THE STORY OF 50 UNDOCUMENTED WORKERS IN NEW YORK CITY: Toil and Trouble
"In the United States we suffer because of our work, and because of the Immigration police. Here we have to work all week, every week. Our work is ordered and controlled. We can't rest or talk. No...
...A few men and women, with several years experience behind them in this country as well as advanced industrial skills, earned up to $220, the highest wages reported...
...The boss thought I was dull in the head, I was so unaware of the value of my own work...
...After four years, Pedro finally got fed up with haggling with his boss every six months for a raise of $10 a week...
...The New York Times, which has been antagonistic to the undocumented for many years, recently editorialized: Laborers from Haiti and Ecuador, willing to work for sub-minimum wages, have readily found jobs in small firms...
...Few immigrants had ever labored alongside "Americano" workers...
...In 1976, when Felipe, from the Dominican Republic, was washing dishes in a posh Manhattan restaurant, he was told by his boss that business was bad...
...in April 1978...
...Some found work the first day out looking, and in only one instance was the search for a first job prolonged to eight weeks...
...In my shop, whoever works, works...
...Every time you turned around, the box was full again...
...unions, but in fact they were members of unions in nearly half of the 110 jobs for which we have the relevant information...
...Fifteen out of a total of 26 women held all their jobs in apparel...
...workforce which inhibits labor organization has been grossly misinterpreted in the public "illegal alien" debate...
...The latter have been immigrant enclaves for years, and today in New York, new/old, legal/illegal immigrants, as well as internal U.S...
...BRIGGS: Well, in many cases that's right...
...They could be further exposed to exploitation because of their illegal status, but what was important to employers in these competitive industries was that these workers were simply available in growing numbers, to work hard and produce more for the going wage, bound to low-skilled work and easily shifted in and out of jobs according to changes in the market...
...But soon the new immigrants became acclimatized to current pay scales for different types of work...
...SCHEUER: The employers know they're not going to complain, they know they're not going to organize...
...Undocumented women did not tend to work regular overtime...
...When Ines from Ecuador asked her boss for a raise in her hourly wage, he transferred her to piecework instead...
...They told us that they were not strictly relegated to marginal factories within the industries where they worked and that their wages, by and large, were no lower than those generally prevailing...
...Piecework pushed the women to produce more in the same period of time...
...That's my choice...
...The pay wasn't enough...
...economy and their unfamiliarity with the U.S...
...They will not join unions...
...They needed active defense against specific workplace abuses...
...He controls people with it...
...He didn't fire me, and he told me when I was sick again I should go to the doctor and not come to work...
...At the same time, since they offered little else as laborers in the way of skills and education, and since they could not rely on public or family aid in case of unemployment, the undocumented had to cling to their work...
...But that person should know that he could go straight to hell, because the boss would be even stronger in the future...
...For this type of employer, a worker without papers was one who could be laid off easily - to cut the workforce in times of slack, to avoid wage increases through seniority, or to unload potential union members...
...I went after him and told him it was done," said Aurelio...
...So she knows about me...
...Nowhere in the 50 interviews is there any mention of a vacation...
...New immigrants of the same nationalities came in clusters, because whenever a job opened up in a shop, through their kin networks "one pulled in another," in the words of one Salvadorean...
...I knew the field, so I knew the work involved...
...She said, "In that place the owners liked an all in the family environment, with a pat on the back...
...That turned out to be part of the subtlety...
...When we asked Pedro, the garment cutter from Nicaragua, whether his boss singled out the undocumented from the rest for harsh treatment, he responded, "He went out of his way to get Haitians...
...Jacinto, an undocumented worker in a door factory, was blunt on this point...
...This was, again, dramatically clear for women sewing machine operators, who improved their speed with repetitive experience, but did not often have opportunities to master new machines or techniques...
...He can use it...
...And those workers who did bring some knowledge of an industry from their home countries were received eagerly by employers...
...They explain the immigrants' relative ease at finding jobs in 16 NACLA ReportNovlDec 1979 Unskilled workers perform the myriad crucial tasks that keep New York City manufacturing functioning...
...As a result, Flora has had to go on lay off for one week every two or three months this year...
...UNORGANIZABLES" ORGANIZED The following exchange took place at hearings on immigration before the Select Committee on Population held in Washington, D.C...
...The boss soon entrusted him the keys to the place as well as many administrative responsibilities...
...In any case, the 50 immigrants were able to sell their labor rapidly in New York, indicating that jobs were available to them - at least in the industrial sector of trabajo chiquito, at the wages offered...
...The wages were cut, and Felipe had to quit because he couldn't meet his expenses on a reduced income...
...An undocumented Ecuadorean woman reported, for example, that her employer, who did not know whether she had papers or not, waited for her when she was coming out of the factory bathroom to announce to her that he had just had a visit from the INS...
...In a variation on the same theme, Oscar, a Salvadorean who was illegal for four years in New York, said that in the first job he held, "They paid me the minimum, by a check in the boss's name, and withheld the taxes...
...When he demanded his paycheck, the owner demanded his green card...
...The strike ended after six weeks with a contract, but it was not a total success...
...These were clear attempts by bosses who were already paying low wages to capitalize on the added vulnerability of a worker with no immigration papers...
...In seven jobs, undocumented workers were paid in cash or by personal check, and presumably never were registered in the company books at all...
...citizens or legal residents...
...At that time, Flora had been a member of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU...
...But it was fully possible for a worker without papers to fade quietly into the factory background, exercising the few advantages, and suffering the same degradation, as legal comrades...
...That work was made for people who have to do anything that comes along to stay alive...
...Iris, for example, came to the United States in 1968 and worked for a decade as a sewing machine operator...
...Is Felipe's observation accurate...
...For example, in a raid on a Brooklyn garment sweatshop in July 1979, witnessed by NACLA, INS agents detained five Mexican workers, four of whom were earning less than $2.00 an hour...
...and probably a group of loyal workers with basic skills who, after being laid off, would come around again for hire when the contracts picked up again...
...I went to work in a factory making hair curlers, the type you heat up," said Trudy, an Ecuadorean who came to the United States in 1968 and overstayed her tourist visa...
...Meanwhile, my machine is always piled high...
...Here, then, are two "supine" illegal workers in New York City...
...Nor are we suggesting that the presence of undocumented workers would pose no difficulties for a union attempting to organize a non-union shop...
...And gets treated according to his production...
...He said, "My relations with my foreman are fine, but for the women I work with, it's a different story...
...The door was open for anyone who wanted to go back to work...
...Echoing their observations, Orlando, a Colombian welder, said "The 'Americanos' were very unstable...
...The undocumented tended to see the unions as the one civil institution in the United States which they could approach safely...
...They were workers with few defenses and limited options because of their low skills relative to the requirements of the U.S...
...I never thought I would find such a fine man in a factory...
...Some bosses practiced both...
...Later she learned from other workers that no such visit had taken place, and no one else had been similarly confronted...
...An Ecuadorean woman said she 1718 NACLA Report had to work standing in a pool of water, due to poor drainage in a parts-washing area of the plant...
...But of the 50 immigrants we interviewed, only one, a man, had been paid less than minimum wage on one of his jobs, out of a total of 136 jobs for which we have information...
...Usually, they preferred the system when they first started out with it, since they were young and could run their needles fast enough to bring home extra pay...
...The workplaces where these immigrants labored commonly employed between 20 and 50 workers, inspite of the fact that 90% of the manufacturing firms in New York City employ less than 20 people.' In other words, the undocumented were by no means wed to the fly-by-night, five-person basement factory...
...We just don't talk about it," was the common refrain...
...These employers were contractors, large and small, facing stiff competition and irregular work loads...
...Within these sectors, the undocumented were highly productive workers...
...In addition, there is no penalty for hiring an undocumented worker...
...Women were union members for three out of five of their jobs, men for one out of three...
...The extent to which the undocumented, based on their imputed docility, necessarily create a division in the U.S...
...So you didn't really have hard exploitation, it was subtle...
...Only a handful of them, with years of experience in skilled work, were more selective...
...citizens and legal residents...
...Those paid in cash received the agreed upon wage...
...they generally worked in the core of New York light industry...
...He organized the workers to pay for the costs of the election vote themselves...
...Two other immigrants had worked in factories where the boss made it clear he would call the INS at the first mention of a union...
...Among the undocumented were eight Haitians, for whom deportation was particularly terrifying, since it meant a forced return to the political repression of Haiti...
...Theirs were laborintensive tasks with archaic technology-punching, molding, cutting, stitching or welding day in and day out, operations mastered in only a few days...
...That was the first unhappy surprise...
...I didn't dare ask the boss what he was doing with the tax money...
...that they were not segregated from legal immigrant workers in the workplace because of their status, rather that they blended into the larger workforce and faced similar working conditions...
...Undocumented men, who were not stuck in apparel, were always on the lookout for a new job to lighten their work load or raise their pay $10 a week...
...Another Salvadorean man who worked at a kind of kiln in a lamp factory was given plastic gloves which burned through continually as he removed the metal from the heat...
...You don't know, you don't ask, you don't tell...
...The immigrants sustained a breakneck pace of work, and also provided extra muscle power...
...others who could be used and then laid-off in a slow season...
...The union helped...
...Aurelio, a Dominican meatpacker, explained how he once unloaded and stacked 150 cases of meat, weighing 175 pounds each, from a truck while his foreman went to round up two other workers to help him...
...Eduardo, an undocumented Salvadorean from a rough peasant background, sighed that his work was not only monotonous, but "frankly, it's wearing me down...
...Felipe, the young Dominican, made this observation: "Being illegal means you don't really communicate things in the factory, because then the fear of revenge begins...
...Once here, they also became "people who have to do what comes along to stay alive," as Felipe said...
...Conrado, the textile mechanic from Colombia, worked in a lamp factory where the workers didn't trust each other...
...Conrado believed the foreman discriminated against the Colombians to squeeze them out and substitute Salvadoreans...
...In the lives of the fifty immigrants, other differences among working people, such as race, sex, or nationality, were systematically manipulated just as effectively as immigration status to create workplaces where "the workers don't trust each other...
...I went to my union to complain...
...The forelady is a Puerto Rican...
...The Federal minimum is now $2.90 an hour or about $105 for a forty-hour week...
...If you look, and.you're really willing to work, you find what you need...
...FACTORY FRICTION In shops and factories, the immigrants encountered more immigrants, but not many workers resembling the white, U.S...
...They worked for four months, then they went to collect unemployment...
...But the foreman gets fresh with them...
...On this money, the immigrants sustained themselves, and, more often than not, provided for non-working family members here and in their home countries...
...The man who runs the place knows when the workers don't trust each other...
...Then he came out and said to them, 'Sorry, but your boss doesn't want you anymore.' " Flora, the tie-maker who went to the ACTWU to complain about discrimination by her forelady in 1971, subsequently became more and more disillusioned...
...Within days the shop was on strike, pressing the boss to sign a contract...
...Some immigrants, whose family contacts failed to turn up job leads in a hurry, went directly to factory hiring offices or consulted employment agencies...
...The ILGWU persuaded another, union contractor to take over, but business went into a slump in mid-1979, and not all the striking workers got their jobs back...
...Given the additional vulnerabilities of undocumented status, and amidst the competitive pressures operating in most New York light industry, willingness to work hard was often transformed into an obligation to work harder...
...If it was well organized, it could help the worker...
...I operate a pedal by repeatedly throwing all my weight on that one foot...
...They came up with a textile job offering $90 a week take-home (in 1977...
...But this impression didn't endure for long...
...Under current New York State law, an employer is neither compelled to ask for immigration documents from employees, nor prevented from doing so...
...I can't collect unemployment insurance without a green card...
...I didn't take the job...
...It took him from 8AM to 1PM to do a single lot of 50 folds...
...BARELY LIVING WAGE What definitely was 'little' about the immigrants' work was the pay they got for it...
...In the interviews, six jobs were mentioned where bosses consistently failed to pay the required time-and-a-half for overtime work...
...We work side by side on the same machine, but suddenly he wants to have me under his shoe at work...
...However, the undocumented commonly seized the first job they came across, without bargaining over the wages offered or the working conditions...
...To hear the undocumented tell it, apparently, Colombians clashed with Salvadoreans, Dominicans with Haitians, while Puerto Ricans got lambasted from all sides, portrayed as foulmouthed loafers and welfare leeches...
...They even kept control on the number of minutes you spent in the bathroom...
...In fact, Armando, a Colombian maintenance mechanic, stated with a certain bravado a widely held self-perception among them: "My will to work is so great, I can produce twice as much as an American worker in the same time...
...When that ran out they came back looking for work again...
...As for the actual work that occupied them daily, the immigrants' comments about it were terse...
...19NACLA Report WILL TO WORK The immigrants were capable of tolerating unrelenting strain, dismal tedium and paltry remuneration for the simple opportunity to bring home a salary of greenbacks...
...I wasn't afraid for a minute because I was undocumented...
...He met an organizer for the ILGWU, and together they explained the union benefits to the workers in the shop (eight legals and twelve undocumented...
...When everyone in a piece-rate shop worked quickly, the result was to raise the standard of producNovlDec 1979 23NACLA Report tion and in effect, to lower the piece-rate...
...For the recent arrivals, these "kin" cushioned the shocks of 14 NACLA ReportNovlDec 1979 15 American culture, eliminated any need to communicate in English and often provided temporary financial suport...
...Other workers made purses, airplane parts, television tubes, loose-leaf binders, lamps, light artillery, expensive jewelry, skin cream, knee pads, even life preservers...
...The extra privilege of a card in one's own name, which most of them did acquire over time, could take as long as a month and cost up to $200--just one more of the "services" provided by shadowy middlemen who reap millions of dollars annually, and inflate the costs of undocumented existence...
...Out of the fifty, five men and one women parlayed skills into wages of over $220 a week...
...Since they considered their avenues at home to be closed, they were determined to make rapid headway on those they found here...
...In this type of shop there were employers who deliberately ferreted out information on an individual's immigration status, only to use the threat of deportation to drive them to exhaustion...
...citizens allegedly competing so vigorously for these jobs...
...The newcomers to the promised port had to find a place for themselves amidst the hulks of burned-out buildings, the cruising street gangs and the rotting garbage...
...She said, "In the factory where I work regularly the boss is an Italian...
...But I knew that I knew how to sew - I learned in Panama -so I couldn't permit that...
...And a Panamanian woman named Flora recounted what happened when, in 1971, after she had been living in the United States illegally for three years, she began to have troubles with the forelady in a tie-making shop where she had just started a new job...
...Sometimes, when the spreading work fell behind, I went back to it and the boss brought in another cutter, an American...
...The real obstacles were the depressed conditions in New York manufacturing (which we will take up in Section III), and, notably, the policies and practices of the unions involved...
...for women it was just under a year, closely paralleling the seasons of the garment industry (where temporary lay-offs often became permanent for illegals who couldn't wait it out on unemployment...
...In 1971 Trudy, an Ecuadorean, worked in a small stocking factory on 34th Street in Manhattan...
...These were jobs in light manufacturing, consisting of assembly, shipping, repairing or cleaning...
...In his first three years, Pedro worked from 7AM to 9PM daily and 9 hours on Saturday...
...On the other hand, none of them ever achieved the $8.50 hourly wage which is now the median for a skilled factory electrician in New York City, to take an example...
...In my job," she continued, "I always have to stand up all day...
...When she left the industry, she was taking home $150 a week which, in real wages, amounted to exactly as much as the $67 she had earned the first week she went to work in New York...
...culture and language...
...The activity which consumed most of their lives left them with no more than a sense of emptiness...
...But faltering English was usually no hindrance at work, since Spanish was the dominant language...
...This led to a growing conviction that many expressed, that their work didn't matter...
...BRIGGS: That's right...
...Many times they couldn't communicate with their union representatives if they didn't speak English...
...But the 50 interviews indicated that bosses weren't concerned whether an immigrant was undocumented or not...
...The undocumented gave no broad evi18 NACLA ReportNovIDec 1979 INS agent checks worker for documents during recent raid on Brooklyn sweatshop...
...They have me standing on one foot for eight hours...
...Where she works now, she charges, the union is undercutting her by turning a blind eye while the contractor farms out jobs to non-union subcontractors and illegal homeworkers to save his own profit margin...
...An irritated citizen or resident can, with no repercussion to him or herself, call up and have the offending person summarily removed...
...They noted bitterly that new workers entering their shops often received the same pay...
...The eldest of them was a 48-year-old peasant woman who said she had been in the United States just three weeks, and was being paid a total of $30 a week for cutting threads off sewn garments...
...A paternalistic boss would characteristically cultivate a worker's gratitude...
...Moreover, the undocumented revealed nothing resembling a predisposition against unions...
...They wanted labor for trabajo chiquito...
...No Salvadorean would help me because of that discrimination...
...He runs to the boss about every little thing...
...As a result, Social Security cards have become fast-moving, but increasingly expensive commodities on the New York black market...
...that they were not directly attracted from their home countries by these jobs, but rather the conditions in their countries drove them out...
...Anamaria, during slack seasons when she was laid off by the Italian to whom she was dedicated, went to work in a small Brooklyn sweatshop run by one of these bosses...
...Conrado, the trained textile mechanic from Colombia, said, "To get my first job, I paid an employment agency $25...
...Protectionist analysts contend it is not...
...Three people in my family had to give me two pints of blood each...
...Men described their paid overtime as voluntary for nine jobs, obligatory in eight...
...Knowing I was illegal, the forelady didn't want to let me do the second job...
...She charged that on three occasions, women workers were fired on the spot for questioning the boss' order on the way a piece of work should be done...
...Here was a clear instance where splits among workers, in this case national ones, resulted in lower wages for the employer to pay, and a union effort stymied at the outset...
...And she tells me not to go home until I finish...
...Teresa (Ecuador) The 50 Caribbean and Latin American workers followed past generations of immigrants into New York...
...Trabajo chiquito could also be downright dangerous...
...If they don't like it: OUT...
...He used to be my closest buddy, and now he's thrown me away like garbage...
...In several instances, workers we interviewed had been the last employees of contractors who finally folded up and went overseas...
...They began to see what their labor might be worth in the long run...
...Their work, no matter how draining or dull, became the center of their existence...
...That was when Conrado got another surprise: in that factory, working overtime was not a choice, if he wanted to keep his job...
...Orlando, the Colombian, went so far as to initiate, in 1978, a decertification campaign against Local 875 of the Teamsters Union in a factory in Brooklyn that makes bronze ashtrays...
...No matter how we feel, we go to work, because if we miss a few days, we find another worker in our place...
...The undocumented in manufacturing were largely limited to a sector where the work is so dismal that intense worker vulnerability is required to keep anyone at it at all...
...2 The undocumented certainly are vulnerable to minimum wage violations, particularly those most recently arrived in the United States...
...Several reported working in garment shops which became ovens in the summer--a literal "sweating system...
...Such tensions were aggravated by current INS enforcement practice, by which agents pinpoint raid sites in response to anonymous telephone tips, or denuncias...
...The union representative came to the fac26NoviDec 1979 tory, and met alone with the boss each time...
...SCHEUER: In other words, it's not just the dollars for which [undocumented immigrants] are willing to work [which forces U.S.] citizens out of the labor market...
...In this shop, Anamaria worked entirely off the books, and was paid in cash, $110 a week...
...They kept saying, 'Don't worry, he's only bluffing.' " When the union finally did come, he said, the representatives met with the boss, not the workers...
...Felipe said he could not convince his representatives from a local of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees to meet with the staff...
...Within national groups, resentment simmered between legal residents and illegal immigrants, in the limited cases where a person's status was known...
...I was a union member, but not any more," said one Haitian...
...He is a friend of my aunt, who sent me to work there...
...SUMMING UP On the basis of the testimonies given to NACLA by undocumented workers, we can say that illegal status was a secondary aspect of their participation in the New York City economy...
...Often they had shot their savings and contracted debts to get to the United States...
...All I did seven hours a day was sit with a toy pistol going tic, tic, tic, painting one little tiny red spot on each curler...
...Even with overall New York City unemployment now at 8.5%, by going through this kin network many immigrants landed their first U.S...
...Still smarting from the hundreds, possibly thousands of dollars they had spent to get into the United States, they were inclined to bear abuse quietly...
...Similarly, Max came in 1975, and ever since has been working the night shift in a plastics factory, six days with ten hours overtime each week...
...The explanation of why these jobs were available remains to be made...
...She said I didn't know how...
...But most of the time they send work out and five of us are on lay-off...
...And it's also in many cases because . . . compared to wages in their home country, these wages look good to an illegal alien...
...He knows they're afraid of the Immigration Service, but there's racism in it too...
...Today these neighborhoods are badly decayed, and all but abandoned by a financially strapped city government...
...While overall the undocumented received the minimum or above, several of them endured incidents of other types of wage abuse...
...The particular positions the immigrants held within factories also tended to be irregular and insecure, subject to seasonal hiring booms when workers could also expect overtime, followed shortly thereafter by widespread lay-offs...
...Thus, protectionists have argued, bosses prefer illegals over others seeking the same work...
...In this case Conrado's trouble came from the fact that he is Colombian (even though he was also undocumented at the time...
...Of course, many undocumented workers joined unions simply because they found jobs in closed union shops...
...Most of the people interviewed took a view like that of Felipe, a young Dominican who was illegal for four years in New York: "They don't really search for illegals, but let's just say they end up using them, and liking it...
...Workplace relations were bound to be personalized...
...The second was that as time went by, no matter how they pushed themselves, their wages barely advanced...
...DEAD-END DRUDGERY The jobs the 50 immigrants found may be "little" in terms of their place in an industrial pecking order, but they are central to New York City manufacturing production...
...In their own generation of migration, they found other Latin American and Caribbean peoples, including many Puerto Ricans (who are U.S...
...migrants, coexist...
...This was particularly true of women in the garment industry...
...She got her raise--from $110 weekly take-home to $130-but she had to work harder for it...
...He pays the Haitians poorly and works them like dogs...
...dence of any systematic wage...
...The urgency and disillusionment behind this job movement also eventually fostered a sympathy for American trade unions...
...Even in these cases the immigrants usually did not have to demonstrate skills or experience...
...In 1979, 15 out of 19 women who were earning regular wages took home between $105 and $135 a week-not below the minimum, but not far above it either...
...Time away from work was never a deserved rest...
...Max, from Colombia, gave one of several examples from the interviews of the additional risks that could arise for women in these shops...
...The reasons the immigrants gave most frequently for leaving jobs were strong objections to wages and working conditions...
...They were earning as much in one week as they would have in six weeks or more of factory work at home...
...But the 50 immigrants barely had a moment to take stock of their ominous new surroundings...
...To advance his wage, two months before he finally quit in September 1979, he began a drive to bring a union into the shop...
...However, it was impossible to evaluate which of the many divisive factors obscuring common interests among workers weighed more heavily in the shops where the 50 immigrants worked...
...Wages would be cut from $4.54 an hour (the union minimum) to $3.25, and the work week would go from 35 to 40 hours...
...Undocumented workers, together with other immigrants in New York, constitute a pool of labor for these jobs...
...They first settled in certain sections of the boroughs that make up the city: Williamsburg in the borough of Brooklyn, the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Jackson Heights in Queens and the South Bronx are the names of only a few...
...Several women complained that their bosses limited them to a 35-hour week, but after a few weeks work put them on the piecework system (pay at a predetermined rate for each item sewn...
...Today he brings home only $180...
...The undocumented never suggested that all these conditions were imposed solely on them simply because their illegal status allowed them little recourse to protest...
...Armando, the maintenance mechanic from Colombia, customarily went to work on Saturdays to repair the roof of the small metal-parts factory where he worked and do other odd jobs without pay...
...They do the same work I do...
...These workers moved in and out of the shops, while a senior, skilled, more fixed generation of workers were made up of Italians, Portuguese, Austrians, Poles, and Jewish and other Europeans...
...By 1979, he had worked up to $5.00 an hour, when a union cutter's wages were $6.50...
...She claims that when she confronted her union representative with ties she got from friends working in non-union shops bearing the same labels as the ties she sews, "The union told me that the company sends work out because they need it quickly and there are only ten of us, we're too slow...
...Why didn't you go collect?' I had to tell her that I can't...
...He claims, "On the cutting machine, I could fire off twenty lots in a week, with two cloth spreaders and one delivery man...
...In these cases, though, the intent of the employers was to defraud the government of taxes, not the workers of wages...
...Since labor was one of their biggest costs, it had to be closely managed...
...Pedro said, "After two weeks on strike, the illegal Haitians began to get scared...
...Imagine that . . . I did that for eight months...
...In addition, the undocumented could become fully conscious of their exploitation as laborers, and they often felt a need for a strong organization to defend themselves...
...The union made a sweetheart contract which failed to guarantee adequate health and vacation benefits...
...Without such cheap labor, . . . employers would be forced to improve their wages and working conditions...
...This was particularly true for women joining the ACTWU and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), the two major unions organizing New York apparel...
...2. New York Times, March 21, 1979...
...The workers, including the Haitians, held out...
...citizens for immigration purposes), as well as a small number of Asians...
...In the factory, he charged, a large bloc of Colombian workers were often paid less for more work than a slightly smaller bloc of Salvadoreans, and were constantly harried by a foreman who was himself from El Salvador...
...The median job for men was six months...
...Several men also worked in apparel as skilled cutters or as unskilled cart pushers...
...They don't feel exploited in that sense...
...In addition to the conflicts between the immigrants and their bosses, under the pressured working conditions there were also pervasive frictions between workers...
...But one key worker swung his vote in return for a raise of $1 an hour...
...As the years passed, it dawned on some of them that high productivity at unchanging low wages was its own trap...
...After I was sick, he would get a chair for me so I could rest from time to time...
...But there were two jobs in linings, one that paid $180 a week and one that paid $200...
...In these shops it was rare for an employer to ask for the tarjeta--the coveted green card...
...Some worked seven days a week, or two jobs at once...
...After being on the job for a mandatory probation period of a month or two, they were automatically inducted...
...It turned out there had been many complaints about her...
...But now it is the same as the boss, two faces of the same coin...
...job in less than a week...
...Armando gave his rationale for loyalty: "As an illegal my only insurance is my work...
...Speaking are the Committee Chairman, Representative James Scheuer of New York, and Vernon Briggs of the University of Texas at Austin, a leading proponent of a more restrictive immigration policy: MR...
...Fed up with low wages, in 1977 he attempted to organize the workers in a Brooklyn metalparts factory to bring in a union...
...But Americans tend to avoid jobs like that...
...Finally, the web of contacts very often extended to workplaces run by patronage and paternalism, where employers were quite willing to give jobs to the friends and family of their workers...
...They knew we were illegals, and said they would shield us...
...But they often discovered that it could be a mixed boon...
...For their first jobs, undocumented workers who didn't manage to borrow one from a relative or friend--sometimes for a fee- were able to purchase it in a matter of days at rates running from $15 to $50...
...Me, I do 2 lots in the morning, and then if I'm really warmed up, I sometimes could do 3 more in the afternoon...
...Furthermore, those undocumented who actively sought out unions did so because of the growing feeling that their low wages, so much the focus of their existence, were not rising over time in proportion to their exertion...
...Like the hiring bosses, fellow workers formed hunches about others on the line, particularly in communities with larger concentrations of undocumented workers...
...These are the conditions of labor which now prevail in the sectors of industry where new immigrant workers, legal or not, come to dwell...
...I try to hang on to the boss and he tries to hang onto me...
...They required a labor force made up of some constant, mainstay workers who gained skill, speed and proficiency through experience...
...They were largely ignorant of the terms prevailing in the New York City labor market, and as immigrants, with limited skills and no English, they were in no position to pick and choose...
...All that to take home $150 a week...
...They also quickly learned that Federal wage standards do not necessarily denote the minimum required for a decent human existence in New York City...
...Men regularly worked overtime in 23 out of the 72 jobs for which information on hours was given in the interviews...
...They needed the guarantee of a union minimum ($3.80 for a sewing machine operator in the garment industry, for example), as well as the improved job security, and the medical benefits which they were not likely to seek from a state bureaucracy which might ask for a green card...
...some persisted with the blind faith of Anamaria, the garment worker from Ecuador, others became acutely aware of exploitation, even that which came garbed in paternalism...
...So I take care of my work...
...If I leave, I have to take the work with me and finish on my aunt's machine at home...
...I can barely walk home in the evening...
...unions...
...Some, mostly women, came with little or no familiarity with trade unionism...
...In other shops, employers made the pressure of competition felt in every corner of the workplace, by controlling a worker's every move, pushing up the speed of work, leaning on workers to stay overtime, sometimes with and sometimes without overtime pay...
...The other legal workers make the mistakes, but she forgives them...
...Take Pedro, a Nicaraguan man who came to the United States in 1973, and, while illegal, worked his way up to become a skilled fabric cutter...
...Of a lamp factory where Conrado worked until September 1979, he said, "In the end I stopped doing overtime, because even though they paid me time-and-a-half, the hourly pay was so low, it just wasn't worth it anymore...
...Though 24Supervising the assembly workers in an electronics factory...
...jobs near the very bottom of the hierarchy of industrial production...
...I told them we had signed union cards for something that was fair and just...
...Before 1974, the undocumented had little difficulty obtaining Social Security cards in their own names from local offices, or by mail...
...In particular, women, like Elena from the Dominican Republic, were able to sign on as sewing machine operators in a few days time, even with no previous experience...
...discrimination which kept them earning less than American or legal resident workers for the same work...
...They came around giving away pairs of stockings to workers, at the same time they were putting a huge box at your feet to fold and pack...
...Typically, they considered their years here- particularly the early ones--to be a time of disciplined abnegation, of sacrificing the present against the future, of saving up and reducing their own standard of living to provide for family sustenance...
...In their first years in the United States, they tended to rely on long hours and hard-driving work to increase their earnings...
...a city wracked with blue-collar unemployment by claiming that the undocumented compete unfairly with Americans in the labor market, accepting lower wages and intolerable conditions...
...Nevertheless Pedro, the Nicaraguan garment cutter, sparked the unionization of his shop on 35th Street in Manhattan, demonstrating that the undocumented were not inaccessible to organizing...
...In the end, she was relieved as forelady...
...For the moment, it's clear that the immigrants' ability to get these jobs did not hinge upon the fact that the workers were living in the United States illegally, and might therefore be more vulnerable to exploitation than U.S...
...Later in the hospital, the doctor explained to me it was an ulcer...
...She sends me all the damaged work from the other 15 machines in the factory...
...That's not to say that the undocumented commonly work below minimum wage, as the mass media still wants to insist...
...But that year a new regulation strictly limited the distribution of cards to U.S...
...Often, unionized immigrants didn't know who their shop steward was, what union their local was part of, who its leaders were...
...In addition, their expendability was reflected in frequent job turnover...
...Dec 1979 off...
...LONG SCRAMBLE When the immigrants first went to work in the United States, their wages seemed generous to them...
...I hear about people from this country who have a hard time finding a job...
...After my hospitalization, the boss showed great consideration...
...The main reason [employers] want to use these people is that they cannot be unionized...
...He stared at me, and all he said was, 'You're joking . . .' " Producing intensely, the many men among the undocumented also put in long hours...
...During the first months on the job in New York, the undocumented did lay very low...
...Though we will later take up in more detail the competition between workers, we can now point out that critics who maintain that the undocumented throw "American" or "domestic" workers out of jobs are blind to the composition of the workforce in N.Y.'s light industries...
...TOIL AND TROUBLE 1. Julia Vitullo-Martin, op...
...With a Social Security card in hand, the immigrants rarely needed any further qualifications to get work...
...When I asked for work, right away she said, 'Why did you come here to work...
...The boss moved his business out of the city rather than be unionized...
...Also, a Dominican, Alfredo, mentioned almost nonchalantly about his second job in New York, as floor boy in a cutting shop in Manhattan's Garment Center: "The ventilation was bad, and after a long day, the dust was so thick from the cut material, my nose would be running blood mixed with shreds of fiber...
...Some were content to leave it at that, and simply collect the union minimum wage...
...That's what's really killing me in this country...
...But there were those who wanted and needed an active, strong labor organization, who let out their frustration in the interviews in a flood of negative assessments of U.S...
...Said Eduardo, the peasant from El Salvador, "A friend of mine married a Puerto Rican woman and got his residence...
...These figures also conceal a form of protest...
...For the most part, the bosses hiring the undocumented workers we interviewed asked to see only a Social Security card, which they didn't scrutinize very closely for validity...
...In Colombia, I was in a union and I know that it's all for one and one for all...
...I lost interest because the union can't do anything for you...
...It's a lot of work and little money, because living is very expensive...
...The woman believed her boss had calculated that a nervous reaction from her would betray undocumented status...
...If there's no union, the job is no good...
...Through the interviews, it became clear that the obstacles to active union participation by undocumented workers had little to do with individual workers' fears...
...My task was to finish the ties, by sewing in the lining," said Flora...
...But in every one of these cases, the immigrants brought the skills, in fine sewing, welding or mechanics, with them when they came from home...
...Whatever raises the immigrants got usually were specified in union contracts, or followed increases in the Federal minimum...
...They were quickly caught up in a dense social network of family, friends and compatriots already living in the city, most of them as fully legal residents...
...When they began confronting regular living expenses in New York, they recognized the income bracket in which they had landed...
...Extremely unpleasant" was how Lila, from Ecuador, characterized her local of the ILGWU...
...Not only were most of the 50 basically willing, in principle, to join U.S...
...GOING TO THE BOTTOM OF THE WORKING CLASS Although the first job hunt was relatively quick, it invariably channelled the 50 im-16 NACLA Report migrants, regardless of their class background and work experience, into a single category of work, which one of them called trabajo chiquito, or "little jobs...
...The native born Americans just won't put up with that...
...I never know if I can get a raise...
...For example, two of the immigrants believed that any union would inspect for green cards, a rumor planted in one instance by a vigilant boss, and generally encouraged by the well-known positions of the AFL-CIO calling for increased enforcement against undocumented workers...
...They would tolerate one factory until they had another job lined up, then move without missing a day of work...
...In these enclaves of immigrants, it was taboo to inquire about another's legal status...
...the only way to get away from them was to quit...
...The man felt he had no choice but to quit without pay...
...sometimes the family at home was anxiously awaiting their dollar remittances...
...I didn't get any support...
...Women who worked piecework were pleased when they first started to hit their stride with a machine, but after years grew tired of the incessant pressure...
...For men and women, two-thirds of their jobs lasted a year or less...
...In general, from the immigrants' accounts it appears that their industriousness stemmed from the logic of their journey to the United States--and not from the semiclandestine status that devolved upon them once they got here...
...The deductions didn't appear itemized anywhere on the check...
...and that once in New York, the kin network channeled them into whatever work was available...
...As a result, unemployment among these immiants overwhelmingly followed involuntary layoffs, and rarely lasted more than a few weeks...
...Out of the fifty, the largest group (21) were women who became workers in apparel factories at one time or another while in New York...
...As immigrants, they brought with them, when they entered the country, a willingness to work...
...A take-home salary of under $135 a week affords only bare-bones survival in a city where, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it costs $251 weekly to cover only the most basic requirements of a family of four...
...Women can't stay long in that place...
...22NovlDec 1979 23 Fanning these flames is the real competition between workers in the rapidly growing labor pool for trabajo chiquito...
...But only a handful of the immigrants believed from what they had seen that their bosses deliberately looked for undocumented workers to hire...
...For the same year, out of 20 men who reported regular wages, 9 earned between $105 and $135 a week, and 8 more earned between $135 and $185...
...It's their docility, their supine acquiescence to every conceivable kind of mistreatment...
...She thinks I'm an animal...
...In these communities coexisting Jewish delicatessens, Italian pasta shops and Hispanic bodegas (grocery stores) mark successive moments in a continuous influx of foreign labor...
...She doesn't let me talk...
...The immigrants described two broad styles of control exercised by foremen, managers and owners: a protective paternalism on one hand, and workplace tyranny on the other...
...A 22-yearold garment worker from Ecuador, named Anamaria, expressed the kind of loyalty a shrewdly solicitous employer could attract...
...The immigrants were also restricted from learning skills with which to bargain for higher pay...
...Also from this older group came the foremen, managers and some shop owners who were most likely to be Italians, Jews and Puerto Ricans, though sometimes they were "Americanos," by which the undocumented meant non-ethnic white and black American citizens...
...In 1977, one day I was at work, and 21NACLA Report about mid-morning I began to feel pain, and to bleed...
...They lived in communities where those with expiring tourist visas, or without any immigration papers at all, blended in unnoticed...
...Basically they take anyone who comes along who will do the work...
...In addition, there was no way to move up from these unskilled jobs...
...The effort was defeated...
...As a result, he said, "My work didn't matter...
...Today, the presence of undocumented workers has done far less to rupture the solidarity of labor than the false images of them propagated by the media, the government, and the AFL-CIO itself...
...In most interviews, the line between voluntary hard work and coercion, though present, was not so clear...
...For now, suffice it to say that an employer could take very concrete advantage of rifts in a shop resulting from nationality, race, sex, or legal status...
...Even so, the shops where the immigrants worked were dreary and dilapidated, and maintenance was shoddy...
...job in the garment industry in Brooklyn...
...Of course, bosses were aware that many immigrant workers could be without papers, and over time, by watching a worker's habits and listening to shop gossip, they did make educated guesses...
...Only a year later, in New York City, one undocumented Ecuadorean garment worker told NACLA, "I never work where there's no union...
...On the other hand, one Dominican man decided he had to quit his job in a garbage can factory in Brooklyn one winter when day after day his hands went numb from the cold inside...
...Well, I never had any trouble at all," sniffed a Dominican named Elena, who got her first U.S...
...I didn't think twice about it...
...On the other hand, Conrado, the textile mechanic, said, "I'm a rebel, and I like my rebelliousness to show...
...None of them had ever been informed of their basic rights as workers, much less as undocumented immigrants...
...In another case, an illegal Ecuadorean tailor who did fine sewing for a Manhattan boutique said that he hadn't been paid after two weeks...
...it was always a lay"Trabajo chiquito" in a cardboard carton factory...
Vol. 13 • November 1979 • No. 6
