Laid-off workers are top concern of labor

Grace Leong

Monday, Dec. 3, 2001 | 10:34 a.m.

Defending the legal rights of immigrants and lobbying Congress to approve a more "worker-sympathetic" benefits package were among several issues pushed by the AFL-CIO Sunday as its conference started in Las Vegas.

At the AFL-CIO's 24th biennial conference that runs through Thursday at the Paris hotel-casino, many national union leaders criticized the recently House-passed economic stimulus package that the union says offers billions of dollars in tax breaks to corporations but, the union charges, fails to provide enough financial assistance to more than 747,000 workers who have lost their jobs or seen their work hours slashed since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The Republican-drafted economic stimulus package offers $100 billion in tax breaks, with $70 billion going to businesses with the goal of those funds being used by companies to stimulate the economy. President George Bush said the package also extends jobless benefits by 13 weeks in the states most affected by terrorism and offers Medicaid coverage for uninsured workers and emergency grants for job training.

But Democrats who control the Senate want to set aside more funding for public works projects, which they say would help create more jobs. They also proposed modest tax breaks of about $20 billion for businesses and tax cuts by about $14 billion for low- and middle-income people. They also want to boost unemployment benefits and health insurance coverage for laid off workers, which would cost $33 billion.

More than 500,000 union workers nationwide employed in the manufacturing, hospitality, airline and travel industries were affected by the economic fallout of the attacks to date, said Judd Ron, a director for the western region of the AFL-CIO.

He said the airline manufacturing and maintenance sectors were the worst hit as plane sales declined and travel and tourism weakened. In Nevada, more than 13,000 workers lost their jobs after the attacks. With an unemployment rate of 6.3 percent in October, Nevada experienced the steepest increase in unemployment in the country.

And union leaders, at Sunday's conference, stressed the need to not only extend unemployment benefits to cover workers still job-hunting but also to immigrant workers, whom the unions say aren't receiving such benefits.

Glen Arnodo, political director of Local 226 of the Culinary Union, which is the largest union in the Las Vegas area with a total of 50,000 members, said: "About half of our membership are immigrants and all are legal immigrants. But those laid off are denied government benefits like food stamps because of legislation enacted by Congress during (Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives) Newt Gingrich's years."

"Our first priority is to get the government to pay COBRA (health insurance benefits) of unemployed workers for at least a year so they can still get coverage," he said. "That's because (unemployed) workers in general are getting about $150-$160 a week in unemployment benefits and can barely afford to pay rents and food, much less pay for healthcare. And they can collect unemployment benefits for only 26 weeks."

"Everyone's who's out of a job is hurting now. But the immigrant community, which provided new vitality to the American labor movement, is taking the brunt of it," said Wade Henderson, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, a Washington, D.C.-based coalition of more than 185 civil rights and labor groups.

"The real tragedy is that many have suffered silently, especially those who are undocumented immigrants, who are afraid of making their circumstances known to the Immigration Service for fear of reprisal," he said.

Yvonne Lee, a Commissioner with the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, a federal agency, agreed, saying the Commission has received a "tremendous" volume of complaints since Sept. 11 from individuals of Middle Eastern and Asian descent saying they were were victims of hate crimes or fired from their jobs because of their race.

"Many employers are using race as an excuse to lay off workers and the 'last hire-first fire' policy is now in place, meaning those who are newly hired are bearing the brunt of the economic impact," she said. "We expected many of the complaints to come from California, New York and Texas, but Nevada ranks high in terms of complaints made."

Lee also criticized an airline security bill that was signed by President Bush in November as having the potential to cause many security screeners at San Francisco's airport, many of whom she said are immigrants, to lose their jobs.

Under the new law, the federal government will take over security screening at airports. Within one year, all screeners are supposed to be federal employees.

"Only U.S. citizens can become federal employees under this new bill. Legal immigrants aren't eligible to work in federal jobs unless they become naturalized U.S. citizens. But this process takes more than a year. For example, many immigrants have to be residents in the United States for at least five years before they can apply for citizenship," Lee said.

"Many immigrants are screeners because when these positions were first opened, few were interested because these were low-paying jobs. But the immigrants applied and were hired because the job requires minimal language interaction. But just because they're immigrants doesn't mean they are bad workers," she said.

"The real problem is with training and accountability, and that's a management problem," she said. "If workers aren't properly trained, regardless of whether you're a U.S. citizen or not, you will have problems."

Arnodo said the Las Vegas union hasn't received many discrimination complaints from its members. But he said the Culinary takes issue at the speed with which the hotel-casino workers were laid off and that the hotel-casinos are slow to rehire workers -- despite an improvement in occupancy rates -- because of the sluggish economy.