The Struggle of Undocumented Workers Is Every Worker's Struggle
Anyone who has ever worked in a restaurant knows that the working class of the United States is an international working class, composed of people from all over the world: immigrants, refugees, second-generation Americans …. This is the direct result of US imperialism. The US maintains large parts of the globe under its domination in order to keep wages down and the price of raw materials and land low. This domination takes many forms – war, austerity, low levels of development – all of which result in the flight of workers from their home countries to the US.
The bosses use this international character of the US working class to sow divisions, often by promoting racist ideas. Lack of unity among workers allows the bosses to keep wages down because it prevents workers from collectively fighting for better working conditions, equal pay, higher wages for all, and other demands. This hurts the whole working class.
In recent decades, undocumented workers – who are perhaps better represented in the restaurant industry than in any other sector besides construction[1] – have been particularly targeted. This situation is in part the result of a major piece of legislation from 1986, the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), and a Supreme Court decision from 2002, Hoffman Plastic Compounds vs. NLRB.
What is IRCA? With the passage of IRCA, employers were for the first time prohibited from hiring undocumented workers. The bosses now faced severe criminal and civil penalties if they were caught, and were legally required to verify the papers of their workers. IRCA also allowed the employers to reverify the legal status of their staff at any time.
In this way, IRCA made the bosses into an arm of state immigration enforcement – that is, into cop-bosses. This both benefited and hurt employers. On the one hand, it threatened to cost them money, either in penalties or higher wages. On the other hand, it gave them leverage to threaten reverification of papers in the face of union organizing efforts. The only thing that prevented the bosses from using this leverage was the fear of major penalties imposed by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for illegal retaliation against workplace organizing.
This is where the Hoffman decision comes in. In the Hoffman case, the US Supreme Court ruled that an undocumented worker, Jose Castro, who had been fired illegally in retaliation for union organizing, was ineligible for wages lost due to the firing and was not eligible to be rehired. This gave the bosses motivation to use the reverification weapon given to them by IRCA. In the face of union organizing efforts, Hoffman makes it easier to go after the undocumented workers in order to block the drive. The Hoffman decision means that undocumented workers might abandon organizing out of fear of permanently losing their jobs, and the bosses risk significantly less in monetary penalties for illegal activities. In addition, business owners have used the Hoffman decision to try and scare workers into thinking they have no rights whatsoever.
However, the Hoffman decision does not mean that undocumented workers cannot organize or that they have no rights as workers. Undocumented workers are still covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which guarantees minimum wage and overtime, as well as state wage laws, like the Wage Theft Prevention Act in New York State. And undocumented workers are still covered by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which means it is still 100% legal for undocumented workers to organize a union, elect a union, and collectively bargain with employers. These are rights we must defend!
But Hoffman did strengthen the alliance between the bosses and state agencies like ICE. Even so-called ‘progressive’ bosses will sooner use the threat of reverification than let their workers organize. In this way, they do the work of reactionaries like Trump, whatever stories they may tell themselves. The bosses work for the state, and the state works for the bosses. When we fight arm-in-arm with our undocumented comrades, we are uniting all workers against this alliance of the bosses and the state. The IRCA law and Hoffman decision will divide and weaken us if we don’t make unity with undocumented workers a central part of our struggle.
We must replace the politics of the bosses with a working-class politics that includes the following demands:
An equal wage for equal work! In restaurants, the highest wages go to the waiters and bartenders, who are almost all US citizens, and usually white. The lowest wages go to line cooks, dishwashers, bussers, and porters, who are almost all immigrant workers, mainly from Latin America, some documented, some undocumented. We must oppose this hierarchy of positions and wages according to nationality, and demand an equal wage for equal work!
No cooperation with ICE! Overturn IRCA! In early 2017, ICE contacted the owners of Tom Cat Bakery in Queens to conduct an I-9 audit (Form I-9 verifies employment eligibility.) The Tom Cat owners withheld the information from the workers until shortly before the deadline to produce papers, causing many workers to leave their jobs for fear of deportation. In the face of this type of situation, we must struggle against the reverification weapon, whether used by the bosses for their own interests or in the service of the state.
Health insurance and paid sick leave for all workers, including undocumented workers! Even before the pandemic, the relative lack of health insurance made restaurant workers particularly vulnerable. With the arrival of coronavirus, the situation became critical. Those still working have faced the prospect of expensive hospitalization and loss of wages if they get sick. And while workers in unions receive health insurance and paid leave, restaurant workers are generally guaranteed nothing. Some workers can rely on unemployment insurance, but most undocumented workers do not qualify. This is why health insurance and paid sick leave are particularly important for those who are here without papers.
In this struggle, we cannot rely on the big, undemocratic trade unions. The AFL-CIO actually supported IRCA, claiming it accomplished “goals long sought by the trade-union movement.”[2] They assumed wages would go up for everyone else with the reduction in numbers of undocumented workers. The AFL-CIO could have tried to unionize undocumented workers, but instead they chose to attack them. The AFL-CIO only changed its position in the 1990s, under the pressure of militant workers from Central America and Mexico. But even while they took some long-overdue pro-immigration stances, they supported the vicious anti-immigrant policies of Bill Clinton, which made it easier to deport undocumented immigrants. The big trade unions are no friends of the working class.
Instead of joining a big trade union, we must work to build our own independent and democratic union, in which our undocumented co-workers will play a leading role. In our struggle, ‘unity’ must be more than a phrase. We may be divided by barriers like language and culture, but we share an important thing in common: we are all exploited by the same bosses, and this means our struggle is a common struggle.
STRONGER TOGETHER!
[1] “According to estimates, approximately 16 percent of DACA-eligible workers are employed in food preparation and serving, more than any other industry.” <https://www.eater.com/2017/9/26/16368172/daca-repeal-restaurant-workers>
[2] “The New Immigration Law: Its Impact on Workers and Unions,” The AFL-CIO American Federationist, January 17, 1987, <https://socialjusticehistory.org/lalabor/workingla/aflonirca1>.