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| President's Perspective: Preparing America's work force — including immigrants Oct. 5, 2006
A significant part of how I view my presidency at NYSUT is the importance I place on visiting work sites and meeting with members and local leaders. As a result, I spend a great deal of time behind the wheel of my car. To pass the time, I often alternate between music and audio books, the latter a newly found pastime. With some long trips lined up this past summer attending regional conferences throughout the state, I decided to tackle Tom Friedman's The World Is Flat. All 20 CDs! The CDs, of course, were interspersed with favorite musical artists. Well, what Friedman took over 16 hours to say, Bob Dylan sang in less than six minutes on his latest album with the cut "Workingman's Blues #2:" "It's a new path that we trod." Issues surrounding globalization — the central theme in Friedman's work — are directly related to U.S. immigration policies and the rights of workers both here and abroad. As you may recall, there were some controversial and noisy debates earlier this year. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants and their supporters — including many unionists — staged demonstrations in cities across the U.S. in April and May. The impetus was legislation approved by the House of Representatives that would have made it a federal crime to live in the U.S. illegally; it would have turned millions of illegal immigrants into felons, depriving them of any opportunity to win legal status. It was at the height of these marches that the NYSUT Representative Assembly weighed in, adopting in early May — after lengthy and emotional debate — a resolution entitled "The Rights of Immigrant Workers." It was an appropriate action at an appropriate time. As unionists, educators and health care professionals, we have an interest in how immigrants to our country are treated. For the most part, the RA resolution supported the AFL-CIO position on this issue, which is to bring about immigration reform based on the following principles: • the uniform enforcement of workplace standards must be a priority, ensuring real and enforceable remedies for labor and employment law violations for all workers, regardless of their immigration status, and that there must be a mechanism whereby all workers can protect their rights; • reforms must provide a reasonable path to permanent residency for the currently undocumented workers; • reform must reverse the practice of allowing employers to turn permanent, full-time, year-round jobs into temporary jobs by broadening the size and scope of so-called guest worker programs; • all workers — foreign and native — must be guaranteed full workplace rights, including the right to organize and join unions; • reform must ensure the safety of the United States without compromising our fundamental civil rights and civil liberties; and • reform of immigration laws must consider the root causes of migration that are pushing workers to migrate. As unionists, that's a solid set of goals for us to get behind. And, thankfully, more reasonable members of Congress have apparently quashed the draconian efforts to limit the rights of immigrants and compromise their legal status. As the 2006 election season winds down, immigration policy remains an important national issue, and an important international issue as well. How we choose to grapple with immigration will be a critical factor in defining our approach to globalization and its impact on the economy and the work force. Not only the work force that we are, but the work force that we train and the work force that we empower here and abroad. Using Friedman's analogy, we are either putting up walls or taking walls down. That's why it's also an issue that NYSUT must keep on its agenda. It's another chapter in the ongoing discussion of society's inequities — whether those inequities manifest themselves in a sixth-grade classroom, on a college campus, in a hospital ward, or in the world economy. The relevancy of NYSUT's interest in immigration policy should be apparent, even to those who question why a labor union like ours delves more and more into social issues and promotes a social agenda. Immigration comes at us almost every day — in the classrooms, campuses, hospitals, laboratories and other workplaces where we practice our professions. Lessons in Syracuse Ann O'Hara of the Syracuse Teachers Association, who we were proud to honor earlier this year as NYSUT's 2006 Health Care Professional of the Year, reminded us of that in June when she wrote in New York Teacher about how nurses and others in her schools interact with students from the Sudan, Bosnia, Vietnam, Liberia, Cuba and other nations who are part of a large, active resettlement group in Syracuse. Ann and her colleagues tackle a significant communications barrier — in terms of language, culture, and access to telephones and computers -— when dealing with newly arrived students and their parents. In this space two weeks ago, I wrote about federal bureaucrats — far removed from the realities of the classroom — who have instituted changes in testing policies for English language learners, requiring ELL students to take the same English language exams as the rest of the student population (see article on page 4). The result, of course, is that more and more of these students and their schools will wrongly be labeled as failures. As a consequence of this reversal in policy by the U.S. Department of Education and the Bush White House, the children of immigrants will be set further and further apart from their classmates. The hope, promise and imagination Friedman describes as the face of America that the rest of the world needs to see will once again be shrouded in fear and mistrust. The Statue of Liberty shudders. Meanwhile, the disparity between low-income students (disproportionately students of color) — a segment in which many newly arrived ELL students and other immigrants would most often fall — and the rest of the population has given us an ever-increasing academic achievement gap. Our failure to close the gap impacts not only these children, but each of our communities as well as our position in the global economy. An influx of families from other nations, especially non-English-speaking families, puts pressure on an already overtaxed education system to create learning opportunities for students new to the United States. These students must acquire the literacy and mathematics skills that will allow them to achieve the high standards now required for academic success. This, of course, means more resources and support. There must be an adequate number of well-trained educators with the skills necessary to help these students reach their academic goals. School districts must be able to provide materials, supplies and the professional development necessary to adequately meet the needs of recently arrived English language learners. Our higher education colleagues must be provided with the resources to offer education and other programs designed to prepare the very best teachers and school professionals. The quality of our teachers, probably the single-greatest determiner of student success, will be critical in maximizing the value our pluralistic culture can add to our ability to compete in the global economy of the future. We must be willing to invest in high-quality teacher preparation and professional development. As you can see, the implications of immigration reform for our work and our members are enormous. NYSUT, through the AFL-CIO and national affiliates, must have a seat at the table at which these consequences are considered. The immigration reforms we support can contribute significantly toward eliminating the gap between society's haves and have-nots that continues to widen as Thomas Friedman's world continues to flatten. We cannot afford to stand by idly and allow the politics of fear to build walls — literally and figuratively — around our country, our work force, and our ability to compete in a flat word. Or, as Dylan proclaims in Workingman's Blues: "You can hang back or fight your best on the frontline." |
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