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Dorothy
Sue Cobble (Director of the Institute for Research
on Women and Professor of Labor Studies, History, and Women’s
and Gender Studies at Rutgers University) and Nancy
Hewitt (Professor of History and Women’s and
Gender Studies at Rutgers University) co-convened an afternoon
symposium on the history, prospects and strategies describing
immigrant women's collective organizing efforts. Rutgers faculty
and invited participants met at the IRW library.
In a dynamic conversation, Sue Cobble and Nancy
Hewitt set out the themes established for the day, including
the labor movement, the women’s movement, and the immigration
of women workers from all parts of the world, noting historical
parallels among these areas in the nineteenth, twentieth, and
twenty-first centuries. They discussed the possibilities for a
new unionism by new immigrants, women’s role at the heart
of this new unionism, and the tensions within immigrant communities
within cross-class, cross-cultural, and cross-gendered groups.
Finally, the conveners proposed discussion involving truly international
organizing and coordinating labor and organizing efforts internationally.
Ruth Milkman (Professor of Sociology and Director
of the Institute for Labor and Employment at UCLA), Jennifer
Gordon (Associate Professor at Fordham Law School), and
Nahar Alam (Director of Andolan Organizing South
Asian Workers) each gave brief papers to ground the balance of
the discussion in the historical and contemporary experiences
of immigrant women.
Ruth
Milkman situated the history of labor organizing
in terms of the history of immigrant organizing and argued that
the idea of immigrant workers as unorganizable is not empirically
sustainable. She further noted that:
Generally, organizing
is more successful today among low-wage workers, women, and workers
of color than other groups of workers, especially when the group
is homogenous (e.g., all women rather than men and women together).
Indeed, new organizing within the low-wage labor circuit is often
led by immigrant women, and immigrant workers are twice as likely
to join unions as are men and women born in the United States.
Immigrant networks,
to which women are central, become the backbones of organizing
networks in terms of referral hiring. Furthermore, immigrant groups
often have a higher level of class-consciousness than do native-born
workers. This class consciousness, together with the stigma of
being a person of color from another country, contributes to a
sense of non-belonging for immigrant workers, thereby creating
a sense of solidarity and making them more open to the idea of
unionization.
In many cases, gender
equality is an explicit goal of the new immigrants’ labor
movement. The intersection of gender and immigration is at the
forefront in the future of organized labor and its possibilities.
Jennifer
Gordon described three sets of tensions within workers
centers regarding class, rights, and voice.
- Immigrants
come from varied class groups even when they are of the same
ethnicity. Class for immigrants has more to do with the class
they had in their former countries than the class they have
in the US. This complicates class identities and leaves immigrant
workers to look for other essential bonds of identification,
such as gender, language, race, and even marital status. However,
identification with other workers often works back to the idea
of class and a new class identity.
-
Rights also become an identity at worker centers, especially
for undocumented immigrants whose status seems to equal "no
rights." Fighting for rights then becomes an identity that
is organized around action.
- Voice
comes into the dynamic in that it is tied to power. Though immigrants
may be “undocumented,” voice offers immigrant workers
a new concept of citizenship as something claimed by contribution
to the community rather than granted by the state. They are
able to claim citizenship for themselves, and voice enables
this. There is a tension between voice and power, however, since
in the workplace voice does not equal power for low-wage immigrant
workers. It is so hard to build power in workplaces that voice
is too often a goal of its own. It is important to couple voice
and power.
Nahar
Alam is an immigrant worker and directs Andolan
Organizing South Asian Workers. Her talk touched on the
various reasons that women immigrate and their experiences in
the United States. She noted the success of Andolan in creating
"ripple effects" of immigrant women spontaneously helping
one another out of exploitive employment situations.
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When arriving on foreign soil, immigrants face language barriers.
For immigrant domestic workers, there are also class issues
between the worker and the domestic employer. Furthermore, the
worker's native culture often attaches a stigma to working as
a domestic servant.
-
Hence, there are cultural limitations not only in the work South
Asian immigrants do, but also in the work of organizing to improve
conditions for these very workers. Empowerment comes from workers
sharing their experiences and organizing via bonds of culture
and gender.
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Andolan is involved in campaigns to expose the misuse of diplomatic
immunity to protect diplomats who exploit their domestic workers,
and is exploring ways to make the United Nations accountable
for this situation.
Maria
Ontiveros (Professor at the University of San Francisco
School of Law) and Seung-kyung
Kim (Associate Professor of Women’s Studies
and Director of Asian American Studies at the University of Maryland)
provided brief responses.
- Maria
Ontiveros picked up on the theme of the “beginning
of new movements.” She considered whether we are at the
beginning of a new civil rights movement. Citing the need to
respond to immigrants at the bottom of the ladder, she proposed
developing ways to imbue immigrant women workers with a sense
of agency.
- Seung-kyung
Kim spoke of the heterogeneity and class differences
within groups of immigrants from the same nation, relying in
particular on the experiences of Asian women. Though the most
difficult barrier for organizing is often a result of language
problems, there is still heterogeneity among immigrants who
speak the same language. Intellectuals involved in labor organization--including
middle-class intellectuals who were involved in South Korean
labor movements--often ignore this nuance. Although laborers
appreciate the involvement of intellectuals, it can detract
from the success of the movement which can only be accomplished
by the workers themselves.
The afternoon concluded with a roundtable
discussion among all the participants
addressing a variety of themes, including the women’s movement
and transnational activism, historical perspectives on immigrant
women within the labor movement, ideas of individual versus collective
rights and advancement, immigration policy, and questions of mobility
and heterogeneity among immigrant workers.
Please see the links to
research by and about the panelists.
The Institute gratefully acknowledges the financial support of
the Rockefeller Foundation for the June 26, 2003 symposium "Immigrant
Women Organizing: Avenues for Collective Advancement" and for
the larger project "Gender, Race, Ethnicity: Rearticulating the
Local and the Global."
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