating petitions and forming delegations to demand changes.
The union strategy relied on organizing resistance to immigration-related firings, and uniting a diverse workforce of African Americans, Puerto Ricans and immigrant Mexicans. In 2007, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and company managers cooperated in two immigration raids that produced a climate of terror organizer Eduardo Pena likened to “a nuclear bomb.” Immigrant workers left the plant in droves. The Smithfield raids were two of many in recent years, used to punish workers when they’ve tried to improve conditions.
The plant’s citizen workers felt the effects along with the immigrants. For months afterwards, the organizing campaign was effectively dead, with many leaders deported and union activity halted by fear. It was only when African American workers who’d fought to win the King holiday became the core of a new generation of leaders that the struggle to build the union could continue.
If Black and Latino immigrant workers hadn’t found a way to work together, the union drive would have ended with the raids. And if the company and ICE had succeeded in convincing half the plant that the other half really had no right to work because they lacked legal immigration status, workers would have been unwilling and unable to defend each other. In the end, both groups found a common interest in better wages and working conditions. But they also had to agree to defend the right of each worker to her or his job, and treat any unfair firing as an attack on the union, whether the victim was Black, Mexican, or Puerto Rican.
The Smithfield firings were made possible by employer sanctions, the Federal law that prohibits employers from hiring undocumented workers. The law makes working a crime for people without papers, and became the pretext for firing immigrant union leaders. That’s why the AFL-CIO voted in 1999 to call for the law’s repeal. The Smithfield raids show that changing immigration law is as necessary for organizing unions as passing reforms like EFCA.
Outside the Tar Heel plant, the union grew roots in working-class communities, and became part of workers’ lives. They took English classes in its office and marched in demonstrations for civil rights. That coalition turned the company’s anti-labor actions against it, exposing its record in the place where Smithfield was most vulnerable – in the eyes of consumers.
The election result was the product of a long-term organizing effort and commitment. With a similar commitment, other unions can do the same, no matter how big the plant or anti-union the employer. But it takes a strategy based on building a real union in the workplace and community. That’s what workers did at Smithfield.
And with changes in labor and immigration law, workers won’t have to conduct a 15-year war to accomplish the same goal.
Stop the Raids in the First 100 Days October 26, 2008
Posted by rogerhollander in Barack Obama, George W. Bush, John McCain, Latin America, Political Commentary.Tags: Add new tag, anti-immigration, border communities, criminalization of undocumented workers, david bacon, government raids on undocumented, human rights, Immigration policy, immigration raids, labor rights, Latino Asian, Mexico, NAFTA, roger hollander, U.S. Mexico border, undocumented workers
add a comment
by: David Bacon, t r u t h o u t | Perspective, October 26, 2008
Citizens of Postville, Iowa, march for immigrant and worker rights after a federal raid of the Agriprocessors meat-packing plant resulted in the arrest of 388 workers. (Photo: AP)
The first of the 388 workers arrested in the immigration raid on the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, were deported last week, having spent five months in federal prison. Their crime? Giving a bad Social Security number to the company to get hired. Among them will be a young man who had his eyes covered with duct tape by a supervisor on the line, who then beat him with a meathook. The supervisor is still on the job.
Postville was one of the many recent immigration raids leading to criminal charges and deportations for thousands of people. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff calls this “closing the back door.” Meanwhile, his department seeks to “open the front door” by establishing new guest worker programs called “close to slavery” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Something is clearly wrong with the priorities of immigration enforcement. Hungry and desperate workers go to jail and get deported. The government protects employers and seeks to turn a family-based immigration system into their managed labor supply. Yet national political campaigns say less and less about it. Immigrant Latino and Asian communities feel increasingly afraid and frustrated. Politicians want their votes, but avoid talking about the rising wave of arrests, imprisonment and deportations.
This month, national demonstrations across the nation are protesting the silence, asking candidates to speak out. Immigrant communities expect a new deal from a new administration, especially from Democrats. They want a new president to take swift and decisive action to give human rights a priority over fear, and recognize immigrants as people, not just a source of cheap labor.
In its first 100 days, a new administration could take these simple steps to benefit immigrants and working families:
• Stop Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from seeking serious federal criminal charges, with incarceration in privately run prisons, for lacking papers or for bad Social Security numbers.
• Stop raiding workplaces, especially where workers are trying to organize unions or enforce wage and hour laws. This would help all workers, not just immigrants, to raise low wages.
• Double the paltry 742 federal inspectors responsible for all US wage and hour violations, and focus on industries where immigrants are concentrated. The National Labor Relations Board could target employers who use immigration threats to violate union rights.
• Halt community sweeps, where agents use warrants for one or two people to detain and deport dozens of others. End the government’s campaign to repeal local sanctuary ordinances, and to drag local law enforcement into immigration raids.
• Allow all workers to apply for a Social Security number and pay legally into the system that benefits everyone. Social Security numbers should be used for their true purpose – paying retirement and disability benefits – not to fire immigrants from their jobs and send them to prison.
• Reestablish worker protections ended under Bush on existing guest worker programs, force employers to hire domestically first, and decertify any contractor guilty of labor violations.
• Restore human rights in border communities, stop construction of the border wall between the US and Mexico, and disband the Operation Streamline federal court, where scores of young border crossers are sent to prison in chains every day.
After the first 100 days, Democrats will have to decide what reforms to bring before Congress, and when. Some would delay action for a year or more. But the US Chamber of Commerce and dozens of trade groups will not sit on their hands. They have been pushing for years for big guest worker programs, more raids and enforcement, and a weak legalization program. Many immigrant and labor rights activists want an alternative, and advocate three steps toward a more progressive reform:
1. A moratorium on raids, while protecting human and labor rights, in the first 100 days.
2. Introduce a bill to give green card visas to the undocumented, and clear up the backlog of people already waiting for them. If more visas are more easily available abroad, people won’t have to cross the border without them. That bill should also create jobs in unemployed communities, repeal employer sanctions laws that make work a crime for immigrants, and pass labor law reform to protect workers’ rights. Guest worker programs with a record of abuse should be ended, as they were in 1964.
3. Change trade policy and renegotiate agreements like NAFTA, so they stop causing poverty and uprooting communities, making migration peoples’ only alternative for survival. Defeat new trade agreements with countries like Colombia, which will cause job loss in the US and spread low wages, labor violations and displacement abroad. US tax dollars, instead of being spent on war in Iraq, could expand rural credit, education and healthcare in Mexico and other countries, easing the pressure behind migration.
There is a common ground between immigrants, African-Americans and other communities of color, unions, churches, civil rights organizations and working families generally. Legalization and immigrant rights, tied to guaranteeing jobs for all working families, can bring people together. All workers, including immigrants, need the right to organize and enforce labor standards – the same goal sought by unions in the Employee Free Choice Act. Changing trade policy will benefit working class communities in the US, while helping the families of immigrants back home from Oaxaca to El Salvador.
The diverse communities who need these reforms can and will find ways to seek them together. In fact, if Barack Obama and a larger Democratic majority in Congress gain office in November, they will owe their victory to this coalition.
After the election, this same coalition will need jobs and rights. But immigrant workers are going to jail now. The wave of raids continues to divide families, even as candidates hold rallies and ask for votes. In Los Angeles’ Placita Olvera, activists have begun a hunger strike to stop the deportations. Marches and demonstrations are making the same point from coast to coast.
Promises of change are not enough. For candidates who want working-class votes, the first step is to speak out.
David Bacon is a California photojournalist who documents labor, migration and globalization. His book “Communities Without Borders” was just published by Cornell University/ILR Press.
roger hollander 
Hundreds of Union Janitors Fired Under Pressure From Feds May 7, 2010
Posted by rogerhollander in California, Economic Crisis, Immigration, Labor, Racism.Tags: California, david bacon, Homeland Security, Immigration, javier murillo, labor, labour, obama administration, racism, seiu, undocumented, unions, workers
add a comment
Friday 07 May 2010
by: David Bacon, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
(Photo: © David Bacon)
San Francisco, California – Federal immigration authorities have pressured one of San Francisco’s major building service companies, ABM, into firing hundreds of its own workers. Some 475 janitors have been told that unless they can show legal immigration status, they will lose their jobs in the near future.
ABM has been a union company for decades, and many of the workers have been there for years. “They’ve been working in the buildings downtown for 15, 20, some as many as 27 years,” said Olga Miranda, president of Service Employees Local 87. “They’ve built homes. They’ve provided for their families. They’ve sent their kids to college. They’re not new workers. They didn’t just get here a year ago.”
Nevertheless, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division of the Department of Homeland Security has told ABM that they have flagged the personnel records of those workers. Weeks ago, ICE agents sifted through Social Security records and the I-9 immigration forms all workers have to fill out when they apply for jobs. They then told ABM that the company had to fire 475 workers who were accused of lacking legal immigration status.
ABM is one of the largest building service companies in the country, and it appears that union janitorial companies are the targets of the Obama administration’s immigration enforcement program. “Homeland Security is going after employers that are union,” Miranda charged. “They’re going after employers that give benefits and are paying above the average.”
Last October, 1,200 janitors working for ABM were fired in similar circumstances in Minneapolis. In November, over 100 janitors working for Seattle Building Maintenance lost their jobs. Minneapolis janitors belong to SEIU Local 26, Seattle janitors to Local 6 and San Francisco janitors to Local 87.
President Obama said sanctions enforcement targets employers “who are using illegal workers in order to drive down wages – and oftentimes mistreat those workers.” An ICE Worksite Enforcement Advisory claimed, “unscrupulous employers are likely to pay illegal workers substandard wages or force them to endure intolerable working conditions.”
Curing intolerable conditions by firing or deporting workers who endure them doesn’t help the workers or change the conditions, however. And despite Obama’s contention that sanctions enforcement will punish those employers who exploit immigrants, employers are rewarded for cooperating with ICE by being immunized from prosecution. Javier Murillo, president of SEIU Local 26, said, “The promise made during the audit is that if the company cooperates and complies, they won’t be fined. So this kind of enforcement really only hurts workers.”
ICE Director John Morton said the agency is auditing the records of 1,654 companies nationwide. “What kind of economic recovery goes with firing thousands of workers?” Miranda asked. “Why don’t they target employers who are not paying taxes, who are not obeying safety or labor laws?”
The San Francisco janitors are now faced with an agonizing dilemma. Should they turn themselves in to Homeland Security, which might charge them with providing a bad Social Security number to their employer, and even hold them for deportation? For workers with families, homes and deep roots in a community, it’s not possible to just walk away and disappear. “I have a lot of members who are single mothers whose children were born here,” Miranda said. “I have a member whose child has leukemia. What are they supposed to do? Leave their children here and go back to Mexico and wait? And wait for what?”
Miranda’s question reflects not just the dilemma facing individual workers, but of 12 million undocumented people living in the United States. Since 2005, successive congress members, senators and administrations have dangled the prospect of gaining legal status in front of those who lack it. In exchange, their various schemes for immigration reform have proposed huge new guest worker programs, and a big increase in exactly the kind of enforcement now directed at 475 San Francisco janitors.
While the potential criminalization of undocumented people in Arizona continues to draw headlines, the actual punishment of workers because of their immigration status has become an increasingly bitter fact of life across the country.
President Obama, condemning Arizona’s law that would make being undocumented a state crime, said it would “undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans.” But then he announced his support for legislation with guest worker programs and increased enforcement.
The country is no closer to legalization of the undocumented than it was ten years ago. But the enforcement provisions of the comprehensive immigration reform bills debated in Congress over the last five years have already been implemented on the ground. The Bush administration conducted a high-profile series of raids in which it sent heavily-armed agents into meatpacking plants and factories, held workers for deportation and sent hundreds to federal prison for using bad Social Security numbers.
After Barack Obama was elected president, immigration authorities said they’d follow a softer policy, using an electronic system to find undocumented people in workplaces. People working with bad Social Security numbers would be fired.
Ironically the Bush administration proposed a regulation that would have required employers to fire any worker who provided an employer with a Social Security number that didn’t match the SSA database. That regulation was then stopped in court by unions, the ACLU and the National Immigration Law Center. The Obama administration, however, is implementing what amounts to the same requirement, with the same consequence of thousands of fired workers.
Union leaders like Miranda see a conflict between the rhetoric used by the president and other Washington, DC, politicians and lobbyists in condemning the Arizona law, and the immigration proposals they make in Congress. “There’s a huge contradiction here,” she said. “You can’t tell one state that what they’re doing is criminalizing people, and at the same time go after employers paying more than a living wage and the workers who have fought for that wage.”
Renee Saucedo, attorney for La Raza Centro Legal and former director of the San Francisco Day Labor Program, is even more critical. “Those bills in Congress, which are presented as ones that will help some people get legal status, will actually make things much worse,” she charged. “We’ll see many more firings like the janitors here, and more punishments for people who are just working and trying to support their families.”
Increasingly, however, the Washington proposals have even less promise of legalization, and more emphasis on punishment. The newest Democratic Party scheme virtually abandons the legalization program promised by the “bipartisan” Schumer/Graham proposal, saying that heavy enforcement at the border and in the workplace must come before any consideration of giving 12 million people legal status.
“We have to look at the whole picture,” Saucedo urged. “So long as we have trade agreements like NAFTA that create poverty in countries like Mexico, people will continue to come here, no matter how many walls we build. Instead of turning people into guest workers, as these bills in Washington would do, while firing and even jailing those who don’t have papers, we need to help people get legal status, and repeal the laws that are making work a crime.”