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ISR Issue 49, September–October 2006
R E V I E W S
Immigrant power in the workplace
Immanuel Ness
Immigrants, Unions, and the New U.S. Labor Market
Temple University Press, 2005
230 pages $22
Review by AMY MULDOON
THE COMMON refrain that this year's immigrant rights movement “came out of nowhere” was based on a mistaken assumption that marginalized workers have no power to fight back. Immigrants, Unions, and the New U.S. Labor Market unravels the contradictory history of immigrant labor organizing in New York in the 1990s, and draws a picture of immigrant workers as militant, creative, and inspiring organizers.
Immanuel Ness situates his study of three organizing drives in the larger context of neoliberalism, both domestically and internationally. Immigration is a feature of both the “push factors”-of declining standards of living brought on by economic and social instability in the developing world-and of “pull factors” of economic restructuring in industrialized countries.
Through the 1990s, anti-immigrant legislation in the Southwest drove many new arrivals to look for work elsewhere in the United States. At the same time, arrests and deportations in New York were falling precipitously, from 22,000 in 1997 to 8,600 in 1999. Word of both tolerance and new job opportunities spread, and New York immigrant populations in some national categories doubled, including Mexicans and West Africans.
The book features three case studies-Mexican greengrocer workers, French-speaking African deliverymen, and South Asian car service drivers.
Ness makes a clear and detailed case that the “post industrial” service economy that dominates large cities carries the same dynamic of exploitation and resistance as the traditional sectors of the economy. The lack of regulation of new industries has allowed bosses a free hand in establishing a new crop of sweatshop-like conditions for recent immigrants. The combination of new job categories and union passivity meant the employers set the terms of work, which Ness details in all its brutality: eighty-four-hour work weeks for Black car drivers, $1 an hour average pay for African deliverymen, and Mexican workers called dogs by bosses.
Many jobs became ghettos for specific national or language groups, in part because of racial profiling by bosses based on assumptions that this group was “passive” and would never resist.
The horrible conditions led workers to unite and create their own organizations, to collaborate with community groups from their background, and eventually to seek union recognition with existing unions. Because quitting and moving to another job-a common strategy for English speakers in minimum wage jobs-was not an option, and legal recourse was not available for fear of deportation, collective action was the solution in each case.
Pickets, walkouts, strikes, and boycotts led to improvements in every industry-reaching beyond the individual shops that participated. The resolve to fight in the worst conditions shows brilliantly through quotes from worker-organizers:
[The boss] said he only employs Africans because we do whatever he will say without complaining. I was not a slave in Africa, and I refuse to be one here. Though I need this job to survive, I also believe that my dignity is important.
Ness makes clear that unionizing drives shifted the balance in favor of workers by raising wages and improving working conditions in individual shops, but also across whole industries by reversing deregulation. In the case of the Black car drivers, the classification of “independent contractor” (which freed bosses from any regulation of wages or conditions) was reversed in favor of classifying drivers as workers.
The role of existing unions varied from somewhat helpful to petty, criminal, and obstructionist. Greengrocers cut sweetheart deals with an International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) local to outflank the UNITE local that was backing an organizing drive. Although it held the contracts on multiple shops, the ILA never actually recruited a single member. The chronicle of jurisdictional battles gives an appalling insight into business unionism at its worst-how it undermines the very goal of organizing.
While the book is full of excellent material on the changing labor market and the reality that old-fashioned class struggle is still the means to fight, Ness is unable to explain why the labor movement is not the vehicle it could be for new organizing. He also credits “culture” as being a motivator and glue for immigrant workers, which implies native and white workers are unlikely to resist exploitation. Both his description of the bureaucratization of the AFL-CIO and his argument that the rank and file must lead the labor movement are strong contributions to understanding today's situation, but he founders in explaining a way forward.
The lack of an explanation about the stranglehold of business unionism-which took hold as McCarthyism was crushing the Left-leaves no room to imagine a different scenario. In the 1920s and 30s the American Federation of Labor shrank and was paralyzed, and refused to organize unskilled workers, but the efforts of socialists and radicals led to new organizing that broke open a period of labor upheaval. The difference was not cultural, or structural, but one of politics. The lack of a labor Left today that embraces direct action, democracy, and solidarity impedes the ability of workers of all origins to generalize our struggles and break out of the thirty-year decline of labor.
Immigration, Unions, and the New U.S. Labor Market makes concrete the reality that resistance is inevitable, even in the “post-industrial” economy, but readers should also check out titles such as Negro and White, Unite and Fight! A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930-90 by Roger Horowitz, No One is Illegal by Justin Akers Chacón and Mike Davis, Labor's Giant Step by Art Preis, and Subterranean Fire by Sharon Smith to grasp how new and existing formations can interact in struggle.
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