Fw: USA: sweatshops thriving
Graeme Bacque (gbacque@idirect.com)
Wed, 14 Oct 1998 23:51:16 -0700
-----Original Message-----
From: Blazing Star <sananda@hotmail.com>
Oct. 14, 1998 >> 8:19 pm PDT
Labor/Immigration-U.S.: Bringing Back Sweatshop
Conditions
Inter Press Service
BERKELEY, (Oct. 13) IPS/GIN - There is an
immigration crisis in the U.S. but it is not one
caused by uncontrolled borders or too many
immigrants, the stereotyped images used to inflame
anti-immigrant hysteria.
It is a sweatshop crisis -- the return to
exploitative conditions in the workplace
reminiscent of a century ago. And the enforcement
of U.S. immigration law has become a key weapon in
the proliferation of those conditions, undermining
the ability of immigrant workers to fight for
better pay and treatment, and the effectiveness of
unions which try to help them.
The slide backwards got a big push with the
passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act
of 1986, which made employer sanctions part of
federal law. The law was a watershed in the status
of immigrants in the U.S., and formalized the
creation of a special category of residents who
have significantly fewer rights than the
population as a whole -- who cannot legally work
or receive social benefits.
Employer sanctions has had a strong economic
impact -- decreasing the wages of undocumented
labor and increasing profit rates in industries
dependent on it. Undocumented workers are a
permanent and constant part of the U.S.
population, and have been for decades. According
to the Urban Institute, it has fluctuated from
2.5-3.5 million in 1980, to 3-5 million in 1986,
to 1.8-3 million in 1988, and to 2.7-3.7 million
in 1992.
It is clear that the undocumented population is
relatively stable -- about one percent of the
total population.
The National Immigration Forum calculates that
undocumented immigrants pay about $7 billion
annually in taxes, subsidizing funds like Social
Security and unemployment insurance from which
they cannot collect benefits. In California, which
accounts for about 43 percent of the nation's
undocumented population, or about 1.4 million
people, undocumented immigrants pay an additional
$732 million in state and local taxes.
A UCLA study found that undocumented workers
contribute approximately 7 percent of California's
$900 billion gross economic product, or $63
billion. The contribution by each undocumented
immigrant is therefore about $45,000, counting
even children, the unemployed, and those too old
or ill to work.
Almost all undocumented workers receive wages
near, and sometimes below, the legal minimum,
which at $5.75 per hour equals an annual income of
$11,960.
The labor of undocumented workers pumps tens of
billions of dollars into the state's economy, but
the workers themselves receive only a small
percentage of it.
That difference is a source of extra profit for
those industries dependent on a workforce made up
largely of undocumented workers -- agriculture and
food processing, land development (including the
residential construction and building services
industries), tourism (including the hotel and
restaurant industries), garment production and
light manufacturing, transportation, retail trade,
healthcare and domestic services.
When that workforce is made more vulnerable by
immigration legislation, it also becomes cheaper
for employers. Nevertheless, undocumented workers
have not been passive victims of exploitation.
Over the last decade, they have been the backbone
of many strikes and organizing drives.
Employers have used their vulnerability, however,
in an effort to stop growing support for unions.
A report issued this week on the impact of
immigration raids by the National INS Raids Task
Force of the National Network for Immigrant and
Refugee Rights, "Portrait of Injustice," details a
number of cases in which immigration enforcement
has been used to deny immigrants their workplace
rights.
In just one of many examples, during the current
joint organizing drive by the Teamsters Union and
the United Farm Workers in Washington state's
apple industry, the Stemilt Fruit Company told
workers that union support would bring on raids.
According to one employee, Mary Mendez, Stemilt's
anti-union consultant told workers that "there
hasn't been a union here yet, and the INS hasn't
done any raids. But with a union, the INS is going
to be around."
Using those threats, the company was able to
defeat the union in a representation election.
Afterwards, however, the NLRB issued a bargaining
order because of Stemilt's illegal actions.
Employer sanctions set up a process in which
employers are required to request documents from
workers to verify their legal right to reside in
the U.S., and record those documents on I-9 forms.
Since IRCA passed in 1986, many employers have
used the I-9 process as a mechanism for firing
pro-union workers.
In 1990, Shine Building Maintenance in Silicon
Valley was faced by an organizing drive by its
immigrant janitors. The company told its workers
they had to provide new documentation verifying
their legal status. When workers couldn't produce
it, they were terminated.
The I-9 check provided a way to eliminate a
pro-union workforce, without violating NLRB
prohibitions against terminations for union
activity.
In San Leandro in 1997, Mediacopy, a video
reproduction company, used threats to verify
workers' immigration status as a means to
terrorize them before a union election, and to
reduce the number of eligible voters.
In December 1996, immigration agents went through
the company's I-9 forms to find the names of
undocumented workers. A major raid followed in
January, in which 99 people were deported.
Workers nevertheless signed union cards at the
plant, and filed for an NLRB election. A month
before the voting, the company announced it had
received an INS request for the reverification of
the documents of another 166 people.
Many workers then simply disappeared. Those who
remained were convinced that another raid was
imminent. The union lost the election, and the
NLRB again sought a bargaining order to compensate
for the extensive illegalities.
The ability of an employer to inform on its own
workforce, and use the INS to remove pro-union
workers, received legal reinforcement last year in
the Montero case in New York State.
In 1992, workers at STC Knitting in Long Island
City, New York, began an organizing drive with the
International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (now
UNITE). Just before the representation election,
the company's attorney wrote to the INS telling
the agency that undocumented workers were employed
in the sweatshop. The INS conducted an I-9 check,
and arrested ten workers, including Gloria
Montero, an active member of the union committee.
When she appealed the way in which immigration
enforcement was used as a tool by the employer to
terrorize workers and remove union supporters, a
federal court ruled that it was a legal
application of employer sanctions.
Even in the absence of direct union organizing,
the pressure of immigration raids keeps wages low
among some of the most vulnerable sections of the
workforce.
In the San Francisco Bay area, such raids have
focused on fast food workers, car wash workers,
and day laborers seeking jobs on the street
corner. Enforcing low wages among these workers
undermines wages generally in the service, fast
food and construction industries.
The INS has great latitude in the selection of
enforcement targets. In Georgia in the spring of
1998, the agency began raids in onion fields
outside Vidalia. After growers protested that
enforcement activity was interfering with their
operations, the local INS district director agreed
to suspend raids and deportations until the onion
crop had been harvested.
The enforcement of employer sanctions has also
undermined the ability of workers to protest the
violation of fair labor standards. In 1992 the INS
signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with
the Department of Labor (DoL). It requires DoL
inspectors to verify I-9 forms when they are
called in by workers over unpaid overtime and
other wage and hour violations.
In Los Angeles the INS initiated a series of raids
in garment sweatshops, called Operation
Buttonhole, in response to information from DoL
inspectors. In one raid on P.K. Fashions, garment
worker Miguel Angel Garcia Serrano was so
frightened he jumped out of an eight-story window.
"Workers in the garment industry won't complain
about workplace violations if it gets out that the
DoL and the INS are working together," says UNITE
organizer Cristina Vasquez. "Manufacturers and
contractors will use it to scare and threaten
workers." A DoL survey released this summer shows
that less than 40 percent of the licensed garment
factories in Southern California are in compliance
with labor and employment laws.
Similar raids also followed a 1998 campaign by the
Korean Immigrant Workers Association (KIWA) to
nforce wage and hour laws in restaurants in the
Los Angeles Korean community. Just weeks after DoL
inspectors were called in over wage and hour
violations, the INS began a wave of I-9 checks and
deportations.
At a Staten Island laundry plant, Launderall,
employees earning $300 for a 72-80 hour week
called in DoL inspectors this fall. After workers
made a claim for $159,000 in back wages, the INS
conducted a raid.
In September, the Yale Law School Workers Rights
Project and the American Civil Liberties Union
filed charges under NAFTA's labor sideagreement
against the DoL/INS memorandum of understanding.
Federal law, upheld by the Supreme Court,
establishes mandatory minimum wage and overtime
protections for all workers, regardless of
immigration status.
"The Clinton policy amounts to a gag order on
immigrant workers," explained Shayne Stevenson,
student director of the Yale group. "If no one can
complain about slave wages, sweatshop owners have
a green light to ignore minimum wage and overtime
laws."
In addition to opening up the prospect of
deportation, employer sanctions also increase the
risk for union activity in other ways. An
undocumented worker considering whether to
organize a union has to take into account the
possibility of being fired, as do other workers.
But sanctions make finding another job harder and
riskier. The period of unemployment is likely to
be longer.
Because sanctions also disqualify a fired worker
from unemployment benefits, food stamps or other
sources of income, a fired worker is forced to
take whatever job is available, at whatever wage.
And under National Labor Relations Board rulings,
if an employer shows that a worker fired for union
activity is undocumented, it is not obligated to
rehire her or him.
When it becomes harder and riskier for workers to
make demands for social services, or to assert
their rights at work or in the community, the
price of their labor drops. Immigrant wages are
already depressed, and getting worse. According to
UCLA professor Goetz Wolff, in women's apparel in
Los Angeles, the average hourly wage fell from
$6.37 to $5.62 between 1988 and 1993. Some 120,000
people work in LA's garment sweatshops, almost all
immigrants, mostly undocumented.
Despite these obstacles, immigrant workers,
including the undocumented, have been the backbone
of labor's resurgence in California, in a
multitude of strikes and organizing drives. Often,
those union efforts have involved unique tactics
to deal with the problem of immigration status.
In the yearlong strike by southern California
drywallers in 1992, mostly-Mexican immigrants were
able to stop all home construction from the
Mexican border north to Santa Barbara. They defied
the police and the Border Patrol, blockading
freeways when their car caravans were rousted as
they traveled to construction sites.
Mass mobilizations and militant tactics also
marked the campaigns by Justice for Janitors in
Century City, Silicon Valley and Sacramento. In
smaller local struggles, unions like Warehouse
Local 6 of the International Longshore and
Warehouse Union have established a presence in the
immigrant community through the use of strikes and
direct action, and a willingness to take on the
problem of immigration.
The history of the union struggles of immigrant
workers in California is by and large a history of
success. According to veteran union organizer Joel
Ochoa, "the immigrant community is looking for
ties with labor. People are coming here from
Mexico and all over Latin America, with a
tradition and culture that gives them a rich
repertoire of tactics for fighting the companies."
Many California unions have realized that they
will grow, and become more effective, as immigrant
workers organize and contribute their traditions
to the broader labor movement. Increasingly they
are calling for an end to the use of immigration
law as a weapon of employers.
Repealing employer sanctions is a position now
shared by the Service Employees International
Union, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and
Technical Employees, the United Electrical Workers
and the California Labor Federation, AFL-CIO.
Speaking before the Asian-Pacific American Labor
Alliance in San Francisco last year, AFL-CIO
Secretary Treasurer Richard Trumka reminded
delegates that "we are all agitators -- we are all
illegals. No matter how many years we've been
here, in the eyes of the bankers of Wall Street
we're all immigrants from Europe or Central
America or Mexico, on our knees, digging in the
dirt."
Winning justice for immigrant workers, ending
sweatshop conditions and defending the right of
unions to organize requires translating those
sentiments into concrete political opposition to
employer sanctions, and the use of immigration law
to deny workers' rights.
=A9 1998 Cable News Network, Inc. A Time Warner
Company. All Rights Reserved.
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