Washington – Illegal-worker Court Ruling In Rubashkin Case Yields Odd Paradox

Washington – Federal law prohibits hiring illegal immigrants, but it also requires companies to bargain with unions that represent them.

That’s the result of a recent court ruling that showcases the unresolved paradoxes posed by U.S. immigration law.

The case developed from events at Agri Processor Co., a kosher meat manufacturer in Brooklyn, N.Y. In September 2005, the company’s workers voted 15-5 to join the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. Company officials refused to bargain and subsequently told the National Labor Relations Board that they’d discovered that illegal immigrants dominated their workforce.

The company “put the Social Security numbers given by all the voting employees into the Social Security Administration’s online database and discovered that most of the numbers were either non-existent or belonged to other people,” Tatel noted.
Agri Processor argued that illegal entrants couldn’t count as the kind of employees who were protected under the National Labor Relations Act. The National Labor Relations Board rejected the argument and ruled that illegal workers could have a collective-bargaining vote.

The company appealed, noting that the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act made it illegal for a company to knowingly hire illegal immigrants.

“I understand the idea that, at first blush, it seems contrary to immigration policy to extend legal protections to undocumented workers,” Jeff Hirsch, a University of Tennessee law professor, said in an e-mail interview Tuesday. “But that argument ignores the equally important policy of protecting workers.”

The D.C. appellate court is important because it spans all federal regulatory agencies. Other appellate courts, such as the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco or the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, cover specific multistate regions. [azstar]