High Court Ruling Hurts Union Goals of Immigrants

Illegal immigrants who are wrongly fired for union organizing are not entitled to back pay, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday, a decision that advocates say leaves millions of low-wage workers vulnerable to being exploited by employers.

On a 5-4 vote in a case involving a California company, the court concluded that a worker’s violation of the nation’s immigration laws outweighs an employer’s violation of its labor laws.

Undocumented immigrants have no legal right to work in the United States, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist said. It would “trivialize the immigration laws [and] also condone and encourage future violations” if these same unlawful employees could win money awards for lost work, he said.

The four liberal dissenters saw the matter through a different prism.

The ruling will undermine labor laws and encourage employers to hire illegal immigrants if they can escape the penalties for doing so, Justice Stephen G. Breyer said.

“With a wink and a nod,” Breyer said, employers can hire these low-wage workers and fire them with impunity if they try to form a union.

The ruling came in the case of a Los Angeles-area chemical plant that had hired a worker who presented a false Texas birth certificate in 1988.

Less than a year later, the worker, Jose Castro, was fired along with three others for passing out union cards at the plant in Paramount.

Since the 1930s, the National Labor Relations Act has prohibited employers from punishing workers for trying to organize a union. Violators can be forced to rehire the workers or pay them for their lost work.

In the Paramount case, an administrative law judge found that the plant, Hoffman Plastic Compounds, had illegally fired Castro. But during a 1993 hearing on the issue of back pay, the company’s lawyer learned that Castro was born in Mexico, not Texas.

“We had no idea until then that this guy was an illegal alien,” said Ryan McCortney, the Costa Mesa attorney for the company.

For that reason, the judge said Castro was entitled to nothing. The National Labor Relations Board in Washington disagreed. The independent federal agency ruled that, although the illegal worker was not entitled to be rehired, he was owed $67,000 for more than three years of lost work--the time between his firing and the discovery of his illegal status.

The full U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington upheld this decision. But over the objections of Bush administration lawyers, the Supreme Court took up the company’s appeal and voided the award Wednesday (Hoffman Plastic Compounds vs. NRLB, 01-1595).

McCortney, the company’s lawyer, said he believes the ruling “will have broader implications” in future cases where illegal immigrants seek monetary damages from employers.

It would not, for example, change an employer’s duty to pay minimum wages, he said. However, “it could affect the remedies [for legal violations]. This was about unearned wages for work not performed,” McCortney said.

Losers Are Those ‘Most In Need’ of Protection

Union leaders and immigrant rights activists said Wednesday’s ruling undercuts the rights of the most vulnerable workers.

“Employers find it cheaper to hire workers who are undocumented and fire them if they try to organize,” said Rebecca Smith, an attorney for the National Employment Law Project in Olympia, Wash. “This ruling leaves these workers helpless to seek a legal remedy. They are the very people who are most in need of the protections of our labor laws.”

Labor leaders have been frustrated in their efforts to organize unions in industries that have large numbers of undocumented workers.

“This decision will allow employers to victimize undocumented workers and escape the consequences for doing so,” said Jonathan Hiatt, a lawyer for the AFL-CIO.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service estimates that 11 million undocumented workers live in the United States, about half of them in California.

State lawyers for California, New York, Arizona, Hawaii, Massachusetts and West Virginia had urged the court to uphold the back pay verdict against the employer. It will “severely jeopardize the ability of states to enforce” their worker rights laws if employers are shielded in cases of undocumented workers, they said.

Rehnquist’s opinion for the majority was joined by Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas.

Joining Breyer in dissent were Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

‘It Just Escalates the Exploitation’

Labor organizers said the ruling will make it more difficult to convince undocumented workers to file complaints for unpaid wages and safety violations, as well as to support a union campaign.

“The message is, they are not entitled to any rights,” said Arturo Rodriguez, president of the United Farm Workers. “We’re going to find very soon that employers are going to create a second class of workers. It just escalates the exploitation.”

Miles Locker, an attorney with the California Labor Commissioner’s office, said that the ruling would not limit the state’s ability to collect wages for work that was performed, if, for example, an employer routinely paid less than the minimum wage. However, the state would no longer be able to protect workers who are fired after complaining about such wage violations or other abuses.

“It’s a problem because it leaves undocumented workers vulnerable to discharge for doing those things that they have every right to do,” he said. “It tends to encourage the most unscrupulous employers to only hire undocumented workers and then fire them when they try to assert their rights.”

Rodriguez and others, however, said the decision could also galvanize support for a new legalization program for illegal immigrants, which the AFL-CIO has advocated for two years.

“It’s a slap in the face by a Supreme Court that made an ideological decision,” said Eliseo Medina, a vice president of the Service Employees International Union and a leading proponent for a new amnesty program. “I’ve been getting calls all day from people saying we really need to step up our campaign. Everyone’s reaction is one of anger. We are, and should be, outraged.”

In Los Angeles, activists working to improve pay and conditions for garment and restaurant workers and day laborers said they hope state agencies will interpret the decision narrowly, pertaining only in the case of union-organizing campaigns.

“We’re trying to look at this as optimistically as possible and move these cases forward,” said Victor Narro of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles. “If somebody does decide to go to court on this [issues not involving union campaigns] it could get kicked back to the Supreme Court.”

Unions and activists have long complained of employers using immigration laws to intimidate and fire assertive workers. Although undocumented workers are rarely reinstated, state and federal agencies have often awarded back pay when the firing was deemed illegal.

Savage reported from Washington and Cleeland from Los Angeles.