DISORGANIZED LABOR
Membership in unions is at historic lows — and their support for illegal workers is part of the reason why
THERE’S a paradox when it comes to unions in America in 2024: On the one hand, approval for labor unions is higher than it’s been since 1965; Americans increasingly see the value of collective bargaining to protect workers from corporations. And yet, just 6% of private-sector workers are unionized, a number that has not significantly budged despite the rising popularity of unions. What gives? To answer this question, I took a pilgrimage to one of America’s great union towns: Las Vegas. Vegas is the Promised Land for service-industry workers. The average pay for a member of the Culinary Union is $26 an hour including benefits. Whether you clean hotel rooms or bake pastries or wash dishes, if you do it in Las Vegas, you do it earning a living wage with full health care and a pension plan. You can feel that the American Dream is alive and well walking through the casinos. It’s in the optimism of the staff, in their swagger.
“Anywhere else, if you’re working in a restaurant or if you’re cleaning toilets or you’re cleaning rooms, these are poor-people jobs,” Ted Pappageorge, secretary-treasurer for the Culinary Union, told me. “And the only difference is if there’s a union. And if you have a big union presence, then the nonunion has to compete, too. They gotta pay, otherwise, they can’t get people.” How do they do it? Certainly, the union has been instrumental — even as Nevada remains a right-towork state. The union has successfully made the case to its workers that, as Pappageorge put it, “the idea that you should be alone and somehow try to take on this economy and this world and all those forces out there that are really opposing what working people need, [this] is a way to lose.”
But there’s another crucial factor in protecting hospitality workers in Vegas that’s at odds with where the Democratic Party — and even the Culinary Union itself are at — at least rhetorically. Because the casinos are so highly regulated, they can’t hire illegal migrants, which sets them apart from the service industry in other parts of the country but especially in sanctuary cities and other Democratic metropolises like Los Angeles, New York, Washington, DC, Seattle, Boston, Atlanta, and Houston, where six in 10 undocumented immigrants live.
As of 2021, there were 7 million immigrant workers in the United States are here illegally, making up 4% of the US workforce and 40% of them work in the service industry where they are paid less than minimum wage. According to some estimates, more than 30% of New York
City’s cooks and 54% of dishwashers are undocumented.
With a glut of workers who will work for so much less, how can legal workers expect to compete, let alone make a living wage?
Indeed, this is why for much of the history of labor in this country, unions were solidly in favor of limiting immigration: increasing the supply of labor means giving power to employers over employees. But organized labor did a 180-degree reversal on immigration in the second half of the 20th century, coming to embrace immigrants, both legal and illegal, and by 2000, the president of the AFL-CIO called for amnesty for millions of undocumented immigrants.
In reversing their opposition to mass immigration, America’s national unions ended up shooting themselves in the foot, telegraphing to desperate American workers that they will stand by the direct competition.
When seen through this lens, it’s less surprising that Americans aren’t rushing to join unions, despite respecting the work they do to support labor.
Unions undoubtedly improve the lives of working-class Americans, and no one who stands for the working class should oppose the power of collective bargaining. But with just 6% of the private sector unionized, it’s hard to see unions as a solution to what ails the working class — although changing their tune on immigration would certainly make them more popular with the workforce that desperately needs their representation.
Worker power is tied to the number of workers relative to the number of jobs; it’s simple supply and demand– and it’s never been clearer than now. The post-pandemic labor crunch gave workers their first gains in decades — yet the labor shortage was met with the worst-policed southern border in US history. The Biden administration released millions of illegal immigrants into the country, and they had the exact impact on the economy you might have expected, filling jobs and halting the gains of working-class Americans in their tracks.
Workers are begging the elites to listen: They aren’t anti-immigrant, but don’t they deserve to live in a country that sees their well-being as a priority? What happened to the American Dream?
It’s time they were heard.