Unions ask “How dare an employer comply with the law?”
Kudos to Mi Pueblo, a grocery store that caters to Hispanic shoppers, for abiding by federal law. At least, I give it kudos. The Unions are fighting mad:
The Bay Area’s biggest Latino grocery chain is trying to avert a threatened boycott after it began checking the immigration status of all its new hires through a federal work-verification program.
“This is a decision that doesn’t come easily,” said spokeswoman Perla Rodriguez of the 21-store Mi Pueblo Foods chain. “The immigrant community, that’s the core of who we are.”
The company joined the E-Verify network a few weeks ago at the recommendation of the Department of Homeland Security, which uses the database to inform companies if their prospective employees are living and working in the country legally, Rodriguez said.
[snip]
A union that has been trying to organize the chain’s 3,300 workers is planning to protest Thursday morning outside the company’s original San Jose store and also threatening a customer boycott.
“I don’t see what the benefit is to them, as an employer or a PR-type thing,” to check the immigration status of the mostly Latino workforce, said spokesman Mike Henneberry of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 5. “It’s voluntary. They don’t have to do it.”
Maybe I’m terribly hampered by an excess of logic, but I do not understand Union support for illegal workers. Every illegal worker takes a job away from a legal American worker. In addition, because so many legal workers are paid under the table, they also exert downward pressure on wages. As an American union member, I would be hacked off that my union dues are being used to benefit people who come here illegally to take my job.