On the corner of East 13th Street and Fifth Avenue stands one of New York’s 2,000 delis – or greengrocers, as the New York Times respectfully calls them. The outside racks are crammed with flowers and neat rows of fruits and vegetables, all providing a splash of colour that contrasts with the huge grey facade of Forbes business magazine’s neo-Gothic building and the drab lecture hall of the New School for Social Research.
I walk past the deli shortly after eight o’clock each morning with my 15-year-old daughter, Victoria, on the way to her school in Greenwich Village. But recently the deli has been doing badly, because outside it stands a picket line, complaining that its Korean owners pay less than the minimum wage of $5.15 per hour (£3.68), that the working week runs well over 40 hours, and that no overtime is on offer.
This may seem like nothing more than a small, local dispute. But it is part of a wider movement. If you think that trade unionism is dying in the developed countries, think again. The picket line at the deli is made up of Mexican immigrants. And it is immigrants who are at the forefront of a revived trade unionism that has wide implications for labour relations throughout the US, and perhaps beyond. The current union drive to recruit immigrants across America has been one of the most successful organising operations since the 1930s – a point noted in passing by the pro-free market economist and Sunday Times columnist Irwin Stelzer in his essay on immigration in the NS of 16 April.
Hispanic workers now make up the biggest minority group in the US. Apart from garbage collection, which is still run by the Mafia, Hispanics do all the menial tasks that used to be done by blacks. As a group, Hispanics thus provide an excellent recruiting ground for the labour movement – and especially for New York’s Local 169 of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, which has made a pitch for the deli workers.
Once owned almost exclusively by Jewish and Italian immigrants, who used the delis as their stepping stone to the American dream, the greengrocers are now owned mostly by immigrants of Korean descent. Before the incident at the Fifth Avenue deli, Koreans, rightly or wrongly, had already gained a bad reputation. Ten years ago, in Brooklyn, blacks boycotted one of the first Korean delis for nine months, after an incident involving a black woman who the owner accused of shoplifting. But city authorities say they have also found poor working conditions in delis owned by people of other ethnic groups, such as Indians and Arabs.
Several employers have agreed to pay thousands of dollars in back wages, but others are still holding out, ignoring the labour laws. Uncovering the abuses has not been easy, either for the unions or for the city authorities. The workers are paid in cash, and many Mexicans, being illegal immigrants, are unwilling to complain.
To assist the immigrant recruitment drive, the umbrella national labour federation, the AFL-CIO, voted for an amnesty for undocumented immigrants in February 2000, and called for a revision of the laws protecting illegal workers from unscrupulous employers. In addition, unions are engaged in a collective effort to educate and organise immigrants. One of the first was the sheet metal workers’ union, which has long been one of the most hostile to immigrant workers.
The real home of the newly resurgent trade unionism is not New York, but Los Angeles, long known as an anti-union town. The city’s hostility to unions dates back to 1910, when union activists were so infuriated by the anti-labour views of the Los Angeles Times that they bombed the newspaper building, killing 20 employees. In the past decade, more than 1.3 million Hispanic migrants have moved into LA. The local unions are attracting workers faster than anywhere else in the country. Public attitudes are also changing. When 8,500 office cleaners went on strike last year, the union raised more than $2m for food.
The unions have achieved astonishing successes. In 1999, 74,000 homecare workers, most of them Hispanic, voted to unionise. Last September, 4,400 bus drivers and train operators went on strike, upending management efforts to avoid paying overtime rates for full-time drivers. City workers are now paid a minimum wage of $7.80 per hour (£5.57).
The unions can expect the success to continue not just among immigrants, but with a whole new generation. The 2001 marching season kicked off with a walk on Washington by women’s groups.
My daughter joined them. One day, as we were walking to school, she said that she wanted to write a letter to a multinational clothing company to complain about the low wages paid to its garment workers in Central America.
A few weeks later, I bumped into a New York garment workers’ union organiser and proudly told him of my daughter’s precocious activism. He listened patiently, then said: “I organised those letters from schoolchildren all over New York. It was a very successful campaign. The store immediately raised the wages of their workers in Central America.”
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