Civic Hopes and Political Realities: Immigrants, Community Organizations, and Political Engagement

Chapter 11. Immigrants At Work: Labor Unions and Noncitizen Members

Rebecca Hamlin Chapter 11 Immigrants At Work: Labor Unions and Noncitizen Members Organized labor is an inherently political institution. This is true, not simply in the abstract sense in which worker movements take on political meaning through their very existence, but also in a tangible, day-to-day sense that is intimately connected to their survival. To fulfill their raison d’être—to improve the workplace conditions and socioeconomic status of their members—unions must not only succeed at collective bargaining and contract negotiations, but also sustain victories at an earlier stage, ensuring that policies impacting basic union activities and the lives of working families are shaped in a favorable manner. To that end, American unions must maximize political power at the national, state, and local levels. The success with which unions build relationships with and maintain influence over those in public office has wide-reaching ramifications for the representation of working class interests in the formation of public policy. For decades, organized labor has been on the defensive in the struggle to maintain political power. Since 1975, union density (the percentage of union members in the workforce) has declined by almost one percentage point every year. In fact, the apex of union density coincided with the formation of the AFLCIO , when the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations merged in 1955. At the time of the merger, 33 percent of the American workforce was unionized. Today, the number hovers around 12 percent (U.S. Census Bureau 2007). This figure is bolstered by high unionization rates among public employees; in the private sector, only 7.4 percent of workers belong to a union; in the agricultural sector, only 3 percent do. Thus the labor movement is faced with the daunting prospect of organizing hundreds of thousands of new members each year to keep pace with the expanding workforce and maintain current density levels. Beyond that, achieving the necessary growth to reverse the trend of decline appears to be impossible. Organizing noncitizen workers, then, can be a mixed blessing for labor unions. Although increasing membership numbers has clear appeal, unions rely on a combination of political donations and high voter turnout among their members to maintain political power, activities which noncitizens cannot legally do. Moreover, immigrant members may have different political interests than cit- izens and, if they are undocumented, they may have particular workplace needs about which unions must familiarize themselves. Incorporating immigrants into unions therefore involves a steep learning curve for union staff, without necessarily providing the pay-off that new organizing of citizen members brings. I argue that mass undocumented immigration over the past twenty years has caused an upheaval at every level of the American labor movement, which, in turn, has affected the ongoing strategies of workplace and political organizing for many unions. First, I chronicle how immigrants have affected change in immigration policy positions in the labor movement via a bottom-up push; then I discuss the emergence of what I call immigrant unions: unions which have large numbers of immigrant members and which give immigrant issues a central place on their political agendas.1 Finally, I consider the strengths and weaknesses of unions as sites where immigrants can become civically and politically engaged, despite their lack of political power. In particular, I trace the process leading up to February 16, 2000, when American organized labor underwent a major shift in its official position on undocumented immigrants and their relationship to union power. For this story, I draw on forty-five in-depth interviews with union staff members conducted between 2003 and 2006 about the role of immigrants in the labor movement and the changing position of unions on immigration policy over time. My interviews are predominantly drawn from the San Francisco Bay Area, though a handful of them are with high-ranking labor leaders based in Washington, D.C. The chapter is focused on California for a number of reasons. First, it is both the most heavily immigrant state and a union stronghold. More than 26 percent of the population of California are foreign-born, compared to about 11 percent nationwide, and compared to the national unionization rate of 12 percent, 15.7 percent of California’s workers are union members (U.S. Census Bureau 2007). I also focus on this state because the grassroots mobilization that led to a dramatic shift within the labor movement was initiated there, in part by a loose coalition of concerned labor organizers, immigrant rights...