>>From today's NYT, a really progressive approach to undocumented workers,
>>actually putting protections in the union contract.
Yes, and it'll probably continue until(if?) unemployment approaches 7 percent, when the labor bosses will call on La Migra to step-up enforcement, again. That, of course, was the theme of the article you quoted, Nathan: Now that there aren't enough people to do the unpleasant jobs, the INS is playing dumb (job-site raids down by almost two-thirds in two years), and employers encourage such "progressive" contracts because they need bodies (preferably brown and frightened ones). Mazur and Co. didn't demand these protections--they were allowed to take them. Sounds to me like business-unionism with a multiculti facade.
This situation also illustrates something Jane Slaughter mentioned in the New Politics symposium (which I finally read last night, thanks to Rakesh's repeated mentioning of it); namely, the "all-out emphasis on organizing new members at the expense of attention to current ones." Oh, and this sounded familiar as well: "[I]t's hard to regard [the workers] as 'organized' yet, in any sense that's meaningful. Dues-payers, of course, they are."
Eric