A new report shows that comprehensive immigration reform would help American workers and the U.S. economy. Reform that offers a path to citizenship for currently unauthorized workers and enforces workers’ rights would raise the “wage floor” for the entire U.S. economy and increase the total gross domestic product (GDP) by at least $1.5 trillion over the next decade, the report says.

“Raising the Floor for American Workers,” by the Center for American Progress and the Immigration Policy Center, says finding a pathway to citizenship for the millions of undocumented workers is a much better alternative in this economic crisis than expanding guest worker programs or mass deportation.

The temporary worker program only generates an annual increase of 0.44 percent in the nation’s GDP or $792 billion over 10 years. It also leads to declining wages for newly legalized immigrant workers, the report says.

Mass deportation would reduce U.S. GDP by 1.46 percent annually or $2.6 trillion, not including the actual cost of deportation, the report adds. Wages would rise for less-skilled native-born workers, while wages for higher-skilled natives would drop. The deportations would lead to widespread job loss as well.

History bears out these findings, according to the report. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which provided opportunities for citizenship, was enacted during an economic recession characterized by high unemployment. Yet it helped raise wages and spurred increases in educational, home and small-business investments by newly legalized immigrants.

Raúl Hinojosa-Ojeda, director of the North American Integration and Development Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the report’s author, says:

This is a compelling economic reason to move away from the current “vicious cycle” where enforcement-only policies perpetuate unauthorized migration and exert downward pressure on already low wages, and toward a “virtuous cycle” of worker empowerment in which legal status and labor rights exert upward pressure on wages.

Click here to read the full report.

*This post originally appeared in AFL-CIO blog on January 11, 2009. Reprinted with permission from the author.

About the Author: James Parks had his first encounter with unions at Gannett’s newspaper in Cincinnati when his colleagues in the newsroom tried to organize a unit of The Newspaper Guild. He saw firsthand how companies pull out all the stops to prevent workers from forming a union. He is a journalist by trade, and worked for newspapers in five different states before joining the AFL-CIO staff in 1990. He has also been a seminary student, drug counselor, community organizer, event planner, adjunct college professor and county bureaucrat. His proudest career moment, though, was when he served, along with other union members and staff, as an official observer for South Africa’s first multiracial elections. Author photo by Joe Kekeris

The firing of 1,800 apparently undocumented workers at American Apparel’s Los Angeles garment factory, forced by a federal investigation, is an example of the Obama administration’s new approach to workplace enforcement, which avoids the Bush administration’s militarized raids.

Unlike other companies targeted for immigration enforcement, American Apparel’s factory boasts positive working conditions and relatively high wages. Workers have health and life insurance, paid English classes and even masseuses on the shop floor, yet the company has still managed to compete with cheap imported clothing and grow very profitable very quickly.

An American Apparel factory in California. (Photo by Humain, via Flickr)

News coverage mentions American Apparel’s “proprietary” production system, so the logistics that let the company treat workers well and still profit in a globalized market may not be widely known. It remains to be seen how the company will survive, given the forced firings and the fact it was already suffering heavily from the recession. (And the fact that the company’s success is probably partly a fashion or social justice fad whose novelty is doomed to fade.)

My initial reaction to yesterday’s news was that a hypocrisy had been exposed, since American Apparel’s very existence is based around its Made in the USA label, and—rightly or wrongly—I associated that label with consumers who are not fans of undocumented immigrant workers.

Then I realized that if American Apparel management guessed their employees were undocumented (they contend they didn’t), publicly embracing the workers as the part of the American workforce they are makes a statement.

Founder and CEO Dov Charney, a Canadian immigrant, has in the past spoken out for sweeping immigration reform, as described in this New York Times story. Apparently the federal investigation, started under the Bush administration, was already underway as Charney launched this ad campaign.

Meanwhile, it is impossible to ignore the fact that while shop floor conditions at American Apparel appear to be very positive, Charney’s one-on-one interactions with his employees, at least female ones, leaves a lot to be desired (as In These Times reported in 2005).

At least three ex-employees have filed sexual harassment suits against Charney, who is known to conduct business in his underwear or even while naked. He describes these habits as creative freedom, which his employees apparently don’t appreciate (see MSNBC’s report here).

Employees told Businessweek, “It was a company built on lechery,” and “I thought it was a male contemporary perspective on feminism, but it turns out to be just a gimmick.”

Many also complain American Apparel’s ads offensively sexualize and objectify young women, especially young immigrant women of color. The company markets the fact that its ads feature employees, but I wonder if they are paid as much as professional models would be.

Ultimately it is ironic that, as one worker quoted by The New York Times points out, the fired workers are likely to end up at actual sweatshops or other under-the-table, exploitative work situations in the U.S.

In other words, while the current federal workplace enforcement policy is more humane and logical than the militarized raids of the past, without comprehensive immigration reform it still comes off as a relatively pointless or purely symbolic gesture.

About the Author: Kari Lydersen, an In These Times contributing editor, is a Chicago-based journalist writing for publications including The Washington Post, the Chicago Reader and The Progressive. Her most recent book is Revolt on Goose Island.

This post originally appeared in Working In These Times on October 1, 2009. Re-printed with permission from the author.

(Many people view Labor Day as just another day off from work, the end of summer, or a fine day for a barbecue. We think that it’s a holiday with a rich history, and an excellent occasion to examine what workers, and workers rights activism, means to this country. Our Taking Back Labor Day posts in September will do that, from a variety of perspectives, and we hope you’ll tune in and join the discussion!)

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We always knew it would take a fight to enact the kinds of sweeping reforms we need to fix the economy so that it really works for working Americans. The Employee Free Choice Act was never set to sail through Congress without opposition from the nation’s most anti-union employers. No one expects that it will be much easier to repair our broken immigration laws, overhaul flawed trade policy, improve retirement security or ensure that parents can finally afford time off work to welcome a newborn. But the sheer nastiness of the health care reform fight begs the question: if even modest reforms are this difficult for a popular Democratic President with large majorities in both chambers of Congress, how will we ever achieve the economic restructuring the nation needs?

One way to improve the odds that working people will have more to celebrate on Labor Days to come is to ensure that our cities get a special invitation to the national policy conversation. Picture it as a giant nationwide barbecue: gathered around the grill, cities can share local policy victories that have measurably improved the lives of their own residents – and can provide a successful model for other cities and for national action. Raising the profile of proven local policies may make the reforms proposed in Washington feel a lot less lonely.

San Francisco can share its own universal health care model, which currently provides 45,000 uninsured city residents with access to affordable primary and preventive care, prescriptions and lab tests through city clinics and participating private hospitals. The track record of Healthy San Francisco, as the program is known, should be informing the national health care debate to a far greater extent than it is.

While they’re talking health, the City by the Bay can also recount its experience guaranteeing everyone employed in the city the opportunity to earn paid sick days – a policy that is projected to reduce costs and improve public health and has not increased unemployment. Washington DC and Milwaukee have already passed weaker versions of this policy. Now New York City is looking to emulate San Francisco’s success. Examples like these can boost national legislation like the Healthy Families Act which would let working people nationwide stop having to make the untenable choice between their health and a needed paycheck.

Minneapolis could also pipe up. The City of Lakes insists that when they provide subsidies for economic development, companies that get public money need to create living wage jobs. The successful policy is a vivid example to cities across the country which regularly provide lucrative private tax breaks only to lure poverty-level jobs.

Then there’s New York, where grassroots organizations citywide have teamed up with the State Department of Labor to educate employees and employers about workplace laws and identify cases where employers are illegally cheating their workers out of pay. The program, known as New York Wage Watch has attracted national controversy because it enlists unions in the effort to detect illegal activity by employers. The debate provides a perfect opportunity to consider which poses a greater threat to the country: the pervasiveness of employers stealing employee wages or the potential for groups – which have no special power to look at a company’s books or confidential documents – to intrude on private business as they uncover illegal activity? Lawbreakers may be right to fear that this local education and monitoring effort could go national.

Finally, Los Angeles should join the party. Home to the nation’s busiest seaport, Los Angeles realized it would never significantly improve air quality as long as the dirty diesel trucks servicing the port were owned by overstretched independent operators without the resources to buy or maintain cleaner vehicles. The city took bold action to both clean up the trucks and transform the drivers from exploited independent contractors into employees with a chance of improving their own working conditions. Not surprisingly, national business interests don’t like the idea of port truckers unionizing. But other port cities are considering the policy, with the potential to improve the quality of both air and jobs.

Federal policy battles cannot be won in a vacuum. Cities and towns across the country demonstrate the success of policies that improve the lives of working people. This is one Labor Day barbecue we should all attend.

About the Author: Amy Traub is the Director of Research at the Drum Major Institute. A native of the Cleveland area, Amy is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Chicago. She received a graduate fellowship to study political science at Columbia University, where she earned her Masters degree in 2001 and completed coursework towards a Ph.D. Her studies focused on comparative political economy, political theory, and social movements. Funded by a field research grant from the Tinker Foundation, Amy conducted original research in Mexico City, exploring the development of the Mexican student movement. Before coming to the Drum Major Institute, Amy headed the research department of a major New York City labor union, where her efforts contributed to the resolution of strikes and successful union organizing campaigns by hundreds of working New Yorkers. She has also been active on the local political scene working with progressive elected officials. Amy resides in Manhattan Valley with her husband.

This blog was originally written for DMI Blog for Labor Day 2009. Re-printed with permission by the author.

What if lawmakers had the guts to create comprehensive labor legislation for immigrants, enshrining their rights in accordance with international law? What if our legal system recognized immigrants’ freedom of movement, shielded families from unnecessary separation, and allowed real recourse against exploitative employers?

We should know better, of course, than to expect anything approaching that from Capitol Hill, where the hobbling immigration debate is dictated by business interests and xenophobia.

So, it’s a good thing such a law has already been drafted for them. Years ago, in response to the growing intersection between human rights and labor migration, the United Nations developed the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families.

Recognizing that border-crossing is an economic right and necessity, the Convention’s provisions include freedom from discrimination in the workplace and public services, equal protection before the law, and protection from “arbitrary expulsion,” violence and intimidation by groups or individuals.

Yet in another stunning display of American exceptionalism, the United States has not joined the dozens of other countries that have ratified these common-sense principles. Washington prefers to relegate immigration issues to the domestic policy arena, which allows it to capitalize freely on a two-tier labor force.

Chandra Bhatnagar of the ACLU’s Human Rights Program noted last December (in a rather lonely celebration of International Migrants Day) that there are three distinctly vulnerable subsets of migrants in America: Guestworkers, who have employment-based visas, are at risk of being chained to exploitative employers without legal recourse. And undocumented workers, following a controversial Supreme Court ruling in 2002, have lost safeguards in the areas of accessible remedies when injured or killed on the job, overtime pay, workers’ compensation” and other protections. Domestic and agricultural workers have been shut out of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act and other labor laws, deprived of a minimum wage floor, workplace safety protections, and the right to unionize.

In a recent paper on the labor migration and international law, Villanova University law professor Beth Lyon writes that a major obstacle to ratification of the Convention examined the government’s reluctance to open its immigration policy to scrutiny under international law:

It appears that the Migrant Worker Convention has received virtually no domestic attention in the United States from either civil society, domestic or international government, likely because it is assumed that any attempt to define immigrants as rights holders is a political non-starter.

But Lyon argues that ratification of the Convention could “help to break through the current domestic political stalemate and build-up of undocumented immigrants” and

advance agendas important to both the right and the left, including increased national security through enhanced standing with the global south and an improved humanitarian situation for one of America’s most vulnerable groups.

Many immigrants’ rights advocates are bypassing the government to leverage international law on their own. The ACLU, for instance, recently invoked United Nations policies in advocating for hundreds of Indian guest workers imported to as cheap forced labor in the Hurricane Katrina recovery effort. The organization complemented its litigation in federal court with an appeal to the U.N. Spe­cial Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants and the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Contemporary forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance.

U.S.-based activists have worked with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to investigate detention facilities in Texas and Arizona, as well as law enforcement policies toward undocumented immigrants.

Last month, the Commission’s Rapporteurship on the Rights of Migrant Workers and their Families reported, “many men, women and children detained in those facilities are held in unacceptable conditions.” The delegation also criticized reliance on local police in anti-immigrant crackdowns, warning that “the federal government might be unable to hold local law enforcement properly accountable for enforcing immigration laws with respect for basic human rights.”

The Florida-based Coalition of Imokalee Workers has framed the plight of exploited migrant farmworkers as a modern-day international slave trade. Targeting food-industry behemoths like Taco Bell and McDonald’s, the group has combined grassroots labor organizing with massive public education campaigns to pressure employers to improve wages and working conditions.

Advocates for domestic workers in New York City link the struggles of home-based laborers, the vast majority of them immigrant women of color, to global economic dynamics and the country’s legacy of racial oppression. To offset the lack of federal protections, Domestic Workers United is pushing for stronger state-level regulations, like livable wage standards, protection from trafficking, and integration into New York’s human rights laws.

Meanwhile, the leaders of the United States, Canada and Mexico discussed trade agreements and border enforcement at the summit in Guadalajara this week. As usual, officials focused on the movement of goods, not people.

Yet the engines of global capital are greased by the flow of labor across borders. A byproduct of economic “integration” has been economic apartheid in immigrant communities. While the political establishment works to advance the rights of corporations to trade freely, the rights of migrants to basic human dignity are brushed off the agenda.

Michelle Chen: Michelle Chen’s work has appeared in Extra!, Legal Affairs, City Limits and Alternet, along with her self-published zine, cain. She also blogs at Racewire.org

This article originally appeared at Working In These Times on July 10, 2009 and is reprinted here with permission from the source.

We need a Labor Secretary in the mold of Francis Perkins, whose top priority was to help the working man.

In recent days, colleagues have asked me to write about the near-collapse of the economy. My first response was to decline — recognizing all too well that I, like most of our nation’s leaders, was not entirely clear about what was going on. I’ve always been a big believer that wisdom is about knowing when to keep your mouth shut (or fingers away from the keyboard). As Proverbs 17:28 says, “Even a fool, when he keeps silent, is counted wise. When he shuts his lips, he is thought to be discerning.”

Although I must admit that I am still not completely clear about what all has occurred and has not occurred, I am more convinced than ever that we need a Secretary of Labor who cares about workers and who will at least try to address issues faced by workers. Unfortunately for the nation, we have a Secretary of Labor who is Missing in Action.

When the unemployment figures came out last week, Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao issued a one-sentence statement: “Today’s employment report provides further evidence of the need for the House of Representatives to pass an economic rescue package today, before it adjourns, which will protect Main Street America and mitigate further job loss,” said U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao. That’s it. That’s all she could muster on the subject.

The day before, she’d given a lengthy speech to the Chamber of Commerce decrying the “Europeanization” of the workplace and denigrating unions. Meanwhile, her Wage and Hour Administrator, Alexander Passantino, claims the Division is doing a great job enforcing wage and hour laws. I’m sure the Education and Training Administrator says the agency is doing a great job there too. Throughout Chao’s speeches over the last year she’s been claiming what a great job the Bush Administration is doing for working people. Well, the emperor has no clothes.

In the midst of the economic meltdown, dramatically rising unemployment figures, military-style immigration raids in workplaces, employers stealing wages like there’s no tomorrow, young people unprepared for today’s jobs — let alone tomorrow’s — and assaults against unions and the right to organize at an all-time high, we need a Secretary of Labor who sees it as his or her job to protect workers. The Secretary of Labor must be the preacher in the bully pulpit for better working conditions for all the nation’s workers. Even if she can’t do anything, she could reach out and talk with workers.

Frances Perkins.

Frances Perkins was the Secretary of Labor appointed by Franklin D Roosevelt in 1932 to help him address the economic crisis left him by eight years of Coolidge and Hoover leadership.

She came to Washington, D.C. with a mission — in her words, to serve God, FDR and the working man. She came with a vision. She wanted to get people back to work, pass national standards for wage payment, and establish a social security system. She and her colleagues created the jobs programs that built many of our nation’s parks and bridges, she passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, the most comprehensive wage protection law in the nation, and she helped design the Social Security System.

Learning from the lessons of Frances Perkins, here’s what the new Secretary of Labor should do:

First, advocate stopping the workplace immigration raids. When Frances Perkins took over, the Department of Labor was responsible for workplace raids and she stopped them immediately. They were wrong then and they are wrong today.

Although Homeland Security, not Labor, has jurisdiction for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Labor Secretary should speak forcefully against this intimidation of workers that is a gross waste of taxpayer money.

Second, enforce the wage and hour laws in meaningful ways. Employers are stealing billions of dollars annually from the paychecks of millions of workers. Wage theft is a national crisis and the Department of Labor is asleep at the wheel. Just as an unregulated banking industry has brought forth catastrophe, unregulated workplaces have enabled employers to steal wages from workers on a mass scale. In 1941, Frances Perkins had 1,500 investigators in the field visiting 12 percent of the country’s workplaces to ensure that employers were paying people legally. Today, with more than 10 times as many workers covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act, there are half as many investigators. Employers know that the chances of getting caught stealing wages is minuscule and that if they are caught, the consequences are insignificant. The Secretary must go after wage theft. What better economic stimulus for the society than workers getting the wages they are owed and spending them in their communities?

Third, lead the charge in supporting unemployed workers. Unemployment insurance should be available widely to workers and job creation strategies should be pursued aggressively both through public incentives for private job creation and public jobs programs. Let’s create those green jobs everyone is talking about.

Fourth, commit to developing the 21st-century supports America’s workers need. During Perkins’s time, she focused on putting in place social security for America’s workers. Today, we need a national health care program. Forty-seven million workers and their families without health care is not in the best interest of workers or the nation as a whole. The Secretary of Labor should play a role in guaranteeing health care to all Americans.

Fifth, support the fundamental rights of all workers to organize into unions of their choice. Although Perkins wasn’t the first choice of labor unions for secretary, she overcame their hesitations with her steadfast support for workers’ rights to organize in the workplace. Elaine Chao, in contrast, has used her public voice to attack the Employee Free Choice Act, the most significant labor law reform to come along in decades.

When the economy is in shambles, it is America’s workers who take the biggest hit. Perhaps in the coming weeks and months, we will all understand better what has happened to our economy. But as we move forward as a nation in addressing the crisis, we need a Secretary of Labor who knows workers, cares for their concerns and speaks up for them. Our current Secretary of Labor is missing in action. We need to put the Labor back in Secretary of Labor.

About the Author: Kim Bobo, Founder and Executive Director of Interfaith Worker Justice, writes the “Dispatches from the Workplace” column for the online magazine Religion Dispatches. She is the author of Wage Theft in America: Why Millions of Working Americans Are Not Getting Paid — And What We Can Do About It (forthcoming in December from the New Press) and the co-author of Organizing for Social Change, the best-selling manual on progressive activism in the U.S.

This article originally appeared on the God’s Politics Blog (www.godspolitics.com).