Unions in the United States have not always opposed immigration. But the mainstream union movement in the United States in the twentieth century did—until the 1990s. The reasons had to do with how the U.S. union movement came to define its goals and its place in U.S. society.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) competed with other, more radical unions. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) promoted a social justice agenda and tried to organize the most dispossessed workers. It sought profound social and economic change. The AFL, in contrast, basically accepted the social order. It concentrated mainly on trying to organize and improve the conditions of the most skilled workers—creating what some have called an “aristocracy of labor.” By the middle of the century, with the growth of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and its later unification with the AFL, this evolved into the creation of a “private welfare state” for union workers.1
While some of its European counterparts sought a larger public agenda of improving conditions for the working class, the AFL-CIO concentrated on improving conditions for union members. Rather than fighting to raise the minimum wage or create a national health-care system, the AFL-CIO sought to improve benefits for organized workers through their contracts with their employers. The privileged position of (mostly white) union workers actually depended on the existence of the dual labor market—domestically and globally—that produced goods and services cheaply. That is, some get low wages so that others can enjoy cheap products.
The IWW rejected the way citizenship was used in the United States to deprive some workers of their rights. At its founding convention in 1905, “Big Bill” Haywood began his remarks by explaining, “I turned over in my mind how I should open the convention. I recalled that during the French Commune the workers had addressed each other as ‘fellow citizens,’ but here there were many workers who were not citizens so that would not do … I opened the convention with ‘fellow workers.’ ”2
Contrast this to the stance taken by Samuel Gompers, the president of the AFL, in the same year. “Caucasians,” he announced proudly, “are not going to let their standard of living be destroyed by Negroes, Chinamen, Japs, or any others.”3 As David Roediger explained, “They opposed entry of ‘the scum’ from ‘the least civilized countries of Europe’ and ‘the replacing of the independent and intelligent coal miners of Pennsylvania by the Huns and Slavs.’ They wrote of fearing that an ‘American’ miner in Pennsylvania could thrive only if he ‘latinizes’ his name. They explicitly asked … ‘How much more [new] immigration can this country absorb and retain its homogeneity?’ ”4
The United Mine Workers of America argued that labor unions needed to uphold “Caucasian ideals of civilization” and used its journal to warn continually against the “yellow peril.”5
Gompers became an anti-imperialist in the case of the Philippines, not because of any solidarity with the Philippine independence movement or opposition to colonial expansion, but because of racism. “We do not oppose the development of our industry, the expansion of our commerce, nor the development of our power and influence which the United States may exert upon the destinies of the nations of the earth,” he explained. The problem was the “semi-savage population” of the islands—he did not want to see it incorporated into the United States.6
“If the Philippines are annexed,” he demanded, “what is to prevent the Chinese, the Negritos and the Malays coming to our country? How can we prevent the Chinese coolies from going to the Philippines and from there swarm into the United States and engulf our people and our civilization? … Can we hope to close the flood-gates of immigration from the hordes of Chinese and the semi-savage races coming from what will then be part of our own country?”7
As Vernon Briggs shows, “At every juncture, and with no exception prior to the 1980s, the union movement either directly instigated or strongly supported every legislative initiative enacted by Congress to restrict immigration and to enforce its policy provisions.”8 Until 1917, those immigration restrictions were purely race based, forbidding first Chinese, then Japanese, then all Asian immigration.
Over the course of the first decades of the twentieth century, though, the AFL, gradually and grudgingly, began to accept the new European immigrant workers into its fold. “Although self-interested, wary, and incomplete, the AFL opening to new immigrant workers initiated a process that could transform ‘semiracial’ typing of already arrived new immigrants … Although specifically defending (and equating) ‘white’ and ‘American’ standards of wages, consumption, and working conditions, the more hopeful came to regard it as possible that some new immigrants could be taught those standards.”9 Workers who could not be encompassed within this new definition of whiteness, however, were still excluded.
Southern and eastern European workers established themselves as white, as Irish workers had before them, by embracing rather than challenging the racial hierarchy. The Irish “learned to distinguish themselves in racial struggles and to establish their claim as ‘whites.’ They did so by taking up arms for the white Republic against the blacks in the Philadelphia race riots and the New York draft riots of 1863. They also took part in the anti-Chinese movement in California.”10 Michael Rogin argues that first the Irish, then southern and eastern European immigrants, established their claim to whiteness through adopting white racism, specifically through the use of blackface: “Blackface … distanced the Irish from the people they parodied. Demonstrating their mastery of the cultural stereotype, Irish minstrels crossed the cultural border … Blackface brought Irish immigrants into the white working class, freeing them from their guilt by black association.”11
The Democratic Party opened itself to Irish immigrant workers on a pro-slavery platform before the Civil War, to “counterbalance the numerical advantage of the Northern free states and maintain slavery by the assimilation of the Irish into the white race.”12 The party became “a coalition of urban machine constituents and southern Negrophobes.”13
Union policies like “father-son” clauses in the building trades and apprenticeship and seniority systems helped to maintain racial exclusivity in the AFL and later AFL-CIO well into the 1960s.14 The federation opposed the NA ACP’s attempt to have domestic and agricultural workers included under the Wagner Act in 1935.15 It worried that the 1964 Civil Rights Act would challenge its history of discrimination and fought to have past discrimination exempted from the Act’s purview.16
The exclusionary system worked fairly well for many white workers until the restructurings of the 1970s began. But in the 1970s the New Deal social compact began to fall apart. Businesses accelerated their shift abroad, and government began to dismantle the New Deal social welfare state. It took the AFL-CIO until 1993 to come to terms with the fact that the old system was unrecoverable—and that its survival depended upon reaching out to immigrant workers. At its 1993 convention the federation adopted a resolution criticizing those who “exploit public anxiety by making immigrants and refugees the scapegoats for economic and social problems.” “Immigrants are not the cause of our nation’s problems,” the resolution stated. It affirmed the rights of immigrants, whether documented or undocumented, and encouraged unions “to develop programs to address the special needs of immigrant members and potential members” and collaborate with “immigrant advocacy groups and service organizations.”17
The “New Voices” leadership that took over the federation in 1995 continued the trend away from exclusiveness and the “private welfare state.” The new leadership categorically rejected the idea “that immigrants are to blame for the deteriorating living standards of America’s low-wage workers.” Rather than focusing on immigrants as the problem, it proposed “increasing the minimum wage, adopting universal health care, and enacting labor law reform as the remedies for the widening income disparity in the nation.”18