Carpenters' union seeks immigrants to spur clout

Thursday, December 15, 2005
By Miriam Jordan, The Wall Street Journal

DENVER -- Over the past three decades, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners has seen its share of interior construction jobs in Colorado plunge to just 10 percent from 70 percent. That decline has prompted union leaders to reach out to workers once shunned as the enemy: illegal immigrants.

At a carpenters' union hall here one recent evening, union organizer Ernesto Belo found himself facing resistance from some veteran carpenters, who questioned the wisdom of embracing workers long willing to settle for lower wages. Mr. Belo grew angry with the skeptics.

"These are the guys working," he shouted. "Your average white kid isn't coming into construction. We need the immigrant workers. Accept that -- or the union dies."

The union movement has been in decline for decades as employers, facing foreign competition and pressure to reduce costs, turn to cheaper nonunion workers. In Denver, Houston, Atlanta, Phoenix, Kansas City, Mo., and other cities across the U.S., leaders of construction and service-sector unions are reaching out to immigrants to try to bolster their sagging memberships and clout. The carpenters' union, for one, is determined to attract more members, regardless of their immigration status.

"If you want to grow, you have to represent the people who are doing the work," says Jim Gleason, the carpenters' labor boss spearheading the campaign in Colorado, where he estimates that two-thirds of all construction workers are immigrants, more than half of them undocumented.

But Mr. Gleason's recruitment drive shows that it's not easy bringing illegal immigrants into organized labor's tent, despite the promise of higher pay and benefits. Many of Denver's undocumented Latino construction workers remain wary of the union, concerned that joining up will complicate their already difficult lives. Recently, the union effort has attracted the attention of the Colorado Minutemen, an activist group that opposes illegal immigration.

Union construction workers are expected to endure spells of unemployment rather than wield their tools at nonunion job sites. Many undocumented workers in Denver are intent on sending a steady stream of money to family members in Mexico. They tend to take whatever jobs they can get.

Some also worry that joining the union will increase the risk of being fired, or even deported. Unions don't ask members for proof of their immigration status. Employers are supposed to do that. Contractors who hire union workers often go by the book, requiring workers to supply Social Security numbers. Many undocumented workers rely on fake Social Security cards, and tax authorities sometimes alert employers to problems. That usually results in dismissal.

Contractors who hire nonunion workers, on the other hand, often pay undocumented workers off the books, no questions asked.

Cesar Avitia, a 32-year-old Mexican without immigration documents, has been doing concrete, drywall and siding work in Denver for 12 years. Six years ago, an organizer for the carpenters' union persuaded him to join. For three years, he enjoyed union pay, family health coverage, a retirement plan and paid vacation. Then his employer received a letter from authorities -- Mr. Avitia isn't sure which ones -- indicating a problem with his documents. He was fired.

"I knew I couldn't fix that problem," he recalls. So he took a nonunion job. "I can't run the risk of getting a union job and then being fired two months later when the contractor finds out and lets me go." Mr. Avitia is currently working on tract housing in a Denver suburb.

Such scrutiny of immigrants' documents "creates a difficulty in retaining these workers in the union," admits Mr. Gleason of the carpenters' union.

Mr. Gleason hopes to surmount this problem by pressuring builders and contractors to hire only union carpenters. That way, more workers -- and more immigrants -- would have to join the union to get work. To force the issue, the union has been campaigning against construction employers in downtown Denver, picketing job sites that it claims offer inadequate wages and benefits to nonunion laborers.

Union leaders have been trying for years to stop the steady erosion of their ranks. Strains over waning clout and membership came to a head this summer, when four unions abandoned the AFL-CIO to form a rival alliance, "Change to Win." The new federation, which counts the carpenters' union as a member, has pledged to devote more resources to recruit low-wage workers, a group that includes many immigrants.

In 2004, 12.5 percent of all workers in the U.S. were union members. But only 9.5 percent of foreign-born workers and 6.2 percent of Mexican-born workers were unionized, according to an analysis of federal population survey data by Ruth Milkman, director of the Institute of Industrial Relations at the University of California at Los Angeles.

As the U.S. moves from a manufacturing to a service-based economy, sectors such as food, lodging and construction are generating jobs, and many are filled by Latino immigrants. "The future of the labor movement depends on the ability to reach out and organize immigrant workers," says Kent Wong, director of the Center for Labor Research at UCLA.

The Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, has led the way. In 1985, the union launched a major campaign to organize Hispanic immigrants, beginning with janitors in Denver. Eventually, it expanded the program, which it called Justice for Janitors, nationwide. SEIU's membership more than doubled to 1.8 million between 1995 and 2004.

That campaign's success "dispels the notion that immigrants, especially illegal ones, are unorganizable," says Ms. Milkman. "Nobody believed you could organize this population until this happened."

Latin American immigrants have stirred anger among some old-guard union members, just as the Southern blacks who migrated North to seek work in heavy manufacturing did in the 1940s.

Some 15 years ago, roofer James Hadel was videotaping Hispanic immigrants on construction sites in Kansas City, with the aim of getting them deported. "We were looking at the Hispanic worker as our enemy," says Mr. Hadel, now vice president of the United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers and Allied Workers. These days, he's trying to sign them up.

At the recent carpenters' union meeting in Denver, veteran carpenter Ken Sanchez objected to reaching out to illegal immigrants, whom he viewed as lawbreakers, he said. They would weaken the union by accepting substandard wages and flip-flopping between union and nonunion jobs, he argued. "By catering to undocumented workers, you will find the union itself driving down wages for skilled carpenters," he said.

The controversy has spread outside of the union. Two weeks ago, Robert Copley, co-founder of the Colorado Minutemen, requested a meeting with carpenters' union organizers. The Minutemen have drawn attention for sending civilians to patrol U.S. borders in an attempt to curtail illegal immigration. Mr. Copley, a former union pipe fitter, says he suggested an alliance between his group and the union to picket job sites that hire illegal immigrants, who he said were "depleting the labor market." The action, he claimed, would elevate wages for union members. Eddie Canales, the union's head organizer, informed him that the union doesn't check immigration papers.

Union carpenters were first drawn into the debate over immigrant laborers in California during a construction boom. In 1992, a group of Latino workers who install drywall inside homes initiated a wildcat strike that crippled home construction from Los Angeles to San Diego for six months. About one-quarter of the strikers were illegal immigrants.

Eventually the local carpenters' union embraced the militant work force, and about 3,000 drywallers joined that union. But 12 years later, nearly half of them are gone, many lost to nonunion jobs, says Jesus Gomez, the Mexican drywaller who led the strike. "If only we could make immigrants understand that the union is the only way they can be respected as workers and human beings," he says.

Through the late 1970s, about 70 percent of the interior construction work in Colorado was performed by union workers, according to carpenters' union leaders. But builders, eager to control escalating labor costs, hired more and more nonunion workers, reducing the union's influence.

In the 1990s, the union got a reprieve when construction of the Denver International Airport supplied work for hundreds of union carpenters. While union members were tied up with that massive project, thousands of nonunion Latino immigrants snapped up jobs in the booming residential sector. Contractors say many of the newcomers were smuggled across the Mexican border by labor brokers and offered to subcontractors for low pay.

The carpenters' union regarded the newcomers as unskilled laborers, and assumed their job opportunities would be limited to less desirable work like house framing and asbestos abatement. But gradually the immigrants began getting jobs on large commercial buildings, which union workers had considered a haven.

Mr. Gleason, an East Coast organizer, arrived in Colorado in 1998 with a mandate from the union leadership to beef up membership in Colorado and New Mexico. He recalls encountering hundreds of unorganized Latino immigrants working long hours for low pay. They seemed ripe for organizing.

He hired Mr. Canales, a bilingual Mexican-American with 12 years of organizing for the SEIU under his belt, to draw up a plan. Mr. Canales enlisted another five Latino organizers. They began visiting construction sites, making house calls and conducting information sessions at the union hall.

A seasoned union drywall worker in Denver earns $17.25 an hour, and receives benefits worth an additional $5 an hour, union leaders say. Nonunion drywall workers are typically paid as little as $13 an hour, and receive no benefits, they say.

"The pitch was 'You want better wages and benefits? You want to enhance your skills and build some retirement money? Let's unite with other workers,' " says Mr. Canales.

But seven out of 10 immigrant workers weren't interested, he estimates. They told him they were concerned only with getting jobs. "Even if I am making less than I deserve, I'm still able to send money home," he recalls being told. Some suspected him and other organizers of having links to immigration authorities.

Javier Marquez, a 40-year-old former Mexican police detective, has been working construction jobs in Denver for the past nine years, without documents. He is not in the union. "If I join the union, the employer might ask for papers and then I'll be out of work," he says.

Jose San Miguel, another illegal immigrant from Mexico, sought help from the union in 2000 for what he says was bad treatment at the hands of a Fort Collins, Colo., subcontractor. He credits the union, which he joined, with helping to solve the problem, gaining him a $60,000 legal settlement in the process.

Nevertheless, when he found himself without work three months ago, the 40-year-old father of three took a nonunion job. As an undocumented worker, he says, it's harder for him to find jobs than it is for his documented union brethren. "When you don't have work," he says, "it's harder if you're undocumented."

Last year, Mr. Gleason and his team began trying a different approach to draw more immigrant workers into their ranks: forcing nonunion commercial jobs in downtown Denver to go union. Their theory is that more union jobs will mean more workers will join the union.

To that end, the union has deployed union laborers to interior construction sites in some upscale buildings to take nonunion jobs and gather intelligence. It has threatened building managers with bad publicity for using nonunion contractors who pay substandard wages. It recently sent picketers to a downtown commercial tower to protest a drywall subcontractor.

"People don't like being targeted," says Peggy Moretti, a senior vice president at Maguire Properties. Maguire owns the 52-story Wells Fargo Center, a property the union has threatened to picket over use of a drywall contractor it says exploits workers. To stave off union action, Maguire told the union that in the future, it would act as a "facilitator" to steer tenants toward contractors that use union labor. Recently, it informed Mr. Canales, the union organizer, that it had recommended to a tenant doing remodeling work that it use a drywall company that pays union wages and benefits, Ms. Moretti says.

Since starting its campaign against employers, the union's share of high-rise remodeling work in the targeted area of downtown Denver has jumped to 7.5 percent from less than 1 percent, union leaders say. The union has increased membership in Denver by about 150 workers, to 1,400 members.

One of the new recruits is Oscar Alvidrez, an illegal immigrant from Mexico who had dropped out of the union in 2003. This time, he said, "I'm going to try and stick with the union."