Immigrants, Unions, and the New U.S. Labor Market (review)

Immanuel Ness's work on immigrant worker organizing in New York City accomplishes two goals. It persuasively argues for the centrality of low-wage immigrant workers for both labor and capital, and it illustrates the abilities of such workers to engage in militant struggle.

Eroding wages and benefits, growing contingent work arrangements, and predatory subcontracting have become familiar corporate strategies. In the first three chapters of Immigrants, Unions, and the New U.S. Labor Market, Ness shows the central role played by immigrants in this "informalization" of jobs. Since many immigrants have the fewest employment options of any workers, they fill those jobs that have been most thoroughly informalized. With the recent corporate restructuring, low-wage immigrants do not work at the margins, but rather at the center of today's economy. As Ness argues, industry after industry today could not function without their work.

The heart of Ness's book details the struggle by three groups of immigrant workers in New York City: greengrocery workers, supermarket delivery people, and black-car drivers. The cases share common elements. All three involve extreme exploitation—twelve-hour workdays, six to seven days a week, earning below minimum wages. In each case employers target one specific immigrant community—Mexicans, West Africans, and South Asians—assuming that such workers offer less resistance. The cases all involve industry restructuring away from unions. New York's 2,000 greengroceries have taken business away from unionized supermarket chains. The union supermarkets have subcontracted for West African baggers and delivery people, who perform not only these official tasks but unofficially do other work done by unionized employees. New "black car" operations have draw business away from a taxi industry that had historically been unionized.

In each case, the initiative for organizing came from workers. The same marginalization that made them attractive to employers also provided a tight sense of community. In every case the workers formed their own independent association. Their struggles in turn established models of community-supported unionism with a rich array of tactics—from boycotts to parades to legal action to strikes.

Defying stereotypes that such workers are hard to organize, all three struggles produced successes. However, the varied roles played by existing unions shaped the nature and degree of the workers' achievements. With the United Food and Commercial Workers having a poor record of representing Mexican workers, the greengrocer workers linked up with UNITE Local 169. Initial success led to broader efforts to secure a citywide master contract. Unfortunately, a swap of bargaining units between UNITE and the UFCW placed the campaign in hands that were unable to keep momentum going. Still, the campaign's work with Attorney General Spitzer's office did result in New York State's Unpaid Wages Prohibition Act and a subsequent Code of Conduct signed by several hundred greengrocers.

West African delivery workers' organizing took place without the union, an RWDSU local with a history of cooperating with management and ignoring the plight of immigrant workers. Only after successful legal action by the National Employment Law Project and a strike by workers did the union step in to sign a separate contract recognizing delivery workers as supermarket employees. Although this produced clear gains for workers, the negotiating process did not involve those who had led the struggle.

Unlike the other cases, the taxi industry had already been largely deunionized by employers. Thus the black car drivers had the ironic advantage of not having to organize out from under an unsupportive union. With effective backing by the Machinists, the South Asian drivers formed IAM Local 340. An NLRB decision reclassifying drivers as employees paved the way for formal organizing and bargaining. In addition the Local 340 spearheaded a successful effort to establish an industry-wide worker disability plan benefiting both union and non-union members alike.

Ness details the impact of the post 9-11 economic crisis and government crack down on the three groups of workers. Ironically, even though...