Vol. 71/No. 40      October 29, 2007

U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer issued a preliminary injunction stopping the Department of Homeland Security from sending out 140,000 “no-match” letters threatening to penalize companies that did not clear up discrepancies in employees’ records within 90 days.

Immigrant rights groups, the AFL-CIO, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce filed a lawsuit against this policy. The judge said the no-match letters, which could affect more than 8 million people, would do “irreparable harm to innocent workers and employers.” Until now the government has sent no-match letters, but this is the first time employers would face criminal or civil liability.

The injunction will remain in place until Breyer makes a final decision after a trial in the lawsuit, which could take months.

Many bosses applauded the ruling. “This would cost a lot of money for employers to comply with,” Angelo Amador, a spokesman for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, told the Bakersfield Californian. The policy would have forced some companies to go out of business, said Larry Rohlfes of the California Landscape Contractors Association.

At garment shops here in Los Angeles many workers are discussing the court decision. The ruling shows that “we Latinos are a ‘necessary evil’ for the United States, because they need us but they don’t want us,” said Carla, a sewing machine operator at the large American Apparel plant here. Carla, who asked that her last name not be used, noted that the government continues its immigration raids in factories and neighborhoods.

“I think it shows that if the employers investigate our immigration status with the Social Security numbers, it would be chaos,” said Carla’s co-worker Maria. “It would be an economic disaster, as much for the employer as for an employee like me.”

Some companies are already complaining that they can’t find enough workers as a result of stepped-up immigration raids over the last year. The New York Times reported October 12 that more than 1,100 Latino workers have left Smithfield Food’s plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina, in the wake of immigration raids there last November. The slaughterhouse, the largest in the world, employs 5,200 people and kills 30,000 hogs a day.

A Smithfield official complained that about 60 percent of new hires are quitting within 90 days—double the rate of a couple of years ago, when many new hires were undocumented immigrants. The more recent workers, many of them African American, often say they are fed up with the brutal job conditions. Some companies have raised wages to attract more workers.

Sharon Hughes, executive vice president of the National Council of Agricultural Employers (NCAE), said this year the pool of available farm workers is down by 200,000, or nearly 10 percent, from last year. This is a result of the stepped-up immigration raids and border crackdowns, she said.

In response to this situation, the U.S. Department of Labor says it is reworking its rules to make it easier for agribusiness to hire “guest workers” under the H-2A visas, which currently cover about 50,000 workers per year. These are temporary work permits, lasting up to 10 months. A worker must sign a contract with the company applying for the visa, and cannot change jobs without losing his or her legal status. The NCAE and other boss associations have urged changes such as speeding up the application process, lowering wages that H-2A workers are guaranteed, and increasing the types of work allowed, including in poultry and meatpacking.

“Our concern working with agricultural workers is that no one is representing the interests of the workers,” Raquel Vizcarra, a community organizer with the Dolores Huerta Foundation in Bakersfield, California, told the Militant.

“When the contracts get reworked they are to the benefit of the employers, like the bracero program,” Vizcarra said, referring to a 1942-64 “guest worker” system in which Mexicans were used as superexploited farm labor. “Our hopes are that a bracero program is not repeated. We want legalization.”
 
 
Related articles:
Workers protest Virginia anti-immigrant laws
N.Y. plan to allow driver’s licenses for undocumented fuels immigration debate
Stop raids, anti-immigrant laws!  
 
 
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