Los Angeles Times
By Kate Linthicum
August 12, 201
When thousands of activists from around California converge on Bakersfield on Wednesday for a protest in favor of an immigration overhaul, union members like Gabriel Zamora will be on the front lines.
A janitor with the Service Employees International Union who crossed the Mexican border illegally more than a decade ago, Zamora is taking the day off work for an amnesty bill that could provide him with a legal work permit.
Labor groups have been mobilizing on behalf of immigration overhaul across the country in recent weeks, launching a series of rallies and sit-ins with other activist groups to urge Republican members of the House of Representatives to take up a Senate bill that would provide a pathway to citizenship for immigrants who are here illegally.
But nowhere are unions more energized than in California, where the issue is personal for thousands of workers who are here without permission or who have family members who are here illegally.
Zamora's union has devoted dozens of staffers to the issue, and union workers have met with members of Congress, canvassed neighborhoods and made thousands of phone calls in favor of the amnesty bill.
Organizers say that changing immigration laws is critical to the future of unions.
In the last year, 1,000 SEIU janitorial workers lost their jobs in immigration raids in San Diego, according to Sandra Diaz, the union's political director. Employers in other industries sometimes use the threat of deportation to bust union-organizing activities.
"There is no higher priority for labor," Maria Elena Durazo, the head of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, said at a news conference announcing upcoming actions last week. She warned that there would be "consequences" for Republicans who don't allow a vote on the Senate bill.
Durazo said she would use the political weight of her organization, which includes Latino voter outreach programs and millions of campaign dollars, to punish politicians who work against an immigration overhaul. "It will catch up to them," she said.
Her organization, which represents workers in the immigrant-heavy hotel and carwash industries, is sending 200 carloads of protesters to the Bakersfield rally. The protest is expected to draw thousands of activists from 100 cities across the state.
It will be held outside the office of Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the third-most powerful Republican in the House. GOP leaders have vowed not to bring the Senate amnesty bill to a vote, saying that they will consider a series of small-scale immigration bills instead.
Over the weekend, SEIU janitors gathered in South Los Angeles to make posters and plan for the rally. The walls of the union hall were decorated with signs carried at previous protests ("America Says Yes to Citizenship!") and photographs of union members at a massive immigration march in 2006 that brought more than 1 million people to Los Angeles' streets.
Although some labor unions in other parts of the country supported protectionist measures to keep immigrants out as recently as the 1990s, California unions have a long history of embracing the immigrant workforce and its priorities.
When immigrants from Central America and Mexico started joining the Los Angeles workforce in the 1980s, union leaders decided that instead of trying to pass laws to keep the immigrants from working, they could organize them.
The unions didn't ask about the workers' immigration status and found ways to help those who were deported or lost authorization to work in the U.S. While working as an organizer in the hotel industry in the 1990s, Durazo negotiated contract provisions that required employers to hold jobs for deported workers for more than a year.
Durazo said it became clear that labor members needed to expand their activism to include a push for a path to citizenship for immigrants after the passage of Proposition 187, a measure supported by then-Republican Gov. Pete Wilson that sought to deny social services to immigrants.
While working to register Latino voters in California to increase the electoral voice of immigrants, she and other state labor leaders sough to persuade national union bosses that immigration overhaul was a key issue. Immigrant members, they said, would be the future of labor.
Their appeals worked. Durazo now heads a national AFL-CIO committee focused on immigration overhaul. The union plans to spend more than $1 million on ads in the coming months targeting 40 Republicans in the House and is also urging its members to take part in rallies in dozens of cities across the country. There are more than 150 protests and other actions planned in California.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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