Читать книгу Unwanted People - Aviva Chomsky - Страница 13

Since the founding of the AFL (later AFL-CIO) in the late nineteenth century, the federation has faced the dilemma of whether to preserve worker gains by fighting to keep immigrant workers out, or whether to broaden its base by welcoming and organizing immigrants. With the tectonic shifts in the U.S. economy and labor market at the end of the twentieth century, accompanied by a new wave of immigration, these questions became even more acute. Unions shrank and working conditions and benefits crumbled, while new sectors like fast food, subcontracted cleaning services, and food processing eagerly employed new immigrants especially from Asia and Latin America.

Many of these jobs were low paid, precarious, and temporary. Workers might be hard to organize because they lacked legal status, thus permission to work, in the United States. Many considered their presence in the United States temporary, and cared more about earning quickly to return home, rather than investing in campaigns for better working conditions in the long run. Some spoke little or no English. Many worked in isolated conditions, legally classified as independent contractors rather than employees. Some worked for small businesses owned by members of their own immigrant community, or for family members. Traditional unions tended to assume they’d be impossible to organize. They are frequently excluded from both academic and popular concepts of the category “working class.”

Nevertheless of course most immigrants are workers, and the worker center movement arose in the 1990s to organize them outside of formal union structures. Many come with union organizing or other political experience in their home countries. Many share experiences of marginalization and inequality beyond the workplace, including inadequate housing, underfunded schools, poor public transportation, precarious legal status, and racism. Many have a deep understanding of the global economy, having witnessed maquiladoras, plantations, foreign-owned mines, or tourism industries in their own countries. Many have very strong social networks through church, sports leagues, and family. If organized labor truly seeks to strengthen social movement unionism, or what Jane McAlevey calls “whole worker organizing,” immigrant workers have a lot to offer to the process. Under the Trump Administration, strengthening links between immigrant rights and worker rights is more essential than ever.

This paper draws on interviews with organizers from three different Boston-area Worker Centers: The Chinese Progressive Association, which founded one of the first Boston Worker Centers in 1987 in support of workers displaced by a factory closure, the Chelsea Collaborative, which began its Latino Immigrants Committee focusing on workers’ rights in 1998, and the Brazilian Women’s Group, which began its workers’ project around 2010, to explore these organizations’ achievements and the challenges they face.

A new generation of immigrant workers in Boston

As Michael Piore argued in 1973, industrial Boston’s labor force was continually replenished with migrants, from Europe in the nineteenth century, then from the rural South and then from Puerto Rico into the middle of the twentieth. These workers filled the lower ranks of the city’s jobs, though the nature of these jobs changed over time as manufacturing declined in the city. Today most of Boston’s immigrant workers, like most of its workers overall, labor in the service sector. Like native workers, immigrants are bifurcated. Highly educated immigrants have moved into professional positions in finance, health, technology, research, and education, while the much larger population of migrants toil in the hidden interstices of the glittery new economy. They process, package, and serve food; they deliver newspapers; they clean homes, offices, hospitals, and yards; they work for subcontractors in construction; and they care for the disabled and the elderly.

Boston’s first significant Latino immigration came from Puerto Rico in the 1950s and 60s. The Puerto Rican population of Boston levelled off after 1970, counting 37,553 in 2014.¹ Soon Puerto Ricans were joined by tens of thousands of new immigrants, mostly from Latin America and the Caribbean but also from China, Vietnam, and India: the share of Boston’s population that was foreign-born hit its low in 1970 and has risen steadily since then.² The number of foreign-born rose to 151,836 in 2000, and to 177,461 by 2015.³ In 2014 27% of Boston’s population was foreign-born.⁴

The top sending countries in 2015 were the Dominican Republic (13%), China (10.6%), Haiti (7.6%), El Salvador (6.3%), Vietnam (6.2%), Jamaica (4.4%), Cape Verde (4.4%), Colombia (2.8%), India (2.2%), and Guatemala (2.2%).⁵ In terms of race, 29% of the foreign-born identify as Hispanic, 24.8% as Asian/Pacific Islander, 24% as Black, 16.9% as white, and 5% as Other Race. Populations of color in Boston, especially Asian and Hispanic, are disproportionately foreign-born, while the white population is overwhelmingly native-born. Only the Black population has relatively equal proportions in the native and in the foreign-born categories.⁶ 27% of the foreign-born in Boston live in poverty, as do 21% of the native-born.⁷

In 1995 Andrés Torres examined Latino immigrants in Boston’s labor force, discovering a much larger and more diverse population than Michael Piore had found two decades earlier. The number of Hispanics employed in the state of Massachusetts rose from 21,000 in 1970 to 44,982 in 1980 and 83,000 in 1990. In 1995 Boston was home to 58,000 Latinos.⁸ Yet Torres lamented what he saw as a “awkward and often uneasy relation between Latinos and labor,” calling this a “sad irony in this discrepancy in light of the deep tradition of labor struggle in Latino countries of origin, and the overwhelming working-class composition of commonwealth Hispanics.”⁹ Like the Puerto Ricans that Piore studied 20 years earlier, Boston’s Latinos in the early 1990s were concentrated in low-wage positions. Some still worked in the lower ends of the manufacturing sector, but given the overall transformation of Boston’s labor market, many also worked in the burgeoning low-end service sectors, with 69% working at these low-wage jobs.¹⁰

Torres confirmed earlier analyses of the divide between Boston’s unions and its black and immigration populations. But he added a new element, which became key in the subsequent formation of Worker Centers in the city. Green and Donahue had alluded to this issue when they examined some of the organizations formed by workers of color and women in the 1970s, like 9 to 5, the United Community Construction Workers, and the Third World Workers Association, all of which fought for their rights in the workplace and beyond.

Torres explained that “for Latinos, the community, not the workplace, is seen as the focal site for organizing activities. Struggles over educational, health, and housing services claim their energies; the battles for political empowerment have greater mobilizing appeal... Straightforward class appeals, emphasizing economic issues alone, will fall short because they ignore the cultural chasm separating the newcomers from the dominant culture of the larger society. To attract the ‘outsiders,’ labor has to transform itself, sharing power from top to bottom. More important, it must insert itself into the life of minority communities economically and socially.”¹¹ Boston’s Worker Centers, like those elsewhere in the country emerged to fill precisely this niche.

Worker Centers

A decade after Torres exposed the weak links between Boston’s unions and the city’s low-wage Latino workers, labor scholar Janice Fine offered a similar diagnosis for unions confronting a still more precarious and immigrant-rich labor force nationwide. To meaningfully organize workers only loosely identified with their jobs or their industries, she wrote, unions needed to “broaden beyond job-related identities through the development of ongoing relationships with workers not just at their workplaces but in their communities... organizations must be rooted in the community, not just at individual workplaces.”¹² Moreover, she noted that the unions most committed to organizing new workers, like SEIU, tended to focus on national strategies and large employers, while many immigrants work for small employers and in the informal sector.¹³ The national context of anti-union legislation, employer manipulation of the NLRB election and bargaining process, and plant closures raise the likelihood of failure and has made unions reluctant to take on “hot shop” or reactive campaigns that inspire so many immigrant worker mobilizations.

Corey Kurtz’s 2008 study of Boston’s immigrant workers confirmed this reluctance, noting that in the city “even progressive unions such as SEIU and UNITE/HERE that organize immigrant workers in particular sectors often refuse to organize smaller workplaces or support rank and file resistance to employer exploitation unless it is part of a larger organizing strategy.”¹⁴ The city’s particular industrial and racial history also exacerbated divide between the city’s labor movement and low-wage immigrant workers and workers of color. What Green and Donahue described for the 1970s was still true decades later. Boston’s unions “tend not to challenge the racism that is rampant in Boston’s broader labor movement or the role that race plays in facilitating the exploitation of workers of color,” wrote Kurtz. ¹⁵

This, then, was the context for the formation of worker centers, organizations made up of and serving low wage immigrant workers who, due to a combination of racial and status difference, and work in underground, small-scale, and subcontracted sectors, have remained peripheral to Boston’s unions. Most of Boston’s worker centers grew out of pre-existing immigrant/ethnic organizations. “Worker centers, rather than viewing themselves as part of the Boston labor movement, tend to see themselves as a response to its exclusivity,” Kurtz explained.¹⁶

Heloisa Galvão of the Brazilian Women’s Group elaborated in describing her organization’s worker center: “It involves culture too. And language. I think that the cultural component is very important, because they feel comfortable with us, because we are not only Brazilians, we are people that we have been through the same situation, and we didn't have documents sometimes, or we were afraid sometimes, or we crossed the border, or we … we know what they are going through because we have been there.”

Because worker centers are not registered in any kind of central location, and because they vary from small, ephemeral organizations to large and solid ones allied with labor unions or one of several national networks, it’s hard to give an exact account of their numbers. Fine found only five nationwide at the movement’s tentative beginning in 1992, and 160 in 2007.¹⁷ Corey Kurtz listed five in Boston in 2008: the Chinese Progressive Association, the Brazilian Immigrant Center, MassCOSH, the Chelsea Latino Immigrant Community, and Centro Presente.¹⁸

Today nine different centers belong to Boston’s Immigrant Worker Center Collaborative, founded in 2005, while others (including two of those in Kurtz’s study, the BIC and Centro Presente) continue their work outside of the Collaborative. Most, like the Chinese Progressive Association, which formed in 1977 and founded one of the first Boston Worker Centers in 1987, the Brazilian Women’s Group, which began its workers’ project around 2010, and New Bedford’s Centro Comunitario de Trabajadores, formed in the wake of the immigration raid at the Michael Bianco factory in 2007, are based in specific immigrant communities’ organizations. The Chelsea Collaborative formed in 1988 as a city-wide coalition in an overwhelmingly Latino city, and began its Latino Immigrants Committee focusing on workers’ rights in 1998; the Lynn Worker Center for Economic Justice, formed in 2008, is affiliated with the North Shore Labor Council (the only union-affiliated Center in the IWCC); MassCOSH is part of a nationwide Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health originally created by the new federal OSHA in the 1970s, and also a member of the national Interfaith Worker Justice coalition.

Stories from the Field

While many scholars argue that unions must organize these workers if they wish to recover their power and relevance in today’s economy, the obstacles revealed in these cases also help explain why unions have been reluctant or unable to do so. The history and nature of Boston’s unions, the nature of today’s precarious, low-wage economy, Boston’s historic racial divide, and the onslaught of anti-immigrant legislation and sentiment all contribute to a fragile landscape for organizing.

Boston’s Chinese Progressive Association illustrates the interweaving of ethnic, national, and political identities that underlie many worker centers. In some ways today’s multifaceted immigrant ethnic radicalism is reminiscent of that which underlay U.S. union organizing a century ago. But new immigrant workers and their community activism differ in fundamental ways from today’s mainstream unions.¹⁹

P&L Sportwear and the Birth of a Worker Center

The CPA worker center owed its genesis to massive layoffs at the P&L Sportswear Company in East Boston, where hundreds of Chinatown women worked. ²⁰ This campaign, and another at Power One International, illustrate much about immigrant workers’ place in the economic restructuring process. The processes also suggest why unions have been largely absent in many worker center campaigns. Both of the campaigns were spurred by workers at factories that were laying off large numbers and preparing to close—typical immigrant employers, but not fertile field for union organizing.²¹

When P&L announced its closing in 1985, recounts Chen, “these women, they are like god, we're going to lose our jobs, so what are we going to do? So they came to CPA to ask for help. So CPA started trying to organize them, really about trying to get access to unemployment, because at that time, you know, there was no language access for people, so the worker center actually fought for language access... And so basically the garment workers, we have a right to jobs! And so together with some of the activists, they also formed, some of the more English speaking younger people, they actually formed a support committee to support the garment workers. And they demanded [state-funded] retraining so they were able to win funding through a lot of rallying, a lot of organizing, money for training, so we actually started the first bilingual vocational training programs for people with limited English proficiency. So basically the workers met with the city, met with the state, or the people who do the vocational training, and these are the things that we want... So after the victory, that was like around 1987, and people really felt like we need to have a worker center, where we would primarily focus on workers' rights, and a place for all the workers to come for assistance...

“So we organized garment workers, right? And we got the retraining, we got them into their jobs... It was a lot of organizing around basically unemployed rights. And language access, to unemployment, and then, making the whole process easier for people.”

As Chen concluded, “we support the workers where they are at.” The emphasis on this campaign was on strengthening legal rights and ensuring workers’ access to these rights, rather than necessarily organizing for a long-term voice in the workplace. The target was the state, rather than the employer. The CPA drew on its long history of ethnic community organizing and a commitment to grassroots mobilization. Its pioneering worker center exemplified the organization’s orientation towards radical social change. ²²

Power One

A second major CPA campaign involved Power One International, a California-based multinational that employed several hundred low-wage and temporary workers at its Allston plant manufacturing power conversion equipment. In 2001, Power One began laying off workers and announced its imminent closing. Chen offered an analysis that placed the situation in global context, and also showed immigrant workers bring their own concepts of labor rights.

“The electronics manufacturing industry was declining, mainly also because of NAFTA, and all those things, right? And so we started to see a bulk of electronic manufacturing workers being laid off... In 2001... one of the major factories in Boston, Power-One, they laid off about 400 workers, there's about 300 Chinese, 100 Latinos, and they were moving the factory to Shenzhen China, and you know, and Mexico. Which is ironic because for more profit, right?

“And the business is not declining, but what they did was a major layoff... there were 30 workers who were going to stay to do just samples... they were just kind of like the more vulnerable workers, the newer immigrants, some of them were undocumented, I think it's true for both Latinos and Chinese. And then some people were taking piece work, to work at home, but they were not paid for overtime and other things. So meanwhile this company is not losing any profit, they just want to make more profit...

“Really what the workers wanted was severance pay. Because in China you actually have legal right to severance pay and here you don't. But we started out with that and we find out all these labor violations. Initially, because the workers organized a work stoppage themselves. And then they're just talking among themselves, like this is crazy, it's all the people who kiss up to the team leaders, the supervisors, get to stay. So they organized the work stoppage, and then they were threatened by the company. And so they came to CPA and we're like well, you guys gonna have to continue to take collective action. And then we find all the labor violations, all these things. But we eventually organized the workers actually to fight to get more funding for vocational training, retraining...”

In this case, the CPA sought support from Greater Boston Legal Services to file unfair labor practice charges against the company for its failure to pay minimum wage and overtime, and discrimination against and harassment of workers. ²³ In the face of noisy public protest and the legal charges, the company agreed to negotiate with workers and granted concessions on overtime and severance pay. Workers also obtained close to $1 million from the federal government in federal trade adjustment assistance funds, to be used for extended unemployment benefits, English and vocational training, and other services. As two GBLS members who worked on the case concluded, “Legal aid programs must forge deep and lasting community partnerships to make enduring advances in communities of color.”²⁴ Like many worker center campaigns, this one involved specifically labor issues, and made use of labor legislation and enforcement institutions as well as worker mobilization—but did not involve any union.

Beyond the Factory

In the Power-One case, immigrant workers were fighting a large multinational. Immigrant labor issues become even more complex when workers are employed by members of their own ethnic community or in the precarious, fragmented service economy. The tightness of the ethnic community can be a strength, or a weakness, in workers’ organizing campaigns.

In some cases, worker centers challenge norms of ethnic unity in their fight for labor rights. Chen explained: “We are one of the few groups within the community that actually challenged Chinese-owned restaurants. We've been criticized with in the community, why are you hanging out dirty laundry? And to us it's kind of like, well, labor violations are labor violations... I have no problem saying that sometimes our people know how to exploit our own people the most. Meanwhile there's other issues around racism, and all that stuff, which we also against that, but it doesn't mean that we won't fight employers exploiting Chinese workers.

“And of course, sometimes it's like, if you look at it, a small employer versus a corporation, they make so much more profit, that may be true, but it doesn't mean that if you open a small restaurant workers should be exploited there. We're not asking, saying that oh, people need to be, whatever, we're asking for people's basic labor rights to be respected. So we have done a lot of organizing around reached out, in different restaurants, in Chinatown.”

Home Health Care: Common Ground with the SEIU?

By the turn of the twenty-first century, more and more of Chinatown’s workers had shifted from precarious positions in large manufacturing companies like P&L and Power-One to similarly precarious positions in Boston’s burgeoning service and especially health care economy. Immigrants made up 27 percent of Boston’s workforce, but they were 50 percent of those employed in hotels, nursing homes, and restaurants.²⁵

One fast-growing sector was the home health care industry—workers who provide in-home care for the elderly, disabled, and recovering. Most home health jobs do not require medical education or experience, and most workers earn barely over minimum wage.²⁶ The average wage is $20,000 a year, and one fourth of home health workers live in poverty.²⁷

Home health care employment doubled from one million in 2004 to 2 million workers nationwide by 2014, and continued to be one of the nation’s fastest-growing sectors, expected to rise to 5 million by 2020. Nine tenths of these workers were women, and half were people of color.²⁸ Boston was not immune to the trend: in Boston, home health care employment grew from 28,300 jobs in 2000 to 89,300 in 2016.²⁹ Nationally, about a quarter of home health workers were immigrants in 2017.³⁰ In Massachusetts, the rate was 34%.³¹ “After the garment industry and then the electronic stuff were gone, if you don't want to work in a restaurant, most people go into home care,” Chen explained. “So [today] those are the bulk of where the Chinese workers are. I would say that there are like thousands of them.”

These Personal Care Assistants (PCAs), Chen explained, “are the people who go into elderly's homes to do chores, and that program was meant for MassHealth [the Massachusetts Medicaid program] to save money, instead of putting people into nursing homes, it could go up to like 60-70,000 dollars a year per person. So this is kind of like prevention and whatever.” In Chinatown, these companies tend to hire local workers. “So basically they're bringing people from the same kind of cultural/language background into helping their elderlies with their daily needs. That could include like chores, and sometimes help them with medicine, other times if they got injured, like bathing them, you know, with their daily needs so that they don't have to go into a nursing facility.”

The Century Foundation called the industry an “organizing nightmare.”³² PCAs work individually and rarely come into contact with other workers. Some are contracted by private agencies, while some work directly for their clients, making it exceedingly difficult to identify a bargaining unit. Yet the fragmented nature of the industry means that PCAs are in many ways the new face of the working class. Thus home health care has become a key sector in which traditional unions and community organizations have sought to collaborate.

In Boston the roots of homecare organizing lay in the early 1980s, when the United Labor Unions, an independent union affiliated with the national Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) began to organize Boston’s African American and immigrant home care workers. Boston ULU organizers “discovered hundreds of disgruntled and militant African American, Latina, and Caribbean women working below the minimum wage for agencies with contracts from the state. ULU learned where to find these workers; how to follow the money trail; and how to take advantage of the structure of home care—its ties to the welfare state and the bonds between workers and clients generated by the labor process itself.”³³ These latter structural issues became very important to the organizing process.

The ULU soon affiliated with the SEIU, where it “helped revitalize organizing within that service industry giant.”³⁴ Likewise in New York, California, and Chicago, the SEIU and other unions deepened their experience in this sector so different from the traditional workplace. Organizing the workers meant organizing their clients and fighting in the political sphere for recognition and labor protections.

Internal struggles in the SEIU contributed to setbacks for this initial phase of home healthcare organizing.³⁵ But in the 1990s the SEIU launched a national campaign as part of the AFL-CIO’s drive to re-emphasize organizing. Mary Kay Henry, who became SEIU’s president in 2010, explained: “It's a sector of the economy that hasn't collapsed in the economic downturn and it can't be offshored.” “Homecare workers are the new face of labor,” added historian Eileen Boris.³⁶ By 2014 SEIU (which split from the AFL-CIO in 2005) claimed over 400,000 home healthcare workers, a full quarter of the national home healthcare workforce. The majority were in California, where these workers comprised 20% of the giant’s membership.³⁷

Part of this new effort was fought in legislatures and the courts. The SEIU argued that since Medicaid ultimately paid home health workers’ wages—by reimbursing the agencies that employed them—these workers should be recognized as public employees. California was the first state to agree, in a series of decisions culminating in 2003, and Massachusetts followed suit in 2006.³⁸ The courts have also debated whether unions can collect fees in lieu of dues from those covered by their contracts who decline to join the union. In contrast to the situation in Massachusetts and California, court rulings in Michigan and Illinois turned home health care into a virtual “right-to-work” industry.³⁹

By 2013, SEIU 1199 had organized some 30,000 Medicaid-reimbursed home health care workers in Massachusetts, and in 2015 Massachusetts became the first state in the nation to agree to raise their wage to $15 an hour (by 2018).⁴⁰ SEIU continued to mobilize thousands of low-wage workers to raise the state minimum wage to $15 for all workers as part of the union’s “Fight for 15” campaign, a national drive that also sought to raise SEIU’s profile in legislative and community efforts.⁴¹

Fight for 15 and the Chinese Progressive Association played an important role in promoting a union organizing campaign at Medical Resources Home Health Corp in 2015. (Because they were not Medicaid-reimbursed, these workers labored outside the state bargaining unit.) The campaign illustrated some of the power as well as some of the challenges of the community/union organizing process.

Medical Resources

A small group of Medical Resources workers resentful about low and unpredictable pay sought the help of the CPA. “And so we started this campaign with just a few workers... saying they're very unhappy, and we start writing letters to the company, and saying I want to know what the pay is. How do you determine, to get a raise, I want to see what is your policy for travel pay, because some people get more, some people get less. And then we started with that. And then the worker core started growing from 4-5 people to about a dozen, and then eventually we had 20 or 30 workers.”

It took a while for the protesters to decide to turn their campaign into a union organizing drive. Chen understood the workers’ reluctance, but also wanted to challenge it: “Whenever a union campaign, the thing that people like to do the most is to say ‘oh, the union just wants your dues,’ and they would criticize unions, saying then your voice is not going to be heard.” Thus “we did not talk about a unionizing at all, throughout. But we were working with 1199, they were doing some research, and feeding information about what do we think, realistically, what the workers can fight for? And also learning more about the industry, the structure, where the money is coming from, goes to who, who are the decision-makers, and things like that... And eventually the workers are like well, you know what, let's do a, let's have a union drive.”

Many of the workers were also dubious about SEIU’s efforts to mobilize them for the Massachusetts Fight for 15 campaign. Recounts Chen: “I start talking to the workers about it, and they're like, ‘I don't know, this is Fight for Fifteen, I don't know if we can get fifteen, you know, like, we're just asking for Boston's living wage, which at the time was $13.67, and that's already we think that's probably impossible,’ right? But after we send them a first petition, they gave everybody who signed the petition 45 cents increase! And then I was like, well, that happened, like that means that they can pay you more, right? But they only gave it to the people who signed the petition.” The company’s concession emboldened workers further, as did the June 2015 state decision on wages for home health workers paid by the state.

Just a few days after SEIU’s wage victory for state-employed home health workers, the Medical Resource workers won a hard-fought union election.⁴² In September 2016, workers ratified their first contract with the agency. They won significant pay raises—though not enough to bring them up to the level of the state’s Medicaid-reimbursed workers—as well as paid leave days and compensation for travel time and waiting time between appointments.⁴³

The CPA served as a crucial bridge between the union and the many Chinese health care workers. While SEIU had organizational resources and state-level clout, the CPA, as an ethnic social justice organization, had the deep roots in the community. “One of our big constituencies that we organize is the elderly. And the elderly, we start telling them about the home care campaign, we're trying to reach out more, to more home care workers. And they start asking their home care workers to contact CPA.”

CPA’s collaboration with SEIU brought some significant victories. Chen reflected on the different, but potentially complementary, nature of the two types of organizations. “Some of [people’s criticisms of unions] may be true, but all in all, if you work in a blue-collar industry, that's the best you can get. And this is how actually you can have the most influence, right? And build the most power. So anyways, because of that we did publicity in the community.”

Not all analysts are sanguine about the home health sector victories. The very strengths of social movement unionism could be perceived as weaknesses from the perspective of the labor movement. Leon Fink and Brian Greenberg argued that “home care, the biggest growth area for organizing in recent years, accentuated a tension already manifest in other ways between union leadership and its rank and file. More than any other organizing battles, home care campaigns have been waged and won through the mobilization of media, church, and political allies more than through the self-organization of the workers themselves. The tangible gains from such campaigns... tend to turn the union political staff (themselves mostly young, college-educated professionals) into a kind of stand-in or steward for the poorly paid immigrant and minority members for whom they serve as advocates.” Moreover, to the extent that home health care workers are paid through Medicare and Medicaid, these campaigns are vulnerable to the critiques levelled against public sector unions, insofar as taxpayers employed in the non-union private sector see their gains as an affront rather than a way of raising the floor for all.⁴⁴ Yet Chen’s experience, as well as that of other Boston worker center staff, suggest that in immigrant communities many of the college-educated staff share not only ethnicity, language, and culture, but also experiences of undocumentedness and low-wage, precarious labor, with the workers they seek to organize.

Undocumentedness and the challenges of organizing

In addition to issues of labor market structure, immigrant status itself brings particular challenges to labor organizing. Historically, immigrant workers’ home-country orientation and short-term goals sometimes made them less likely to protest working conditions and wages that natives would consider to be intolerable. Many of Boston’s recent immigrants share this home-country orientation, while also facing new issues that emerged in the late twentieth century related to immigration status and undocumentedness. Laws, policies, and enforcement have increasingly made workers’ status unstable and fragile. Undocumentedness can divide workers, and can pose very real and concrete obstacles to labor organizing, especially in the Trump era. But immigrant rights can also serve as a key organizing issue for immigrant workers, as evidenced by the huge mobilizations in 2006 and 2017 that linked labor and immigrant identities.⁴⁵

For immigrant and especially undocumented workers in Boston, immigration status is utterly central to their identity and position as workers. But their status brings with it an array of obstacles to labor organizing. Gladys Vega of the Chelsea Collaborative described a 2012 case at Boston Hides and Furs, a Chelsea animal hides processing wholesaler that was paying immigrant workers well under minimum wage. “We called a meeting with them, it took us a little bit hard to get them organized, because they were so fearful about immigration. And they were so fearful about our organization, although some of them know Chelsea Collaborative, but when it comes to talking about their work conditions, they were like, no, they're gonna call immigration, like they were in panic about seeking help.” With support from Greater Boston Legal Services, the U.S. Department of Labor ultimately sued the company and obtained $825,000 in back wages for 14 employees—with no immigration status retaliation.

While worker centers emphasize that they support workers regardless of their immigration status, the immigrant community itself is far from united with respect to the rights of the undocumented. Says the CPA’s Karen Chen: “so our community is quite divided, on whether or not you support the undocumented. Because the people who came here what they call "the right way", right? And they say "well, I had to wait for 15 years for my family to be reunited, and the people who come in undocumented are cutting the line! Why should we give them the right to do that? Doesn't it encourage more people to come in? That's kind of like the general entire undocumented narrative within the community. And for us, in the workers center, the way that we have been able, every meeting sometimes international women's day, we always have this discussion around ‘why would it be important to not have a second class citizen, because they will be like second class workers. And that actually jeopardizes the rights of all workers.’”⁴⁶

Lídia Ferreira of the Brazilian Women’s Group explained how legal status intersects with other aspects of immigrant vulnerability: “[Shortly after President Trump’s election] we had a meeting here with three workers who are suffering from wage theft, also misclassification, and unpaid overtime. And also they are suffering by threats by their employers. Because one of them had an accident at work, and when he decided to claim the workers compensation to Brazilian Women’s Group, the employers started to threaten him, and his family in Brazil. And that is something unfortunately very common in our community. Because the employer knows their situation, their English, their situation, they start to say like example, I will report you to immigration if you decide to start a claim, to file a claim, and that is something...”

These fears seemed to be realized as ICE under Trump began to cast its net wider in detaining undocumented immigrants, and has had a sobering impact on the ability of workers to fight for their rights. In several cases nationally, including one in Boston, ICE apparently responded to tips from employers or to the very fact that workers filed a claim against an employer, to target undocumented workers.⁴⁷

On May 1 2017 the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office reaffirmed its commitment to protecting the labor rights of all workers regardless of immigration status, and protecting workers from status-related retaliation. “In Massachusetts, our labor and employment laws protect every worker, regardless of their immigration status,” the Attorney General promised. “When dishonest employers hire undocumented workers under the table and then threaten them with deportation, it cheats the workers and makes it harder for honest businesses to compete. Today, my office is sending a message: if you’re being threatened by your employer, our laws protect you.”⁴⁸

But in May 2017, a Honduran immigrant in Boston agreed to meet with his employer after he filed a worker compensation claim. When the worker appeared at the appointed spot, ICE agents were waiting to arrest him.⁴⁹ Several other similar cases elsewhere in the country suggest that this was not a unique development. As the Obama-era deportation priorities have been vastly expanded, employer ability to threaten and control workers has also.⁵⁰ These kinds of actions are sure to have chilling effects on immigrant workers’ ability to fight for their rights and for worker centers to strengthen their organizing.

Even beyond the issue of their legal status, immigrant workers may have other reasons for being wary of attempts to organize. The issue of wage theft illustrates some of the challenges. Wage theft “happens in many ways, such as forcing workers to work off the clock, incorrectly classifying employees as independent contractors, writing bad paychecks, denying an employee benefits, underpaying, or simply not paying workers.” Community Labor United estimates that wage theft costs Massachusetts workers $700 million a year. Despite aggressive action by the state Attorney General’s office, only a small portion is ever recovered. Wage theft has been a key issue in which Boston’s worker centers have collaborated with the state’s union federation to fight for a common goal: state-level legislation to hold parent industries responsible for violations like wage theft committed by subcontractors. The labor-supported bill passed the State Senate in 2016, but stalled in the House; it was reintroduced and remained under consideration as of mid-2017.⁵¹

Many workers suffering from wage theft approach a center hoping for help recovering their own lost wages. Centers generally want to engage workers in the larger legislative and public campaign, while for the workers, the end goal may be simply receiving their back wages. The contradiction illustrates the contradiction in the dual mission of worker centers: as service providers, and as organizers for larger social change. In this respect, the questions and challenges facing worker centers mirror those facing unions: how to articulate and navigate connections between the narrower fight to protect workers’ rights on the job and the larger goal of structural change in an economy increasingly inauspicious to these rights. Low-wage and immigrant workers may be among the most exploited, but their status can also contribute to a world-view as individualistic and conservative as a stereotypically anti-immigrant white worker’s. Immigrant workers are afraid of losing their jobs, but also of being reported to immigration and of repercussions to their families in their home countries.

Lídia Ferreira explained: “First we have to show them or educate them about the issues... We start to try to help them to think beyond the situation... It's difficult for them to see the light at the end of the tunnel, when you are talking about a long process, a campaign. Like last week I spoke with two workers who came to the meeting, [but] they are [only] interested to receive their own payments, they are still waiting for so long.... As a worker center, we need the workers to make the difference. We need their ability to go forward, to fight, to organize, to bring other workers to the solution.”

Despite the unfavorable political climate and the many structural challenges, Chen tried to offer a hopeful perspective on labor-community relations after the 2016 election. Perhaps organized labor’s weakened position could actually push it into greater focus on labor-community relations. “Labor is actually looking to partner with communities and worker centers to build a stronger movement. And I think that's very smart, because I think we're a very important strategic partner to the labor movement. And then labor needs to take stronger stands around immigrant rights, and housing issues, and other things.”

Boston offers a complex landscape in which liberal, pro-worker, pro-union, and pro-immigrant ideologies infuse the city’s self-image, while obscuring the marginalization and exploitation that many immigrant workers confront. The city’s unions and worker centers play a crucial role in fighting for both legislative and grassroots solutions to its deep inequalities.

(2018)

¹ Center for Puerto Rican Studies, 5. Many Puerto Ricans settled elsewhere in the state: There were 199,207 Puerto Ricans in Massachusetts in 2000, 266,125 in 2010, and 308,028 in 2014. The Hispanic or Latino population of the state also jumped, from 428,729 in 2000 to 627,654 in 2010 and 730,094 in 2014. See Center for Puerto Rican Studies, 2.

² Boston Redevelopment Authority, “Imagine All the People,” rev. ed. June 2009. https://www.bostonplans.org/getattachment/c84782e4-01fd-4930-9939-f28b35ee9a84.

³ “Boston by the Numbers,” 8.

⁴ Boston Redevelopment Authority-Research Division, “New Bostonians 2013-2014,” March 2014. https://www.bostonplans.org/getattachment/08c87f4c-a651-45f9-bb42-04a55bae8b3b.

⁵ “Boston by the Numbers,” 8.

⁶ “Boston by the Numbers,” 9.

⁷ “Boston by the Numbers,” 10.

⁸ Torres, 150.

⁹ Torres, 149.

¹⁰ Torres, 151.

¹¹ Torres, 154.

¹² Fine, “A Marriage Made in Heaven? Mismatches and Misunderstandings between Worker Centres and Unions (British Journal of Industrial Relations 45:2 June 2007 0007–1080 pp. 335–360), 341.

¹³ Fine, 344. See McAlevey Raising Hell, for an inside look at the pitfalls of this SEIU approach.

¹⁴ Kurtz, 82-83.

¹⁵ Kurtz, 82-83.

¹⁶ Kurtz, 82-83.

¹⁷ Fine, 335.

¹⁸ Kurtz, 8.

¹⁹ See Linked Labor Histories, and Ardis Cameron, Radicals of the Worst Sort: Laboring Women in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1860-1912 (University of Illinois Press, 1993).

²⁰ The P&L Sportswear Company closed on December 6, 1985, leaving over 300 garment workers, 90% of them Chinese, without work or health care. http://onourterms.barnard.edu/ojs/index.php/oot/article/download/9/12.

²¹ See Linked Labor Histories for discussion of how faltering New England textile manufacturers relied on immigrant workers as they prepared to shut down or relocate in the 1980s and 90s.

²² For some of the CPA’s history, see Peter Kwong, The New Chinatown (rev. ed. Hill and Wang, 1996), chap. 9.

²³ A lawyer and paralegal from Greater Boston Legal Services, which collaborated with the CPA on the campaign, give more detail on the process. See Cynthia Mark and Evonne Yang, “The Power-One Campaign: Immigrant Worker Empowerment Through Law and Organizing,” Clearance Review: Journal of Poverty Law and Policy 36:3-4 (July-August 2002), pp. 264-74. http://courses.povertylaw.org/pluginfile.php/15103/mod_folder/content/0/Mark.pdf?forcedownload=1

²⁴ Mark and Yang, 265.

²⁵ Katie Johnston, “MIT Study: Immigrants Vital to Boston’s Economy,” Boston Globe, May 18, 2017. http://iwer.mit.edu/posts/mit-study-immigrants-vital-bostons-economy/.

²⁶ “Health Care Employment,” 16-17.

²⁷ Eduardo Porter, “Home Health Care: Shouldn’t It Be Work Worth Doing?” New York Times, August 29, 2017. http://iwer.mit.edu/posts/home-health-care-shouldnt-work-worth/.

²⁸ Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute (PHI), U.S. Homecare Workers: Key Facts. https://phinational.org/sites/phinational.org/files/phi-home-care-workers-key-facts.pdf.

²⁹ “Health Care Employment,” 7.

³⁰ Amy Baxter, “One in Four Direct Care Workers Are Immigrants,” Home Health Care News, June 21, 2017. https://homehealthcarenews.com/2017/06/one-in-four-direct-care-workers-are-immigrants/.

³¹ Robert Espinoza, “Immigrants and the Direct Care Workforce,” PHI Research Brief, June 2017. https://phinational.org/sites/phinational.org/files/research-report/immigrants_and_the_direct_care_workforce_-_phi_-_june_2017.pdf.

³² Leigh Anne Schriever, “The Home Health Care Industry’s Organizing Nightmare,” August 18, 2015. https://tcf.org/content/commentary/the-home-health-care-industrys-organizing-nightmare/.

³³ Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein, Caring for America: Home Health Care Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State (Oxford University Press, rpr. ed. 2015), 164.

³⁴ See Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein, “‘We were the Invisible Workforce’: Unionizing Home Care,” in Dorothy Sue Cobble, ed., The Sex of Class: Women Transforming American Labor (2007), 177-?, 188-89. On the background of ACORN, the ULU, and the Boston campaign see also Vanessa Tate, Poor Workers’ Unions: Rebuilding Labor from Below (Haymarket, ), 111-119, and Keith Kelleher, “ACORN Organizing and Chicago Healthcare Workers,” Labor Research Review 1:8 (1986).

³⁵ See Steve Early, The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor: Birth of a New Workers’ Movement or Death Throes of the Old? (Haymarket Books, 2011), 167-71 for a discussion of these issues and their impact on Boston organizing. See also Leon Fink and Brian Greenberg, Upheaval in the Quiet Zone: 1199SEIU and the Politics of Health Care Unionism (2^nd ed. University of Illinois Press, 2009), chap. 10.

³⁶ Kris Maher, “Unions Target Home Workers,” Wall Street Journal, June 19, 2013. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324049504578541593593292614.

³⁷; Alana Semuels, “Home Healthcare Ruling May Inhibit Growth of Powerful Union,” Los Angeles Times, June 30, 2014. http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-union-react-20140701-story.html.

³⁸ Jeffrey Krassner, “A Prescription for Growth,” Boston Globe, November 8, 2007. http://archive.boston.com/business/healthcare/articles/2007/11/08/a_prescription_for_growth/.

³⁹ Alejandra Cancino, “SEIU Stops Collecting Fees from Non-Member Home Health Workers,” Chicago Tribune, August 12, 2014; Semuels, “Home Healthcare Ruling.”

⁴⁰ Mary Moore, “Unions Gained Ground in Bay State Last Year,” Boston Business Journal, February 1, 2013. https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/print-edition/2013/02/01/unions-gained-ground-in-bay-state-last.html; Katie Johnston, “Mass. Home Health Workers Win Wage Hike to $15 an Hour,” Boston Globe, June 26, 2015. https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2015/06/26/home-health-workers-win-wage-hike-hour/KrsUcC8dPlDdwpnJYjNzRI/story.html.

⁴¹ http://fightfor15homecare.org/.

⁴² Katie Johnston, “Mass Home Healthcare Workers Win Wage Hike to $15 an Hour,” Boston Globe, June 26, 2015. http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2015/06/26/home-health-workers-win-wage-hike-hour/KrsUcC8dPlDdwpnJYjNzRI/story.html; SEIU Press Release, “Home care workers at Medical Resources Vote to Unionize Despite Illegal Management Tactics, June 30, 2015,” https://www.1199seiu.org/breaking_home_care_workers_at_medical_resources_vote_to_unionize_despite_illegal_management_tactics.

⁴³ Jessica Bartlett, “Newly unionized workers at Newton-based home health agency secure raises,” Boston Business Journal, Jul 27, 2016, https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/blog/health-care/2016/07/newly-unionized-workers-at-newton-based-home.html; 1199SEIU Press Release, “Medical Resources Caregivers Win First Contract,” September 22, 2016, https://www.1199seiu.org/massachusetts/medical-resources-caregivers-win-first-contract.

⁴⁴ Fink and Greenberg, 285-86.

⁴⁵ See Kim Voss and Irene Bloemraad, Rallying for Immigrant Rights: The Fight for Inclusion in 21^st Century America (University of California Press, 2011).

⁴⁶ For an in-depth study of these divisions, see David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (University of California Press, 1995).

⁴⁷ Michael Grabell, “They Got Hurt At Work—Then They Got Deported,” NPR, August 16, 2017. http://www.npr.org/2017/08/16/543650270/they-got-hurt-at-work-then-they-got-deported; Michael Arria, “Why Defending Workers’ Rights Means Fighting ICE’s Deportation Machine,” In These Times, August 21, 2017. http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/20442/Donald-Trump-Immigration-ICE-Raids-workers-labor-movement1.

⁴⁸ Attorney General Maura Healey, Press Release, “On International Workers Day, AG Healey Issues Advisory on Protections for Immigrant Workers,” May 1, 2017, http://www.mass.gov/ago/news-and-updates/press-releases/2017/2017-05-01-protections-immigrant-workers.html.

⁴⁹ Shannon Dooling, “An ICE Arrest After A Workers' Comp Meeting Has Lawyers Questioning If It Was Retaliation,” WBUR, May 17, 2017. http://www.wbur.org/news/2017/05/17/ice-arrest-workers-comp.

⁵⁰ Michael Grabell, “They Got Hurt At Work—Then They Got Deported,” NPR, August 16, 2017. http://www.npr.org/2017/08/16/543650270/they-got-hurt-at-work-then-they-got-deported; Michael Arria, “Why Defending Workers’ Rights Means Fighting ICE’s Deportation Machine,” In These Times, August 21, 2017. http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/20442/Donald-Trump-Immigration-ICE-Raids-workers-labor-movement1.

⁵¹ Katie Lannan and Colin A. Young, “Wage Theft Demands Legislative Response, Advocates Say” Hull Times, June 21, 2017.http://www.hulltimes.com/ht-online/2017/6/21/wage-theft-demands-legislative-response-advocates-say