OSI hosted a breakfast forum to mark the publication of Suburban Sweatshops: The Fight for Immigrant Rights (Harvard University Press), by Fordham University law professor and former OSI Individual Project fellow Jennifer Gordon.
In 1992, Gordon founded the Workplace Project to help immigrant workers in the underground suburban economy of Long Island, New York. In a story of gritty determination and surprising hope, she weaves together Latino immigrant life and legal activism to tell the unexpected tale of how the most vulnerable workers in society came together to demand fair wages, safe working conditions, and respect from employers. Immigrant workers many undocumented won a series of remarkable victories, including a raise of thirty percent for day laborers and a domestic workers' bill of rights. In the process, they transformed themselves into effective political participants.
In addition to Jennifer Gordon, the panel featured:
- Ronald Hayduk, co-director of the Immigrant Voting Rights Project;
- Gouri Sadhwani, executive director of the New York Civic Participation Project;
- Gara LaMarche, OSI vice president and director of U.S. Programs (moderator).
Summary
Gordon noted that the word “sweatshop” usually means only one thing: garment work, done long ago in the United States or today in distant locations. Most people do not realize that there has been a “massive resurgence” of sweatshops—just not necessarily garment work.
Sweatshops—which Gordon defined as places “where you work extremely long and often illegal hours, for extremely or illegally low wages, and often have a high risk of being injured in the process”—haven’t disappeared, but have shifted to service industries. More immigrants now go directly to the suburbs, she noted, than to urban centers. “Suburban sweatshops” can be restaurants where dishwashers and busboys work, landscaping businesses (a major industry in which workers are often expected to mow 40 or 50 lawns per day), or homes that employ domestic workers (a recent survey by the Workplace Project found that they earn an average of $272 per week and work 12 hours a day).
The Workplace Project is part of a group of “worker centers,” whose members are those who earn the lowest wages and perform the worst kinds of work. Members come together not just to take on issues like wages and working conditions but also immigration, housing, transportation, and other problems that new immigrants face.
Worker centers have had a number of recent high-profile victories: Gordon cited the $4-million settlement for back wages won by Young Workers United against the Cheesecake Factory restaurant chain in San Francisco. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers carried out a successful campaign against Taco Bell to increase the wages paid to migrant workers employed by the chain’s tomato growers.
Gordon pointed to three important effects of worker centers: They enable workers themselves to lead the efforts (in contrast to older models of consumer boycott). The centers demonstrate that “there are no unorganizable workers.” New and undocumented immigrants are becoming political participants for the first time—in protests or in promoting legislative change.
Ronald Hayduk discussed the idea of “noncitizen citizenship.” Although voting rights for noncitizens may seem far-fetched, he said, historically such rights were not tied to citizenship. Immigrants had the right to vote in local, state, and even federal elections from the time of the founding of the United States until 1926.
Noncitizen voting is making a comeback today, Hayduk said. There are currently a dozen places in the United States where immigrants have the right to vote. The movement is grounded in the idea of "no taxation without representation"; for instance there are more than one million adults in New York City who pay taxes but cannot vote.
Gouri Sadhwani addressed the importance of finding new ways to engage immigrants in civic life. The New York Civic Participation Project (NYCPP), founded three years ago by three unions, one community organization, and one national advocacy organization, recognized a large gap in New York City—a great deal of civil society activity takes place, but there is little engagement of low-income immigrant workers.
NYCPP uses union members as a catalyst for organizing in communities, a model Sadhwani referred to as “whole worker organizing.” It represents an effort by unions to think about workers beyond the workplace by focusing on community problems like high rents or poor-quality schools. For example, unions participated last year in the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride. This was an important campaign, Sadhwani said, because it linked the new immigrant rights movement to the African American civil rights movement.