Globalization, Immigration, and Organizing

The US labor movement has staked its future on aggressive organizing, and it has scored some recent successes. But fundamental shifts in the global economy ranging from increased outsourcing to massive immigration could reverse those successes and undermine labor’s organizing efforts. There is an urgent need for new strategies not only to confront the global challenges that threaten labor, but to take advantage of new opportunities for building a global labor movement.

Consider this:
•    Following the purchase of AT&T by Cingular Wireless, CWA has organized 16,000 former AT&T workers, many of them in call centers, around the country.
•    In the face of chaos in the car industry, the UAW has actually increased union density in the auto parts sector in the past year or so reversing a long decline.
•    SEIU recently won recognition-- involving 5,300 workers-- at the major contractors that clean 70% of Houston’s big buildings. It’s the biggest private sector union victory in years in the South.

These victories have, for the most part, been the result of sophisticated organizing strategies that leverage the muscle of existing union members, along with community and political support, to get card check recognition agreements.

In Houston, for instance, SEIU won a card check agreement after the union built strong community and labor support and threatened action by the contractors’ unionized workforces in other cities. 

It’s easy to see how globalization could affect the CWA’s call center workers and the UAW's auto parts workers: corporations are already outsourcing many of these jobs to lower wage regions of the world. What to do about outsourcing has bedeviled labor for decades. (We will discuss our suggestions for strategies to deal with outsourcing in later blogs. But see our report, “Outsource This? American Workers, the Jobs Deficit and the Fair Globalization Solution” for a more detailed look at the problem and possible solutions.)

But how does globalization affect the janitors in Houston? Well, Houston’s janitors represent the other side of the same coin: while cleaning jobs may not be highly mobile, the people that fill those jobs are.

Houston’s janitors are nearly all Latino immigrants, many are undocumented.  They are part of a massive global migration of people in search of work that has reshaped labor markets around the world. The global south is now in the global north. As Frank Sharry wrote recently in the American Prospect, “We [already] have an integrated labor market with Latin America.”  More immigrants (in absolute numbers) came to the US during the decade of the 1990s than during any other decade in the history of the US—including the decades of the mass migrations at the end of the 19th and early 20th century.

Undocumented immigrants coming into the US now outnumber those with visas.  Despite an economic downturn in 2001 and a severe clampdown following 9/11, the flow of immigrants has continued unabated. The percentage of immigrants in the workforce actually increased from 13 to 15% from 2000 to 2004.

But if the labor markets are becoming globally integrated, the laws and institutions which regulate them are not. Existing laws and institutions are simply inadequate to the task of regulation.

Now, natavist and xenophobic forces are moving fast to fill this regulatory vacuum. While Houston’s largely undocumented janitorial workforce was organizing, the House of Representatives was passing draconian legislation that would make many of them felons subject to arrest and deportation. Across the country there is a potential tsunami of nativist, anti-immigrant sentiment building that is finding an audience-- and not only among the usual xenophobes but in working class and low income communities where workers are forced to compete with the newcomers for jobs.

As the number of undocumented immigrants in labor’s ranks grows, it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine a situation in which one part of the labor movement is demanding the deportation of the other half.

Unions have come light years in the past decade or so on immigration issues. Today most unions understand that immigrants—documented or undocumented—are an integral part of the US workforce. Most unions seek to organize immigrants and most advocate for immigrant rights. Now it’s time to develop strategies that match the complexity of the problems immigration presents.

Most migrants are looking for work, therefore the world's labor movements are in a special position to lead a global discussion on immigration. And the US labor movement is in a good position to kick off such a global discussion. First, it was largely build by previous waves of immigrants and can draw on positive cultural imagery about immigration, and secondly, because the US is experiencing a surge of newcomers that unions are trying to organize. Today, the question of immigration reform can no longer be separated from the question of organizing.

We will look at the discussion about immigraton reform in and around the labor movement in future blogs.

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Comments

[David Bensman]

I am glad to see you focusing on this issue. I think the key to the connection between globalization and immigration lies in the fact that global economic institutions, at the behest of global corporations, are encouraging developing countries to shift to export-oriented development strategies. In response, these countries are pushing their rural populations off the land, to become either factory workers or employees in commercial agriculture. This push of people from the land is creating the great waves of migration flooding into the U.S., Europe, and parts of Asia. China has pushed 150 million people from the land to become urban migrant workers who lack basic citizenship rights in the cities where they work.
Any effective response to neo-liberal globalization will include alternate development strategies which allow people to stay on their land while opening up better opportunities for rural development.