By Steven Greenhouse
The San Diego Union Tribune, February 17,
2000
NEW ORLEANS -- Adopting a sharp change in policy, the American labor movement yesterday called for blanket amnesty for illegal immigrants and an end to most sanctions against employers who hire them.
In decades past, labor unions often saw immigrant workers as the enemy, accusing them of depressing wages and breaking strikes. But the executive council of the AFL-CIO adopted a more sympathetic approach yesterday, contending that too often the nation's immigration rules had enabled employers to exploit illegal workers.
The new policy comes as business groups are pushing for similar legislative changes to help industry cope with a shortage of workers.
Immigrants constitute an ever-larger part of the nation's work force, and labor leaders are stepping up efforts to unionize hundreds of thousands of immigrants who work at farms, hotels, and in construction, meatpacking and many other industries.
Labor leaders complain that unscrupulous employers often fight off unionization drives by threatening to fire employees who are illegal immigrants and support unions, and by calling immigration officials to deport them.
"The present system doesn't work and is used as a weapon against workers," said John Wilhelm, chairman of the labor federation's Committee on Immigration Policy and president of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union.
"The only reason a lot of employers want to hire a large number of illegal aliens is so they can exploit them."
Labor leaders said they hoped their new policy would help persuade Congress to pass an amnesty law that would enable immigrant workers to stand up for their rights.
"I think the AFL-CIO's decision is going to be a shot heard round Washington," said Frank Sharry, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, an immigrants' advocacy group.
"You have a variety of employer groups saying, 'We need more immigrant workers and we want our workers to be legal,' and you have the AFL-CIO saying, 'We want more immigrant workers to be legal and we're willing to talk to employers about their legitimate needs.' You have the makings of a business-labor compact that could draw new immigration policies for the next decade."
A spokeswoman for a San Diego County migrant rights group said organized labor's amnesty proposal is better than the guest-worker program that Congress has been considering since last year.
"What we need to do is legalize the workers who are already in the field," said Claudia Smith of the Oceanside-based California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation."
"We estimate 40 to 50 percent of the farm workers in California may be undocumented," she said.
"If there is a scarcity of labor, then amnesty should be given and it should be unconditional. We are utterly dependent on foreign labor."
Smith criticized the guest-worker program Congress is considering because it offers permanent residency only to farm laborers who work 180 days a year for five years. Most migrants don't work that many days, she said.
The labor federation's resolution calls for blanket amnesty for the estimated 6 million illegal immigrants in the United States. At the same time, the federation, which is holding its annual winter meeting in New Orleans, called on the federal government to maintain efforts to keep out illegal immigrants.
Just 15 years ago, the labor federation's support helped pass legislation creating sanctions for employers who hire illegal immigrants. At the time, labor unions said that such sanctions were needed to keep illegal immigrants from flooding the labor market and undermining union wages.
But union officials said yesterday that a new policy was needed because employer sanctions have failed to stem the tide of immigration and because immigrants represent such a large part of the work force in dozens of industries.
"It's a very dramatic change in policy that follows a very dramatic change in our world," Wilhelm said.
Yesterday's action came after union officials in California -- the state with the most illegal immigrants -- urged AFL-CIO officials to back an amnesty, telling them that many illegal workers faced low wages and lives of misery because of the way immigration rules have enabled unscrupulous employers to exploit them.
"Our commitment to organize requires that we organize all workers in California," Sharon Cornu, the California Labor Federation's communications director, said yesterday.
Unions in the state recruited 132,000 workers last year in organizing campaigns concentrated in the construction, home-care and service industries, job sectors that attract large numbers of undocumented workers.
While the new members might include those who are undocumented workers, the unions don't know because they don't ask about legal status, she said.
In all, the organizing effort boosted the total of AFL-CIO-represented workers in the state to 2.1 million.
Nonetheless, many immigrants have had an ambivalent attitude toward the labor movement because some unions sought to keep out immigrant workers and because of labor's past support of employer sanctions.
But with unions straining to organize more workers, labor officials have concluded that current immigration rules, with their threat of deportation, have made it hard to unionize industries that hire many illegal immigrants, like apparel, chicken-processing and hotels.
Labor leaders pointed to an incident involving a Holiday Inn Express in Minneapolis, which asked immigration officials to deport nine hotel maids after they had voted to unionize. The maids were arrested.
Union officials see their new policy as a way to make immigrants warm up toward labor and to make it easier to unionize businesses with many illegal immigrants, by making it harder for employers to intimidate them.
"We, the labor movement, have to put ourselves in a leadership position in immigrant rights," said Arturo Rodriguez, president of the United Farm Workers. "This is a way to help low-wage, immigrant workers."
Staff writers Leonel Sanchez and Diane Lindquist contributed to this report.