I
n
a landmark opinion, Brooklyn judge, Steven Davis, a hearing officer
for the National Labor Relations Board, ordered Extreme Building
Services, an asbestos removal company, to stop “physically
assaulting employees, preventing employees from washing up at the
fire hydrant, destroying employees’ asbestos workers licenses,
[and] interrogating employees concerning their union membership.”
The
judge then ordered the company to put five fired workers back on
the job.
Unfortunately,
a decision by an NLRB judge doesn’t mark the end of the line
and those workers may not return anytime soon. If Extreme decides
to appeal Davis’s order, it could stretch out legal proceedings
for years.
Nationally,
one-third of all efforts made by workers to join unions results
in at least one firing, according to the AFL-CIO. While the National
Labor Relations Act was passed in 1936 to outlaw such events, it
doesn’t provide much protection today. An epidemic of retaliation
has spread across U.S. workplaces, and immigrants especially have
become its targets.
Firings
and retaliation, in turn, produce fear. Whether or not a firing
is eventually declared illegal, a fired worker is still out of a
job. Fear of firing is one important reason why the percentage of
organized workers keeps dropping.
Last
year union density declined again. In 2002, only 13.2 percent of
U.S. workers belonged to unions. Yet some unions grow despite this.
One of them, the Laborers Union, is the union workers at Extreme
wanted to join. The Laborers have discovered that the anger of immigrant
workers, who see themselves on the bottom, is an effective antidote
to fear.
Just
to get from her native Ecuador to Long Island, Maria Ortega, a fired
Extreme employee, had to borrow $7,000. “So we have to work
in whatever conditions we find so we can send something back,”
she explains. “It’s very serious to lose a job here because
it could mean losing your house back home. Many of us have had to
leave our children behind. Where would they live then?” On
Long Island, Ortega became an asbestos stripper, one of the most
dangerous jobs in America. One tiny fiber of this mineral, once
a common ingredient in insulation, floor and ceiling tiles, and
drywall, can cause asbestosis and mesothelioma, a form of cancer
that robs the body of its breath and eventually life.
Ortega
was hired to clean asbestos from the basement of the Pilgrim Psychiatric
Center on Long Island. According to another fired worker, Betsey
Arruda, “there were no microtraps [to filter out stray fibers],
the plastic sheeting didn’t seal the job, and they didn’t
use water to keep the fibers from getting into the air.”
Because
there were no functioning showers, workers feared they were bringing
home fibers on their clothes and bodies. “They’d tell
us to use the fire hydrant to wash off after work,” Arruda
says. “Anyone who protested was sent home.”
The
atmosphere of fear increased when Extreme’s owner, Emil Braun,
brought a gun into the basement one day and threatened to use it
to open a stuck door. “Everybody was terrorized—no one
dared to talk to him,” Arruda recalls. Braun refused to be
interviewed. But Extreme workers didn’t just get scared. They
got angry. “It’s not supposed to be that way here,”
Ortega says hotly. “We’re immigrants, but we’re human
beings too.” Polish immigrants were also working in the
basement, doing the same job. Andres Siemak, stripping asbestos
alongside the Ecuadorans, was upset not just at the low wages and
dangerous conditions, but at the effort to silence everyone. “In
a non-union job, you can’t say anything,” he fumed. Siemak
was the first to be fired—he and a Polish coworker wrote a
leaflet urging everyone to get organized and handed it out at lunch.
When the Ecuadorans saw that, they got scared. But it didn’t
take long before they too were angry enough to act. A month later,
Ortega and Arruda wrote their own leaflet and handed it out. Days
later, they too were told there was no more work for them.
“We
did for the other people here,” Arruda says. “We knew
someday someone would do it for us.” That transfer of experience
from one group of immigrants to another is one reason why the Laborers
Union has been able to rebuild its ranks. In the early 1980s, most
asbestos contractors had union agreements and were paying wages
over $30 an hour. At the end of the decade, they tore the agreements
up, cut wages, and began hiring the Poles. These new workers, however,
began organizing their own union almost immediately, the Hazardous
Waste Handlers Association. “But it wasn’t strong enough
to go up against the mafia, who ran the industry,” remembers
Pawel Kedzior, an asbestos stripper from those days. Workers organized
independently because the union had long-time ties to the mob. At
the beginning of the 1990s, courts forced the union to clean itself
up. The Laborers disbanded ten local unions in New York and threw
out its old leaders. Two new locals were organized, including one
for asbestos workers. A new generation of organizers made an alliance
with the Poles and won new union contracts. Kedzior became the new
union’s president. Siemak was there. “I was one of the
first guys to help organize the asbestos projects in 1996,”
he recalls. “I knew that a union would help us fight for our
rights.”
He
took that knowledge to work at Extreme and although he was fired,
he passed it along to the Ecuadorans. Other people like him have
done the same on jobs throughout Long Island. Extreme Building Services
has not yet signed a union agreement or complied with Judge Davis’s
decision. But the Laborers Union is growing anyway. A handful of
new locals in New York and New Jersey have contracts with dozens
of asbestos removal contractors. Over 3,000 new members like Siemak,
Ortega, and Arruda have become union messengers in workplaces throughout
New York City’s urban periphery. The union still fights in
the courts, waiting for the lengthy legal process to unveil its
uncertain protections. But organizer David Johnson says, “we’ve
learned that functioning on the ground, and depending on the activism
of a new generation of workers, is a better answer to the fear of
getting fired.”
David Bacon is
a freelance writer and photographer covering mainly labor issues.
