Organized Labor

John Sweeney, President of the AFL-CIO, signed an agreement August 9 of this year with the NDLON. The agreement pledges that the AFL-CIO will work together with the NDLON in various regards, including advocacy for enforcement of worker rights and for immigration reform. Renee Saucedo of La Raza Centro Legal was on the dais with Sweeney for the announcement of the agreement. Terry O’Sullivan, General President of the Laborers International, which has disaffiliated from the AFL-CIO, has also met with Ms. Saucedo and discussed possible cooperation. The labor movement on the national level, then, is moving to work with the NDLON.

What does this mean for the Building Trades here?

I have met with Renee Saucedo to explore this question. I have visited the day labor center on Cesar Chavez Street twice during dispatch hours and have attended one of the center’s monthly membership meetings.

Those who have followed my columns in the last year and a half will know my views on immigration from Mexico and Latin America. As long as there is so great an economic imbalance between the United States and their southern neighbors immigrants will flow north. They will do so despite walls and penalties. If they cannot work in the aboveground economy they will work in the underground economy. If “guest worker” programs are instituted and immigrants work through them they will be locked into a kind of modern indentured servitude, bound to one company and largely beyond the reach of unions. They will be unlikely to contest failures to obey or enforce laws guaranteeing them a certain wage level. They could therefore be exploited readily against us. If “guest worker” programs are instituted and immigrants enter the country by other means – and we can be sure they will – they will be all the likelier to remain in the underground economy. Unorganized, they, too, could be exploited against us.

All the workers who spoke to me at the San Francisco day labor center said that they wanted to be in our unions. They were restrained by fears arising from their immigration status. Many of our signatory employers would feel restrained from employing them. Some of our unions would feel restrained from accepting them as members. Their presence being inevitable, if we do not or cannot take them into our ranks how do we keep them from being used against us?

The programs of the NDLON may offer an interim approach. Certainly the more day laborers can be organized, the more they can demand a better wage and fair conditions, the less they can be used to undercut us, given our generally greater skill and productivity.

The more they are organized, the more realistic it might be also for us to discuss boundaries between their work and ours, because their representatives will speak for more of them. To a large degree they operate now in markets where we do not. One of the day laborers at the center said that they work for individual homeowners and not contractors. Those of us who have walked onto many non-union jobsites as organizers know that this is not universally true, but it may be preponderantly so. And to a large degree day laborers really are “day laborers,” working only the briefest jobs. Both these considerations suggest boundaries based on scope and/or duration of employment.

At the same time, those boundaries would be problematic and at best stopgap. That we do not now have a strong presence in certain markets – short term jobs directly for individual homeowners, say – does not mean that we do not hope someday to become strong in them. And many of our members feed their families and pay their bills through a succession of jobs a day, two days, a week, two weeks in duration, especially during winter or hard economic times.

But the question of boundaries is largely moot at present. We might discuss boundaries with the day labor center, but far more day laborers can be found along Cesar Chavez and Twenty-sixth Streets any weekday morning than in the center. A larger center may bring more workers in off the streets, and the day labor center is applying political pressure to oblige a nearby developer to provide such a center. For others, a major effort at old-fashioned organizing will be required.

This would be a net good no matter what relationship, formal or otherwise, the Building Trades have with the day labor program. The more completely the City’s economy is unionized, the stronger labor will be generally. The day labor program may not be a union in the formal sense detailed by the National Labor Relations Act, but it returns in ways to the very roots of unionism, to what we were in our early history. If the day labor program functions on the fringes of legality because of the undocumented status of its members, it is not so different from what we were in our early years, when we were sometimes held to be unlawful cabals. If its members operate in a cash economy, so did we in times within the memory of some of our older living members. Its attempts to move workers from the street corner to the hiring hall recall the Longshoremen’s efforts to end the “shape-up” along the Embarcadero in the nineteen-thirties. It practices the kind of self-organization that preceded all our modern unions.

We can hope that the recent change in Congress brings the opportunity for a more realistic approach to immigration. If Congress takes this opportunity and sees and acts clearly, the day labor program by inculcating union ideals into its members or encouraging them where they are already held will be preparing our own future members. We might even imagine ways in which some of our trades could credit documented work in the day labor program as pre-apprentice training.

In any case, those union ideals, our ideals, say that all workers should be organized. If day labor programs such as those of the NDLON are the one means of organizing a large number of workers, our ideals say that we should support them when and how we can. The establishment of a tradition of mutual understanding and cooperation among us will serve us all well.