Strengthening Social Security—Key Goal of Latinos and Union Movement
From ILCA
Good jobs, affordable health care coverage and secure retirements are the top priorities among Latino workers, Latino leaders said. Key among those mutual goals is strengthening Social Security. Speaking at an AFL-CIO roundtable meeting with Latino union leaders and Spanish-language media, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Linda Chavez-Thompson said President George W. Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security would be a “disaster” for nearly all Latinos. “Are we going to go back to those terrible times when many of our seniors had to live on dog food and go without heat in the winter? That’s what is at stake.” Strengthening Social Security is vital for Latino families, Chavez-Thompson said, because nearly half of older Latinos depend on the benefit for at least 90 percent of their total income. Among Latinos ages 65 and older, more than 75 percent now receive income from Social Security, but only 28 percent have income from assets and even fewer—15 percent—have income from pensions or annuities. “The Latino community and the union movement belong together as allies,” said Chavez-Thompson “We share the same values. We share many of the same heroes, such as César Chávez, and we share the same vision of making our land more equal and fair.”
Wal-Mart-Type Jobs ‘Drive Down Wages and Destroy Benefits’
Another fundamental issue for working Latinos is obtaining good jobs that provide affordable health insurance and secure retirement benefits, not the Wal-Mart-type jobs that drive down wages and destroy benefits, said Chavez-Thompson. Wal-Mart is the biggest private-sector employer of people of color in America, with more than 128,000 Latino employees, “and the terrible truth is that most of these jobs pay so little that there’s no way these workers can support themselves, let alone their families,” she said. “That’s why we in the AFL-CIO are doing everything we can to shine a light on Wal-Mart’s true record—the jobs with little pay, few benefits, little dignity and no future—and how that actually drives down wages all through the economy.” The best way for Latino workers to gain good jobs is by joining a union, Chavez-Thomspon said. Latinos comprise 10.1 percent of union membership, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Union workers on average are paid 25 percent more than nonunion workers—and for Latinos, the advantage of belonging to a union is 45 percent, the BLS reports. But employers have chopped away at workers’ freedom to form a union until there are now three times as many working people who would like to join unions as there are members, said Chavez-Thompson.
Union Movement Working with Latino Leaders on Immigration Reform
Ensuring immigrant workers are respected in the workplace is part of a larger union movement initiative to gain immigration reform that will provide a certain path to legalization for workers from around the world who already are living and working in the United States, said Ana Avendaño, director of the AFL-CIO Immigrant Worker Program, and Soñia Ramirez, an AFL-CIO legislative representative. The AFL-CIO also is fighting to repeal and replace employer sanctions with stiffer penalties for employers who take advantage of workers’ immigration status to exploit them and undermine labor protections for all workers. The union movement seeks to reform, not expand, temporary worker programs and reform the permanent immigration system so those who want to reunite with their families are not penalized. Discussing the economic conditions in the countries from which many immigrant workers flee, Patricia Campos, legislative director for UNITE HERE, said much of the staggering poverty and economic injustice in Mexico and Central and South America could be alleviated if the United States and its trading partners included workers’ rights and other environmental protections in trade agreements. That’s why unions are fighting to stop the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), she said. If approved, CAFTA would eliminate tariffs from the United States and five Central American countries. But the agreement does not include protections for workers to form a union or provide environmental safeguards. The Bush administration and congressional Republican leaders are expected to try to bring CAFTA to a vote this spring. Other Latino union leaders who participated in the roundtable include Jose La Luz, AFL-CIO assistant organizing director, Irasema Garza, AFSCME Women’s Rights director, Hugo Carballo, Laborers Local 11 business manager, and Irene Orozco, United Food and Commercial Workers assistant to the director of Civil Rights & Community Relations.
