Sean Higgins of the Washington Examiner probes an unusual form of outreach from the federal government to a handful of foreign states.
The federal government has signed agreements with three foreign countries — Mexico, Ecuador and the Philippines — to establish outreach programs to teach immigrants their rights to engage in labor organizing in the U.S.
The agreements do not distinguish between those who entered legally or illegally. They are part of a broader effort by the National Labor Relations Board to get immigrants involved in union activism. …
… The agreements are substantially similar, with several sections repeated verbatim in each one. All three documents state that the No. 1 outreach goal is “to educate those who may not be aware of the Act, including those employees just entering the work force, by providing information designed to clearly inform [that nation’s] workers in the United States of America their rights under the Act and to develop ways of communicating such information (e.g., via print and electronic media, electronic assistance tools, mobile device applications, and links to the NLRB’s web site from the [country’s] web sites) to the … workers residing in the United States of America and their employers.”
The board has said the law’s protections for workers engaged in union organizing extend even to people who are not legally authorized to work in the U.S. An employer who fires an illegal immigrant worker — which is required under federal immigration law — can be sanctioned by the board if it decides the worker’s union activism was the real reason for the dismissal.
