Announced in mid-February, the policy shift comes from two sources. One is to help the employers who face a labor shortage in the United States. The American Chamber of Commerce immediately applauded the move, for example.

The other is the fact that there continues to be a growing number of immigrants in the U.S. workforce who are part of the renewed resistance by growing layers of the working class to the bosses' assault on wages, benefits, and dignity on the job.

The union officialdom's announcement coincides with a rise in union membership for the first time in two decades, many of whom are immigrant workers. Some 20 percent of workers hired last year were immigrants with growing numbers of them joining the ranks of labor in meatpacking, construction, and garment and textile plants. An estimated 40 percent of the population growth in the 1990s has been the result of immigration.

Last fall, for example, more than 5,200 workers at the nation's largest textile plant in Kannapolis, North Carolina, voted to be represented by the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees. The workers there had waged several unsuccessful organizing drives over the past 25 years. The margin of victory this time, as even the capitalist media was forced to admit, was the growing numbers of immigrant workers who had recently gotten jobs at the mill who were strong supporters of the union.

Employers have also sought to defeat unionizing drives by harassing undocumented workers, many of whom are in the forefront of fighting for union representation. In Minneapolis, nine women who worked as maids at the Holiday Inn Express helped lead the fight for a union in August, only to be fired and face deportation orders several months later. Their union, the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union, has 250,000 members, 75 percent of whom are immigrant workers.

Commenting on the union federation's change in policy, an article in the February 17 Washington Post points to this as "a remarkable turnaround for the American labor movement and points it back toward its roots when the sons and daughters of turn-of-the-century immigrants became the leaders of the nation's industrial union drive in the 1930s."  
 

Backs future deportations

The union federation's position, which will be presented in a number of public forums starting in April, backs amnesty for the estimated 6 million workers without papers currently in the United States and a halt to the current system in which employers must verify workers' eligibility to work in the United States, a law that the union officialdom backed when it was enacted 15 years ago.

Their proposals to "reform" the immigration system, however, also includes support to ongoing efforts by the federal government to keep additional undocumented workers out of the country. The proposals by the conservative layer that sits on top of the union membership would also endorse deportation of workers caught by the INS who immigrate illegally after the amnesty is in place. Their arguments are couched in continued support to economic nationalism, protectionism, and controlling what crosses the borders in products and human beings.

The AFL-CIO's new policy comes as employers are facing a shortage of workers. A section of the employing class are pressing for similar immigration "reforms," including maintaining and expanding their so-called guest worker program. Under this law hundreds of thousands of workers from Mexico and throughout Latin America are brought into the United States for several months at a time to work the farms and fields at low wages while forced to confront decrepit housing and work conditions.

Among those praising the union officialdom's new immigration plan is Randy Johnson, vice president of labor policy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "I think this is an area where the business community and organized labor can work together," he said.

The New York Times in a February 22 editorial described the labor federation's new approach to immigration laws as "a surprising turnabout" since "until now, organized labor has fought hard to keep illegal workers from taking jobs from higher-paid union workers."

The liberal Times, echoing the position of conservative commentators, called for rejecting the AFL-CIO's proposal, stating, "Amnesty would undermine the integrity of the country's immigration laws and would depress the wages of its lowest-paid native-born workers.... The primary problem with amnesties is that they beget more illegal immigration."

The Times, referring back to the previous amnesty in the 1980s, noted, "Amnesties signal foreign workers that American citizenship can be had by sneaking across the border, or staying beyond the term of one's visa, and hiding out until Congress passes the next amnesty."

A nationally syndicated column by conservative commentator Samuel Francis, entitled, "Unions desert U.S. workers for immigrants," worried that "the amnestied aliens will flood into the unions" and "pull even more illegals across the border."

"What the AFL-CIO decided to do," Francis wrote, "is one more betrayal of the American workers it's supposed to be looking out for, and one more act of treachery against America and its people."  
 
 
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