Evicting Non-Union’s Primary Source of Labor
To house the large number of expected immigrants, companies like GEO Group, which manages the above facility in Oklahoma, will have to rapidly build more prisons. Their stock is soaring.
Between 11 and 14 million people have immigrated to America for a variety of reasons but have allegedly evaded our established immigration processes to get here. Now the incoming presidential administration has threatened to create a mass-deportation engine that will round up, imprison, and then ship out those millions of people, many of whom have established lives here, who have had children here, who pay taxes.
That deportation engine is already revving. Since the election, the two largest private prison companies, CoreCivic and GEO Group, saw their stock values jump by 72% and 61% respectively. These companies, which are contractors with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), are likely to be tapped to create the massive detention system imagined by the new administration, which has said that price is no object.
A Blunt Instrument
The former director of ICE, Tom Homan, who has been chosen to be the new administration’s border czar, said at a recent conference, “No one’s off the table. If you’re here illegally, you better be looking over your shoulder.” He vowed to “run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen.” It's obvious that such a large-scale operation will have to be blunt and heartless to be effective, and its effects will no doubt visit untold misery on millions of hardworking and well-intentioned human beings.
It will also wreak havoc on the industries that rely on this immigrant population as a source of labor. In New York City, most non-unionized construction contractors rely on the new immigrants to staff their work crews. According to the Center for Migration Studies of New York, immigrant workers comprise over 60% of the non-union construction workforce and at least 41% of that workforce remains undocumented. Mass deportation will gut this labor sector.
Nan Wu, research director of the American Immigration Council, explains the impact on productivity. “The removal of so many workers within a short period would push up construction costs and lead to delays in building new homes, making housing even less affordable in many parts of the country,” Wu said.
"I know that while the unions want a bigger share of the work, this is not the way they want it to happen.”
The Human Impact
If you’re familiar with the stories on this website, you know why many non-union contractors prefer to pull workers from immigrant communities. It’s because struggling immigrants who are afraid of deportation, many of them fighting to overcome poverty and without representation, can be manipulated by their bosses who seek maximum profit on every project.
Too many non-union bosses abuse this undocumented workforce by paying them poverty level earnings, stealing their wages, skimping on safety training and equipment, and worse. As a result many of these workers end up horribly injured, many have died. But non-union contractors continue to exploit them, city councilmember Francisco Moya says, “because they can. They have done the math and figured out that it pays them much more when they abuse this vulnerable workforce. And to a large extent, they have gotten away with it.”
Worker Solidarity
“Unions have a big beef with non-union, for sure,” one project estimator told Union-Built Matters, who asked to remain anonymous because he must work with non-union builders. “They hire immigrants and then don’t pay them properly which allows them to lower their bids and win more projects away from unions. That’s why the beef is with the people who run those crooked shops. Not with the workers. We all recognize those guys are here just trying to do what’s right for themselves and their families. They want to put in the work, get paid, take care of the people they love. Hell, that describes every union man and woman too.”
Member of local union 6A, Sharwin Edwards echoed that point. “I worked for years in non-union. The people over there are good people. It’s their bosses that you need to watch out for. They’re the ones should be deported.”
Union Rules on Immigrant Labor
New York City’s construction unions require their members to be in good standing with the US customs and immigration office. Every union has handlers who will help new immigrants get their documentation in order so that they can legally join our workforce and begin paying taxes. This help often requires the retrieval of paperwork, such as a birth certificate, from foreign bureaucracies not known for accurate record-keeping, efficiency, or timeliness. Collecting that material from afar is “not an easy job by any means,” said Ruben Colon, a former talent recruiter for New York’s carpenters’ union. “But we take it very seriously because we want these workers to come here, to thrive, and to stay here. New York is an immigrant city. This is how.”
“Will mass deportation mean that non-union contractors will have to start paying their labor better? And maybe as a result union contractors will start winning more projects?” the estimator asked. “Only time will tell. But I know that while the unions want a bigger share of the work, this is not the way they want it to happen.”
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