Note - I am replying to a post by Rakesh that has probably not been posted yet. So see his bracketed comments-- NN
> From: Rakesh Bhandari
> >So three cheers for labor on taking the right stand.
>
> Nathan, I agree. Regardless of citzenship status, labor should enjoy the
> rights to organize and strike without threat of termination (or
> repatriation). Of course this amnesty plan works from the assumption that
> such rights only belong to citizens, not workers as such. So at
> some point,
> what we need is not amnesty but expanded rights for labor, regardless of
> citzenship. But still this is not a bad idea.
Actually, in the abstract our Constitution and labor laws protect labor and other rights equally for citizens and non-citizens, legal and illegal, alike. Prop 187 in California was declared unconstitutional largely on that basis.
So the formal law protects undocumented workers quite as strongly as citizens (for what's that worth). In fact, an important case by HERE just won relatively large back pay for illegal hotel workers illegally discharged in the course of a union organizing campaign.
Unfortunately, the downside is that those payments were sent to the workers homes in Mexico where they were deported. Because undocumented immigrants can be deported at any time regardless of their union actions and there is no blocking of deportation even in case of motives related to union organizing, it is often quite easy to intimidate such workers with the threat of INS raids. This is why the amnesty program is so important to lessen the threat of deporations as a scare tool that dissuades immigrant workers from standing up for their rights.
One small victory won in this area was by the Yale Law Workers Rights Project (which I coordinate now, but was not here when this was done.) For a while, the US Labor Department had a "memorandum of understanding " with the INS to turnover any evidence of undocumented workers. This of course meant that any complaint of labor abuses could easily snowball into deportations. The Yale WRP, on behalf of a range of immigrant, labor and civil rights groups, actually used the NAFTA labor side accords to challenge the policy. The NAFTA accords are really pathetic generally, but they happened to be tailormade for challenging this kind of administrative rule. The Mexican government accepted the petition and through that pressure and lobbying by folks at the administration, the Memorandum of Understanding was dropped and the Labor Department agreed not to act as informants for the INS.
> And Doug may well be right Clinton's new respect for Sweeney may be
> motivated by the need to maintain AFL-CIO support in an election year,
> rather than by any real interest in eco-labor standards either as good in
> themselves or even as a veiled protectionist threat in bargaining
> situations.
No question that a lot of policies are being done to court labor. I doubted the intelligence of Sweeney's endorsement of Gore, but as a pure power politics move, it's paid off. Gore owes Sweeney big time and every other politician can look at Bradley and see the consequences of losing the labor troops. It will be interesting to see how many Dems will end up willing to cross labor on the China trade vote.
-- Nathan Newman