At first glance, the news seems routine. Four hundred deliverymen in Manhattan join a labor union and win $3 million in back pay. What's unusual is that the workers, predominantly from West Africa, are all undocumented. And, even more remarkable, these illegal immigrants, given lax immigration enforcement, have little reason to fear deportation. Indeed, one of them, Siaka Diakite, an Ivory Coast native, is now pictured in a widely distributed color brochure put out by the AFL-CIO. Says Charles Batchli, a plaintiff from the Congo: "It didn't matter who we were. We are human beings first. The question was, Were we taken advantage of?"
The derailment last week of Linda Chavez's nomination as Labor Secretary refocused attention on the unlawfulness of harboring or employing illegal immigrants. But the latest story from America's underground work force has come through in lawsuits across the nation in recent years: that once hired, such workers are entitled to legal protection from abuse. Marta Mercado, the Guatemalan who received some $1,500 from Chavez over two years and did chores for her, has no complaints about her treatment. But many undocumented laborers, whose illegal status makes them vulnerable to exploitation, do.
Today, openly, even defiantly, these workers are clamoring to assert their rights under U.S. labor and civil rights laws. They are joining the unions that once stigmatized them as a threat to American jobs. And they are gaining allies within the American establishment. No institution is defending them more eagerly than Big Labor, which in the past lobbied for criminalizing their employment and supported raids that resulted in mass deportations. "We don't care about green cards," says Doug Dority, head of the 1.4 million-member United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. "We care about union cards."
This sudden embrace is a matter of practical demographics. With the shrinking of unionized manufacturing, the labor movement has lost members--and political clout. Now focusing on the growing service sector, unions see immigrants, including the estimated 5 million to 6 million undocumented workers, as a rich source of new constituents. The bulk of the illegal ones are Latinos, who are joining unions at twice the rate of Caucasians.
The AFL-CIO, led by president John Sweeney, has poured resources into organizing efforts heavily focused on immigrants, such as the ongoing campaign by the United Farm Workers to sign up strawberry pickers in California, and the Service Employees International Union's successful drive to enroll 74,000 Los Angeles home-care workers, many of them undocumented. Last year the AFL-CIO reversed its longtime support of sanctions against employers who hire illegal immigrants and called for an amnesty that would give legal residency to millions of such aliens who are already here. It added that "courageous undocumented workers who come forward to assert their rights should not be faced with deportation."