Immanuel Ness’s book, Immigrants, Unions, and the New U.S Labor Market discusses why and how immigrants organize. In short, according to Ness, immigrants, regardless of their immigration status are able to organize because they have strong community solidarity. In reverse, non-foreign born Americans do not organize because they lack community solidarity. I wrote a paper on Ness’s (and Hum’s) papers but there is one issue I did not address there that I would like to cover more in depth. This the issue of why native born Americans lack strong community solidarity? There are several answers to this question.
One reason is that immigrants, because they are so dependent on the help they receive from friends, families, and connections in the U.S. are automatically inclined, or even forced to maintain close ties with their network. It is necessary for their acclimation to life in America. Native born Americans, on the other hand, do not require such assistance and are therefore less inclined to maintain and grow their community networks and thus have lower levels of community solidarity.
Another source of communal solidarity for immigrants is with their coworkers. Immigrants often work very long hours with the same people in small businesses. This is an optimal environment for employees to bond. Immigrant employees not only share the common immigrant experience but also share the common experience of long, hard work and the feeling of being exploited. Native born American workers, on the other hand, often work in larger retail outlets, such as Walmart and Target. These businesses which are huge both on the local and national level offer little to no opportunity for employees to bond, especially considering that such workplaces have a tendency to rely on a fluid and often changing labor force, meaning that the same people are often not working together for long.
In addition to facing a constantly changing labor force, native employees in large chains are also less inclined towards community solidarity for another reason: they feel they have more options. So, for example, if the job as a cashier at Walmart doesn’t work out they have no problem with leaving and getting a job as a waitress at Applebees. In other words, they don’t stay at one job long enough to form strong and meaningful bonds with their co-workers. Immigrant workers, on the other hand, weather due to their insecurity about murky immigration statuses or because they feel their skill set limits them to one job for one business, are more likely to stay at one job for as long as possible. When conditions at one job are poor they are much more likely to strive to improve those conditions as opposed to changing jobs. As a result, they are more likely to stay with the same group of workers longer, allowing them to form strong bonds with co-workers and thus the community solidarity that stimulates and allows immigrants t succesfully organize.
