SEATTLE – For Pablo Alvarado, the genesis occurred back in 1999 when janitors in Los Angeles were on strike. Some of the cleaning companies came to the corners and workers’ centres where day labourers gathered and tried to hire workers to cross the janitors’ picket lines, he recounted to IPS.
“The workers said ‘Thanks, but no thanks, we won’t do that.’ And instead 260 day labourers joined 2,000 janitors who marched across the landscape of Los Angeles,” he said.
“That’s the type of solidarity that’s going to bring immigrant rights organisations [together] with organised labour,” said Alvarado, executive director of the National Day Labour Organising Network (NDLON), the most extensive network of immigrant workers centres in the United States.
At national and local levels, strategically and tactically, trade unions and organisations of mostly immigrant day labourers are gravitating towards each other and inventing ways to cooperate. The new alliance shows potential both to strengthen organised workers’ leverage in the labour market and to increase their political muscle.
It will be indispensible to both groups in the looming debate on immigration reform. But it could be strained as the economic crisis swells unemployment and shrinks wages.
According to Ana Avendaño, the epiphany for some trade unions occurred several years ago in Agoura Hills, a Los Angeles suburb that was seeing a lot of new construction. At dawn, she went with a group of union leaders to visit a street corner where a group of day labourers connected to NDLON gathered daily to look for work.
But on this morning, the group was huddled to discuss what to charge as their minimum wage. Meanwhile, cars were coming by looking for workers. While they met, the group had assigned one worker to stand on the sidewalk and tell them, “Sorry, we’re busy. You’ll have to come back later.”
“The workers finally decided on a minimum wage for themselves after discussing things like ‘What if they give us lunch?’, ‘What if I have certain skills?’ And they filled in the number on their flyers so that when employers came back they would have this common minimum wage,” recalled Avendaño, who is director of the Immigrant Workers Programme for the American Federation of Labour-Congress of Industrial Organisations (AFL-CIO), the nation’s largest trade union confederation.
Watching the day labourers self-organising, she told IPS, “It felt to us like we were witnessing the birth of a new, different kind of labour movement, but very much along the same lines of what we’ve had.”
Alvarado of NDLON also sees a convergence of purposes between unions and day labourers: “We all want to improve wages and working conditions for all workers, native-born and immigrants. The only way to protect native-born workers is by ensuring that we level the playing field, that the most vulnerable workers are protected as well.”