[Marxism] AFL-CIO, ACLU, NILC challenge new Homeland Security Rule

[Greg McDonald]

Andrew P. wrote:

"re the statement posted by Greg from the AFL et al. against the new   
no-match rule: Somebody better tell the AFL-CIO they're wasting  
they're  time, taking positions for immigrant rights when their  
organization is  mostly white. Don't they know, as Joaquin said:

But white folks are just that --white, Americans, first and  
foremost-- and
if you have to rely on them to achieve some goal or defend yourself,  
then
you're screwed."

As a member of the IWW, you'll certainly not hear me defending the  
AFL-CIO re. their track record on immigrant workers. But it seems to  
me that you've put them in a damned if you do, damned if you don't  
position.  That is to say, if they don't take a position in favor of  
immigrant workers then they're typical volk, and if they do then  
they're just hypocrites. In this particular case, a more fruitful  
line of criticism would be to examine their motivations for filing  
the suit in the first place. It seems they're more concerned with  
protecting "American" workers from being misconstrued as undocumented  
because of problems in the SS filing system, than they are concerned  
with protecting the labor rights of undocumented workers. Reread the  
first two paragraphs:

SAN FRANCISCO - The American Federation of Labor and Congress of
Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the American Civil Liberties
Union, the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) and the Central
Labor Council of Alameda County along with other local labor
movements today filed a lawsuit charging that a new Department of
Homeland Security (DHS) rule will threaten jobs of U.S. citizens and
other legally authorized workers simply because of errors in the
government's inaccurate social security earnings databases. The rule
violates workers' rights and imposes burdensome obligations on
employers who receive Social Security Administration (SSA) "no-match"
letters that inform an employer of alleged discrepancies between
employee records and the SSA database.

Under the new rule, many U.S. citizens and legally authorized workers
could be required to be terminated if their erroneous SSA records are
not fixed within 90 days of an SSA "no-match" letter being sent to an
employer.  The rule is scheduled to go into effect on September 14.
SSA intends to send out notices to employers enforcing the new rule
beginning next Tuesday, September 4.  The new notices will be sent to
approximately 140,000 employers, affecting about eight million
employees.

So in this case there is actually no pretense whatsoever that the  
mainstream labor bureaucracy is concerned even a little bit with the  
rights of immigrants on the job. It seems to me the NILC and ACLU are  
piggybacking the AFL-CIO to force homeland insecurity to back down.  
It's an indirect attack against the new program, a form of realpolitik.

Greg