Even the best unions are often reluctant to organize undocumented or otherwise vulnerable workers who are not U.S. citizens. Here is an example:
In the early 1970s, as a staff member of the Southern Conference Educational Fund, I went to south Florida to assist the United Farm Workers organizing campaign in Coca-Cola's orange groves near Belle Glade and sugar plantation workers below Lake Okechobee. Both were spirited and militant, with a strike on at the largest sugar plantation. Things got nasty after a cane truck ran over and killed Nan Freeman, a student from New College at Sarasota who was on the picket line outside the front entrance.
Both strikers and scabs were Cuban exiles, who taunted one another on bullhorns over each group's alleged cowardice at Playa Giron (the Bay of Pigs invasion), yet when I visited workers in their homes, many had Che Guevara posters as their only wall decorations.
When the owners had trouble recruiting workers, they boated them in from Jamaica. At that point, Cesar Chavez made his appearance on the line, which raised morale enormously, and brought lots of volunteers to the lines. Among the first things Chavez did was to direct the UFW's attorneys to file papers in federal court demanding that the Jamaicans be deported, and moved pickets to the Miami courthouse.
I wrote an open letter to Cesar, published in the SCEF newspaper, calling on the UFW to organize the Jamaicans, not to exclude them, pointing out that they, like Cesar's forebears and mine, had merely come to this country looking for work. My letter was widely reprinted in the left press, with greatest effect when it appeared in the People's World, the West Coast CP paper.
Cesar wrote a reply, which both SCEF and PW published, defending the deportation efforts, but my position prevailed with the union's staff organizers, and the suit was allowed to wither away quietly, having become an embarrassment to the union. The UFW won both organizing drives, and in just one year became a major center of working class militancy in Florida.
If a union as progressive as the UFW was in those years can play the exclusionist card, which ones can we expect to be better by instinct? The cigar workers union, Samuel Gompers' base, introduced the union label as part of its crusade against Chinese workers, so these habits are as deeply rooted as any tradition of the U.S. labor movement.
Ken Lawrence
> Max & Nathan:
> >Thank you for the inspirational message, but unions have
> >been organizing workers in the U.S., legal or no.
> >It's already been happening.
>
> One doesn't quite get this happy impression by reading, for instance,
> _Forbidden Workers: Illegal Chinese Immigrants and American Labor_ by Peter
> Kwong.