Neighborhood Funders Group

NFG REPORTS
SUMMER 2001 ISSUE TWO • VOLUME EIGHT

Immigrants and the New Economy Site Visit

In late March over 50 grantmakers descended on Las Vegas, Nevada for the second in a series of site visits sponsored by NFG's Working Group on Labor and Community and Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees (GCIR). Participants lauded Susan Chinn, Executive Director of the Discount Foundation, and Janet Shenk, an Arca Foundation trustee and AFL-CIO President John Sweeney's liaison to the philanthropic community, for organizing the opportunity to hear personal stories from immigrant workers and union leaders and learn about the issues they face in the workplace. This article is adapted from Robin Epstein's case study, which will be available later on NFG's Web site at www.nfg.org along with information about the Working Group.

After a tour of the 3,000-room Monte Carlo Resort and Casino that took in its boilers and air conditioners, its uniform-cleaning operation and the penthouse preferred by the Sultan of Brunei, four dozen grantmakers went to dinner, where they heard from John Wilhelm, General President of the Hotel Employees & Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE) and chair of the AFL-CIO's Immigration Committee. It was the first evening of "Immigrants and the New Economy," organized by NFG's Working Group on Labor and Community and GCIR.

Wilhelm disarmed the funders - some of whom support union-related efforts but many of whom have not - with a whopper of a statement: the American labor movement has been asleep since the McCarthy era, he said. The jury is still out, Wilhelm added, as to whether unions will rouse themselves, cement community alliances and make a difference in the lives of working people. But then, in telling the story of the Las Vegas local of the hotel workers union, which he led from 1987 to 1998, Wilhelm suggested there is reason to hope that the jury's verdict will be good for workers, immigrants, the economy and democracy. Indeed, the tale of HERE Local 226, known as "the Culinary," was as compelling an argument as can be made that in some U.S. cities the labor movement is very much awake.

If you scrub bathtubs or scrape dishes to support your family there's no better place to work than a unionized hotel on the Las Vegas Strip. Making $11.29 an hour, with full family health coverage, paid vacations, sick days, pensions, job security and a career ladder, maids with little formal education can and do own their own homes in Las Vegas. This town may lure tourists with the promise of untold - and unearned - riches, but the people who come here to escape poverty or war are willing to work. Thanks to the HERE Local 226, they can get skills and jobs that give them a foothold in the American dream. The union also helps those who need to learn English. In return, the Culinary asks that members be active citizens both in the workplace and in the public square.

Over the last decade, because of its commitment to organizing and its energetic political engagement, the Culinary has emerged as a national model. "Obviously this is a great union," said Craig McGarvey of the James Irvine Foundation. "If a foundation's mission is to help people get out of poverty, a strong case is being made on this site visit that excellent unions like this one would make very viable partners."

In a two-day visit, the grantmakers heard immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala, Cuba, Nicaragua and Yugoslavia give moving testimony in halting English, sometimes accompanied by tears as well as laughter, of how the hotel workers union and the carpenters union had trained them and made it possible for them to secure good jobs with good benefits that support their families and give them a stake in the American dream.

They saw where unions teach their members the skills they need to succeed, from mock hotel rooms set up in Las Vegas public housing, where would-be guest room attendants learn hospital corners and paperwork; to a restaurant training facility where aspiring servers and kitchen workers, when not in ESL classes, take lunch orders and cook meals for the city's downtown workforce; to a hangar-style building where apprentice carpenters hang dry wall, journeymen read blueprints and both bone up on their math.

The funders heard about the growing - and increasingly linked - civic participation of union members and immigrants, and about the hotel workers' wager that making their comprehensive health care coverage more culturally apt will also make it more cost-effective.

They met a pastor, a lawyer and a community organizer from the Nevada Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice, an interfaith non-profit that is dedicated to using pastors' bodies as well as their theology to stop exploitation in the residential construction, landscaping and house-cleaning industries, which too often turn undocumented low-wage workers into no-wage workers with no recourse for justice.

And they got acquainted with Nancy Mills, of the AFL-CIO's Working for America Institute, whose job it is to form partnerships between unions, community organizations and employers that set ambitious goals for workforce development and career advancement. The Institute challenges the conventional wisdom that says service jobs have to be lousy jobs, just as the early 20th century labor movement changed the perception - and the reality - of manufacturing work.

For funders already involved in community-labor grantmaking, the "Immigrants and the New Economy" visit put their work in perspective. Many reported coming away energized by what they had heard and seen. Some participants new to the work that labor unions and community organizations are jointly engaged in were impressed by these two unions' innovative practices in supporting immigrants and undocumented workers. Grantmakers are already putting their experiences to use in developing and deepening a range of initiatives.

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