The Progressive 

Ana Contreras would have been a competitor for the national tai kwon do championship team this year. She’s 14. For six years she’s gone to practice instead of birthday parties, giving up the friendships most teenagers live for. Then two months ago disaster struck. Her mother Dolores lost her job. The money for classes was gone, and not just that.

“I only bought clothes for her once a year, when my tax refund check came,” Dolores Contreras explains. “Now she needs shoes, and I had to tell her we didn’t have any money. I stopped the cable and the internet she needs for school. When my cell phone contract is up next month, I’ll stop that too. I’ve never had enough money for a car, and now we’ve gone three months without paying the light bill.”

Contreras shares her misery with eighteen hundred other families. All lost their jobs when their employer, American Apparel, fired them for lacking immigration status. (Her name was changed for this art-icle.) She still has her letter from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), handed her two months ago by the company lawyer. It says the documents she provided when she was hired are no good, and without work authorization, her work life is over.

Of course, it’s not really over. Contreras still has to keep working if she and her daughter are to eat and pay rent. So instead of a job that barely paid her bills, she had to find another one that won’t even do that.

Contreras is a skilled sewing machine operator. She came to the U.S. thirteen years ago, after working many years in the garment factories of Tehuacan, Puebla. In Los Angeles, Contreras hoped to find the money to send home for her sister’s weekly dialysis treatments, and to pay the living and school expenses for four other siblings. For five years she moved from shop to shop. Like most garment workers, she didn’t get paid for overtime, her paychecks were often short, and sometimes her employer disappeared overnight, owing weeks in back pay.

Finally Contreras got a job at American Apparel, famous for its sexy clothing, made in Los Angeles instead of overseas. She still had to work like a demon. Her team of ten experienced seamstresses turned out 30 dozen tee shirts an hour. After dividing the piece rate evenly among them, she’d come home with $400 for a 4-day week, after taxes. She paid Social Security too, although she’ll never see a dime in benefits because her contributions were credited to an invented number.

“President Obama is responsible for putting us in this situation,” she charges angrily. “This is worse than an immigration raid. They want to keep us from working at all.”

Contreras may be angry, but she’s not wrong. The White House website says “President Obama will remove incentives to enter the country illegally by preventing employers from hiring undocumented workers and enforcing the law.” On June 24 he told Congress members that the government was “cracking down on employers who are using illegal workers in order to drive down wages — and oftentimes mistreat those workers.”

The law Obama is enforcing is the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which requires employers to keep records of workers’ immigration status, and prohibits them from hiring those who have no legal documents, or “work authorization.” In effect, the law made it a crime for undocumented immigrants to work. This provision, employer sanctions, is the legal basis for all the workplace immigration raids and enforcement of the last 23 years. “Sanctions pretend to punish employers,” says Bill Ong Hing, law professor at the University of California at Davis. “In reality, they punish workers.”

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division of DHS said early this year that it was auditing the records of 654 companies nationwide. The audit at American Apparel actually began in 2007, under President Bush. In Minneapolis, another Bush-era audit examined the records of janitors employed by American Building Maintenance. In May, the company and ICE told 1200 workers that if they didn’t provide new documents that showed that they could legally work, they’d be fired. In Los Angeles 254 workers at Overhill Farms were fired in May. The company, with over 800 employees, was audited by the Internal Revenue Service earlier this year. According to John Grant, packinghouse division director for Local 770 of the United Food and Commercial Workers, which represents production employees at the food processing plant, “they found discrepancies in the Social Security numbers of many workers. Overhill then sent a letter on April 6 to 254 people— all members of our union – giving them 30 days to reconcile their numbers.”

On May 2 the company stopped the production lines and sent everyone home, saying, according to worker Isela Hernandez, “there would be no work until they called us to come back.” For 254 people that call never came. According to Alex Auerbach, spokesperson for Overhill Farms, “the company was required by federal law to terminate these employees because they had invalid Social Security numbers. To do otherwise would have exposed both the employees and the company to criminal and civil prosecution.”

“We asked to see the IRS letter or any other documents related to this,” Grant responds. “We’ve never heard of the IRS demanding the termination of a worker. They never showed us any letter. The company doesn’t have to terminate these people. No document we know of says they do.” Some of the terminated workers actually had valid Social Security numbers, and were fired anyway.

The current firings highlight larger questions of immigration enforcement policy. “These workers have not only done nothing wrong, they’ve spent years making the company rich. No one ever called company profits illegal, or says they should give them back to the workers. So why are the workers called illegal?” asks Nativo Lopez, director of the Hermandad Mexicana Latinoamericana. The Hermandad, with roots in Los Angeles’ immigrant rights movement going back to legendary activist Bert Corona, has organized protests against the firings at Overhill Farms and American Apparel. “Any immigration policy that says these workers have no right to work and feed their families is wrong and needs to be changed,” he declares.

President Obama says sanctions enforcement targets employers “who are using illegal workers in order to drive down wages — and oftentimes mistreat those workers.” This restates a common Bush administration rationale for workplace raids.

Curing intolerable conditions by firing or deporting the workers who endure them doesn’t help the workers or change the conditions, however. But that’s not who ICE targets anyway. Workers at Smithfield were trying to organize a union to improve conditions. Overhill Farms has a union. American Apparel pays better than most garment factories. In Minneapolis, the 1200 fired janitors at ABM get a higher wage than non-union workers – and they had to strike to win it.

ICE’s campaign of audits and firings, which SEIU Local 26 president Javier Murillo calls “the Obama enforcement policy,” targets the same set of employers the Bush raids went after – union companies or those with organizing drives. If anything, ICE seems intent on punishing undocumented workers who earn too much, or who become too visible by demanding higher wages and organizing unions.

And despite Obama’s notion that sanctions enforcement will punish those employers who exploit immigrants, at American Apparel and ABM the employers were rewarded for cooperation by being immunized from prosecution. ICE threatened to fine Dov Charney, American Apparel’s owner, but then withdrew the threat, according to attorney Peter Schey. Murillo says, “the promise made during the audit is that if the company cooperates and complies, they won’t be fined. So this policy really only hurts workers.”

This growing wave of firings is provoking sharp debate in unions, especially those with large immigrant memberships. Many of the food processing workers at Overhill Farms and ABM’s janitors have been dues-paying members for years. They expect the union to defend them when the company fires them for lack of status. “The union should try to stop people from losing their jobs,” demanded Erlinda Sile-rio, an Overhill Farms worker. “It should try to get the company to hire us back, and pay compensation for the time we’ve been out.”

The twelve million undocumented people in the U.S., spread in factories, fields and construction sites throughout the country, encompass lots of workers aware of their rights and anxious to improve their lives. National union organizing campaigns, like Justice for Janitors and Hotel Workers Rising, depend on the determination and activism of these immigrants, documented and undocumented alike.

That reality finally convinced the AFL-CIO in 1999 to reject the federation’s former support for employer sanctions, and call for repeal. Unions recognized that sanctions enforcement makes it much more difficult for workers to defend their rights, organize unions, and raise wages.

Opposing sanctions, however, puts labor in opposition to the current administration, which it helped elect. Some Washington DC lobbying groups have decided to support the administration policy of sanctions enforcement instead.

Nativo Lopez says he’ll organize the workers being fired if unions won’t, although recently he also expressed a desire for greater cooperation with the UFCW in the defense of fired workers. Last year the Hermandad began setting up workers’ councils in southern California neighborhoods, to oppose employer sanctions and help workers resist them. “If companies start firing people as they have here, this place will look like a war zone,” he warns, “but if we fight to defend people, we can organize them.”

This is an edited verson of the original article that first appeared in the Progressive Magazine December 2009/January 2010 issue. The complete article can be found at: http://www.progressive.org/full/archive.