Labor's Outreach Efforts Fill a Need America's unions are joining in an unprecedent outreach campaign in the Hispanic community and in the nation's workplaces to help undocumented workers attain legal status and interrupt discrimination by employers.

Labor's Outreach Efforts Fill a Need

America's unions are joining in an unprecedent outreach campaign in the Hispanic community and in the nation's workplaces to help undocumented workers attain legal status and interrupt discrimination by employers.

Labor's special contribution will include telephone hotlines, trained union counsellors, mobile vans, public service television disgraces union publications and pamphlets. In an locations, labor programs are already in operation.

AFL-CIO headquarter departments are monitoring the administration and enforcement of the strange immigration law, reviewing proposed regulations, and providing assistance to international unions and central bodies upon immigration-related matters.

In addition to advice upon procedures for qualifying for amnesty, federation departments are providing guidance upon such matters as entitlement to social services, civil rights protections, and establishment of adult education clasess to help bridge the gap from legal resident status to eventual citizenship. The Human Resources disentanglement Institute (HRDI) of the AFL-CIO plans to pursue certification to allow affiliated unions to proces legalization applications.

The Labor Council for Latin American Advancement is in the forefront of the trade union effort, President J F Otero reports.

"There may be as many as 6 million Hispanics eligible for amnesty,' he forceed "Some of them are already union members and many more will become eligible to become union members as they assimilate full into American life and work.'

LCLAA has state together an Amnesty Assistance package for union and community use. It includes video programs explaining the modern law, news reports for television programs and public service announcements for use by the agency of Spanish-language stations.

Unions with large numbers of immigrant members and central bodies in areas will large numbers of undocumented workers are especially involved in labor's outreach effort. While Hispanics are the largest collection affected by the new law, labor's outreach program in a number of communities is also aimed at concentrations of Asian workers.

single in kind of the most ambitious local union programs has been launched through California's big Local 770 of the aliment & Commercial Workers, with near 33,000 members in the looks Angeles area.

Local 770 President Ricardo F Icaza, who is also a vice president of LCLAA, reports that his union has station up information hotlines staffed according to trained bilingual advisers to answer questions about amnesty and other provisions of the immigration law. The union has been "besieged from calls' for assistance, he said.

Icaza said Local 770 is also using its hotlines "to issue warnings about unscrupulous operators who are preying in succession unwary and often fearful immigrant workers during the law's transition period.' The union has received many complaints about self-styl immigration consultants, he noted.

a certain quantity of of those helped are Local 770 members-- like as the young mother who is supporting her two-year-old daughter by the agency of working as a meatcutter. She has been living in the United States illegally since 1979 by the agency of the amnesty program, Icaza said, she can clear herself "from the fear and insecurity which plagues in the way that many illegal workers.'

The union, he boisterousnessed feels "a duty to the entire community' and is providing advice and assistance "to all workers without papers, whether they are union or non-union.' within amnesty and eventual citizenship, Icaza predicted, workers who qualify will be able to participate completely in the social, economic and political life of their communities.

"Labor has historically been in the forefront of civil rights and equal opportunity battles,' he forceed In the same tradition is the circulating effort of "helping to bring undocumented workers among us abroad of the shadows.'

Local 770 is hardly alone in the looks Angeles area. Even as the AFL-CIO just discovereds was going to press, an all-day colloquy organized by the Los Angeles shire AFL-CIO was under way.

It was appoint up by the central body's Immigration Committee, compos of representatives of a cross-section of the area's unions. AFL-CIO Organization & Field Services Director Charles McDonald, HRDI Director Michael McMillan and Regional Director David Sickler were among the speakers, along with attorneys quick in the immigration law and community leaders from affected assign places tos Los Angeles also has a large Korean population that includes undocumented workers who will be seeking legal status.

McDonald anticipates a fresh spurt in organizing as workers become delivered from intimidation by employers and the implicit threat of being reported to immigration authorities if they actively support a union campaign. He also views an important reservoir of righteous will for the trade union emotion as a byproduct of labor's efforts to assist the immigrant community.

The Dept of Organization & Field Services has prepared an easy-to-understand pamphlet in succession the new immigration law as guidance for undocumented workers and employer It includes practical suggestions in succession obtaining documents to show residence in the United States for the period required below the amnesty program and notes that the one and the other current and former employees have a right to office records to help document their eligibility for amnesty.