In an effort to get the explosive immigration issue off the table, many liberal members of Congress are going along with the re-creation of the guestworker status. Surprisingly, and for the same reasons, a number of Latino groups—such as La Raza and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus—are also entertaining the idea, although with conditions. Any guestworker program, said the National Council of La Raza, “must offer full worker protections and rights.”

I don’t believe that will work. Passage of any legal, accepted guestworker program will redound to harm American workers—citizens or not. The creation of a permanent underclass of workers will remain a threat to that layer of workers above them. And there won’t be any worker protections for either class.

For instance, in Darwin, Australia right now, there’s a controversy over guestworkers used as strikebreakers. The striking workers are called trolley collectors, which confused me until I recalled that trolleys here are trams there, and trolleys there are carts. These are the people who collect supermarket carts in the parking lots. According to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

Skilled migrants have been flown into the Northern Territory’s Top End shopping centres to replace local workers who are striking over pay conditions. Local collectors who work for the Sydney-based Starlink International group have been on strike since Friday.

Actually, the permanent workers were subcontracted to one Karoom Trolley Services, who wouldn’t pay them for extra pre-Christmas hours. Instead, Karoom found migrants—some with official skilled worker 457 visas, some without—and paid some of them more than the permanent workers. But the new workers are disposable, used to make a point. 

Contingent, occasional or undocumented workers present an organizing problem for labor, but a large pool of government-sanctioned Grade B workers is worse. In Australia, all the employer had to do was think the workers were legal and he got away with it. Labor gets the message.

I’m not under any illusion that scrapping the guestworker proposal will eliminate the threat of strike-breakers. There are always some workers who are greedy, ignorant or desperate enough to scab. But creating a separate class of guestworkers divides workers as surely as the color line once did.

This applies as well to the millions of undocumented laborers who fill the low-wage jobs. Every worker—that’s every—deserves  representation, preferably in a union. By de-legitimizing huge groups of workers, government and society ensure that here will be a steady downward pull on wages. For too many workers—and that’s most of us—color, language or immigration status come before equality as a worker. That stand won’t improve working conditions or wages. Without a labor movement to stand up to employers, and a government to stand behind the movement, capital will find ways to get cheap labor—legal or not. But let’s not help them by branding some workers second-class.

Some of organized labor is falling for it, but not all. AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said that guestworker status sends a message to immigrant workers that although “their hard work is essential to the prosperity of our nation, they deserve no better than a perennial second-class status.”

Actually, some Italian anarchist, whose name escapes both me and Google, said it better: “You must pull him up or he will surely pull you down.”

For another look at the subject, check out Amy Traub’s TomPaine article, The Guest Worker Gamble (March 23, 2006).

–Alec Dubro

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