In the book, Immigrant Unions & The New US Labor Market, Immanuel Ness focuses on the motives that prompt immigrant workers to organize and form organizations such as labor unions in order to improve their working conditions.
The chapter “Why New Immigrants Organize” opens by describing the various labor conflicts that swept through Manhattan in the spring of 2001 between Mexicans working in green sweatshops and their employers. These workers organized various strikes in order to raise their wages, improve their workplace conditions and gain respect. This example demonstrates a pattern that is all too common now-a-days. Young men flee from their home country such as Mexico, because of a decline in living conditions and seek jobs in the United States where there are willing to work for low wages in New York City industries. The book centers on the various ways in which these immigrants organize and disproves the notion that immigrants are complacent and not likely to fight for improved conditions. In fact, according to Ness, immigrants are more likely to organize and protest than their native counterparts. They have an “improbable willingness to take inordinate risks to build worker power, raise wages and improve conditions in disparate work places” ( Ness 2 ). This surprised me, one would expect recently arrived immigrants to do their best to fit into their environment, to prevent attention from being drawn to themselves and to blend into their surroundings both at home and in their workplace. Instead this reading says the opposite. immigrants are willing to take the risks necessary in order to improve work place conditions for themselves and for other immigrants. This implies to me that immigrants manage to form some ties with other fellow immigrants, ties that give them the security and valor necessary to risk their jobs and fight for what they believe in.
Other sections of the readings proved to me that they do in fact gain a sense of unity from other immigrants in the area. One of the main reasons for a strong presence of economic immigrants in the United States is the country’s need for people to fill in jobs and industry services, particularly those that no longer attract native born workers. The immigrants that tend to accept these jobs generally have fewer social networking ties outside the workplace than inside. Furthermore, the long hours of work that are typical of such poorly-paid jobs enable these workers to form bonds with each other that are strengthened day by day as they work together. Because of their common experiences, they tend to manifest a common resentment towards their employer “on the basis of common exploitation”, resulting in workplace militancy, or in other words: a sense of immigrant solidarity.
I found this very interesting because by the employers mistreating their immigrant employees there are actually fueling and contributing to a stronger formation of a labor union that will try to bring down the regulations that they so desperately try to maintain. Instead of mistreating employees of common ethnicities and social status, employees should be aware that their actions can lead to future labor movements against their businesses.
