Service Employees’ International Union (SEIU)
SEIU’s Justice for Janitors campaign is perhaps the
most successful model to date for organizing and
winning contracts for immigrant workers. Under
Justice for Janitors, SEIU has managed to organize
over 35,000 worer 35,000 workers, mostly immigrants, in less than
a decade. Organizing activity under this campaign
has been most dynamic and successful in Los
Angeles, San Francisco, California’s Silicon Valley, Washington, DC., Hartford, Detroit, Chicago and
Milwaukee. The success of the Justice for Janitors campaign’s nontraditional methods-a combination
of worker mobilization, community-based work, civil
disobedience and strategic campaigns, has inspired
many other unions to organize immigrant workers.
SEIU is also organizing immigrant workers in other
industries, such as health care, ambulance services,
amusement and recreation parks. The SEIU also
elected its first top officer of Latin American origin, Executive Vice President for the Western Region
Eliseo Medina. Medina, a Chicano who worked with
Cesar Chavez in the UFW, is responsible for the SEIU’s
organizing campaign on the West Coast and for sup-
porting the union’s organizing of its health care local
in Puerto Rico,
United Needletrades, Industrial and Textile
Employees (UNITE)
UNITE, a merger of the Amalgamated Clothing
and Textile Workers (ACTWU) and the International
Ladies Garment Workers (ILGWU), has been orga-
nizing immigrant workers in the garment and tex-
tile industry, light manufacturing, industrial laun-
dries and retail trades. Recently, the
UNITE! union has been particularly successful “” in organizing and winning first con-
tracts for immigrant workers in manufacturing and
distribution in Texas. For example, in 1995 over
1,000 workers-most of them immigrants-at
Foktajek, a windows manufacturer located in Fort
Worth, won their first contract after a year of being
organized by UNITE (at the time the ACTWU).
Recently, UNITE has been organizing poultry work-
ers in the South and the Southwest. The union also has C0mmUni~ty-based organizing
pr ojects such a s its Garment Workeirs’ Justice Centers
in New York City, Los Angeles and Sa San Francisco, where workers come for advice about wage-and-
hour complaints, organizing committee meetings,
literacy classes and English classes. UNITE has a
national campaign to abolish sweatshops in the gar-
ment industry. The program focus is to harness pub-
lic horror about sweatshops to build pressure on
retailers to o take responsibility for conditions in their
suppliers’ factories in the United States and abroad.
United Farm Workers (UFW)
The United Farm Workers Union is historically one
of the most inspiring and-despite its small size-
influential unions among Latino trade
unionists. While its cause may no longer be as fashionable as it was when leg-
endary farm-worker leader Cesar Chavez
exhorted urban consumers not to buy grapes, the
UFW under Arturo Rodriguez and Dolores Huerta is
actively organizing again.
The union has expanded its organizing from its
base in California to the states of Arizona,
Washington, Texas and Florida. Since April 1994, the
UFW has won 13 representation elections in a row covering 5,000 workers, and has successfully renego-
tiated dozens of contracts. One of the biggest con-
tracts was with the country’s largest rose grower,
Bear Creek Production Co. in Wasco, California,
which gained family medical and pension benefits, an 8% pay raise, nine holidays, and grievance and
seniority systems. More recently the union obtained a contract for workers at the Chateau Ste. Michelle
winery in Washington State, and is contemplating
two major campaigns with its former rival, the
Teamsters, to organize immigrant workers
employed by Washington apple growers and by
California strawberry growers. Its current campaign
to organize strawberry workers in California has the
active backing of the new AFL-CIO leadership.
Communications Workers of America (CWA)
CWA was the union behind the organizing of
Spanish-speaking telephone operators at U.S. Sprint’s
“La Conexi6n Familiar.” When the union’s organizing
drive began, the company closed down the business.
That led to a campaign against Sprint, in support of
the rights of the dismissed workers. The campaign
was joined by the Mexican telephone workers union
(STRM), and a coalition of Latino civil rights groups. A case against Sprint has been filed under the NAFTA
side agreements, and is still pending.
United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW)
and Laborers International Union of North
America (LIUNA)
These two unions, together with community and
religious groups, have formed the National Poultry
Workers Alliance to organize about
50,000 poultry workers in the South. A
growing number of immigrant workers can be found in the poultry industry, and
the Alliance has set its sights on them. The
Alliance won an organizing drive on July 12 at Case
Farms in Morganton, N.C. Many of the 600 workers
employed there were immigrant workers from Guatemala or Mexico; they voted 337 to 183 to join
the laborers. [See “Profile of an
Organizer: Yanira Merino,” p. 30]. The
Laborers have also increased their orga-
nizing in the Northeast. They recently
won a contract and organizing campaign among
1,200 asbestos-removal workers in New York City,
mostly Latinos and recent Polish immigrants.
International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT)
Under the new leadership of Ron Carey, the
Teamsters, who represent many first and second-
generation immigrant workers, have become more
active on Latino labor issues. The IBT has been trying
to organize tomato-processing plants like Tomatech,
which has 500 workers, mostly Mexicans and
Mexican Americans in California, and
hotels with a largely immigrant workforce
in Florida. This year, the union announced
plans to organize food growers, processing
and distribution workers in Washington
State and California, and is exploring a partnership
with the United Farm Workers in those efforts.
The Teamsters have also been very active on the
NAFTA fight. Under the leadership of Chicano
national vice president John Riojas of San Antonio,
they have formed strategic alliances with truck dri-
vers from Mexico who belong to independent
unions in order to assert their labor rights, and have
successfully challenged the implementation of the
NAFTA agreement in the transporation industry.
Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees
International Union (HERE)
The hotel workers union is also organizing work-
sites with significant numbers of immigrant workers,
using community-organizing strategies. The union
has been organizing 25 nonunion hotels around the
Los Angeles airport, which employ a total of 7,000
workers. The organizing campaign involves house vis-
its to 2,000 workers–mostly immigrants–who live in
Lennox, an unincorporated one-square-mile section
of Los Angeles County right under the airport’s land-
ing approach.
United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers
of America (UE)
UE has had successful organizing drives among Latino workers in Milwaukee and in California in
which trade unionists from Mexico have participat-
ed. The union has also engaged in a lot of cross-bor-
der labor organizing and has run joint training ses-
sions with the Authentic Labor Front (FAT) of Mexico.
Together with the Teamsters and a few other U.S.
unions, the UE helped establish a worker center for
the training of Mexican organizers in the maquila
sector of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.
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