Meat Company Asks Supreme Court to Deny
Illegal Workers the Right to Join Unions

Agriprocessors, the nation's largest kosher meat producer, is asking the Supreme Court to rule that illegal immigrants do not have a right to form or join trade unions. The basic argument of the company's lawyers will be: if undocumented immigrants are not allowed to work, why should they be entitled to the right to join a union?

The case dates back to September 2005, when the employees in Agriprocessors' Brooklyn plant voted 15 to 5 to join Local 342 of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union in an election conducted by the National Labor Relations Board. The workers, most of them from Mexico, joined the union for many of the same reasons that native-born Americans join: dissatisfaction with low pay, no health benefits, lousy working conditions.

A few days after the election, the company announced it would not recognize the union, because it "discovered" that 17 of its employees were illegal immigrants. However, the NLRB went ahead and certified the union as bargaining agent, citing a 1984 Supreme Court ruling that illegal immigrant workers fall within the definition of "employee" under the National Labor Relations Act (1935) and therefore have the right to join a union.

The U.S. Court of Appeals, in a decision last January, rejected the Agriprocessors' argument, and wrote that allowing illegal immigrants to join a union "helps to assure that the wages and employment conditions of lawful residents are not adversely affected by the competition of illegal alien employees."

Agriprocessors was in the news last May when federal agents raided its meatpacking plant in Iowa, apprehending 389 of its workers as illegal immigrants. Union officials accused the company of employing 57 under-age workers, but there was no vigorous response to the detentions from organized labor.

Unions Face Obstacles at Worksites with Illegal Workers

There are some 12 million illegal immigrants in our country. They work in construction, transportation, agriculture, health care, computer technology retailing and other industries. They work and live in every part of the country. Although legally banned from holding U.S. jobs, they are increasingly integrated into the American economy,

But because of their illegal status, employers can take advantage of them by paying them less than they pay American citizens. Illegal immigrants often hesitate to protest a lack of benefits, poor working conditions and abusive treatment, because they run the risk of being handed over to the immigration authorities and deported.

Realistically, we have two basic alternatives. Either we raise the level of wages and benefits of undocumented workers to our standards or we allow employers to drag our wages and benefits down to theirs. For our mutual protection, we must organize them into unions. We must demonstrate our solidarity with them, not consider them our enemies.

Let us hope that the Supreme Court will turn down the Agriprocessors' appeal. It would be devastating to the labor movement and its future if the conservatives on the Court deny undocumented immigrant workers the right to join a union.

The immigration issue is being hotly debated across the country with as yet no sign of consensus on how it is to be resolved. One principle that unions ought to adopt and work for is that every worker in a workplace must be treated fairly.

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