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The indispensable advocate: with big-city machines gone, unions are the primary champions of America''s new immigrants. (A Special Report On Immigration And Work).

Article Excerpt
Varsha Patel works in the stockroom at the Cintas industrial laundry plant in Piscataway, N.J., sorting dirty uniforms as they come in for cleaning. For eight hours she remains standing as she separates the damaged cloths from the merely dirty; at the end of the day, she says, "My hands, feet and legs are sore." For this she is paid a princely $7.94 an hour.

Varsha Patel (not her real name) has worked for Cintas, America's largest uniform rental company, since 1997, and it has not been the happiest of associations. Six months ago, her co-workers who hang clothing on racks positioned well above their heads had to hang 1,700 uniforms a day. Now they have to hang 2,000. And if she or her fellow workers take more than six sick days in a year, they'll be summarily fired.

The work force at Piscataway isn't notably young; most of the plant's 145 production workers are women in their 30s, 40s and 50s, almost all of whom make between $6.50 and $9 an hour. Many, like Varsha Patel, are immigrants from the Indian state of Gujarat (virtually all Gujaratis have the surname Patel); the other workers come from Punjab (another Indian state) and Vietnam, with a smattering of Latinos, Pakistanis and African Americans.

Earlier this year, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE) sent Seema Patel, a daughter of Gujarati immigrants who'd recently graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, to Piscataway as one of four staffers organizing the plant's workers. Cintas, which last year had revenues of $2.3 billion, employs 17,000 workers in its far-flung laundries, few of whom make more than the $9 hourly ceiling at Piscataway. Eighty percent of those workers are immigrants, says Jen Roitman, whom UNITE has assigned to head up the 150 organizers it plans to put on its nationwide campaign to unionize the company.

Seema Patel grew up in the largely white, upper-middle-class community of Mission Viejo in California's Orange County, so when she started making house calls on the Piscataway plant's workers in nearby Edison, N.J.--home to the nation's largest Gujarati community--she quickly discovered she'd entered a very different culture. Like most first-generation immigrant communities throughout American history, the...