As the Trump administration takes its fight against undocumented workers to the workplace, some unions in the US are picking up the mantle to protect their members, thereby creating a new battlefront between the Republican party and organised labour.
In some cases, unions have organised legal representation for their members and gone so far as to hold rallies around the country to stop deportations. The tactics seem to be paying off in many instances although success is not guaranteed. The problem is that historically, the unions themselves have widely disparate relationships with undocumented workers and minorities.
Civil rights groups have repeatedly sued construction unions to force them to admit African Americans, and for decades unions like the Northeast Regional Carpenters Council would call immigration authorities to deport undocumented workers. Over the last two decades as construction unions sought to organise larger numbers of undocumented workers, the attitude of labour has changed. Now, in the era of Trump, many labour leaders see an opportunity to accelerate those changes.
One catalyst for change is the fact that the majority of new members in the construction workforce are Latinos, so building trades unions must do more to embrace immigrant workers if they are going to survive. Another factor that has helped promote the leftward shift of the building trades has been the emergence of Latino labor leaders within their unions.
Initiatives such as the Working Families United coalition has helped lead labour’s effort to protect workers facing threats of deportation while pushing unions to be more inclusive of immigrants. Not only have the unions become more engaged in assisting their immigrant members facing deportation within their union, but externally their politics have also begun to shift. During the 2013 immigration debates, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations officially embraced the use of E-Verify system to check documentation of workers on construction. Some unions still use the E-Verify system, but many labour leaders have since moved away from it.
