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Andrew Schneider's remarks at immigrant-rights news conference: People should not have to give up their rights to fair treatment – guaranteed them by the Bill of Rights – when they walk through the plant or office door. Employees are not pieces of equipment. Treating them with dignity and fairness is not inconsistent with good competitive management. Based on this philosophy, the ACLU along with AFL-CIO, National Immigration Law Center and the Central Labor Council of Alameda County sued the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) over a new government rule known as the “no match” rule. The new DHS rule would cause U.S. citizens and other authorized workers to lose their jobs by illegally using error-prone social security records as a tool for immigration enforcement. We are happy to report that a federal judge on Wednesday issued a preliminary injunction halting the government from enforcing that rule. The way the no-match program works is the Social Security Administration (SSA) compares the name and social security number on the W-2 form that is sent to them from an employer with the name and social security number they have on file. And when the numbers differ, SSA sends out a no-match letter to the employer. Originally, the purpose was to notify employers that their records do not match those at SSA, and that their workers were not receiving proper credit for their earnings. But on August 10, 2007, DHS announced a new rule in which U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can use the receipt by an employer of a no-match letter as evidence that the employer has “constructive knowledge” that the employee who is the subject of the letter is unauthorized to work. Under this rule, employers who received such a letter and took no action to terminate the employment of the person in question, would be subject to prosecution. The no-match letters particularly hurt U.S. citizens and lawful workers. SSA’s Office of the Inspector General found that of the 17.8 million discrepancies in the SSA database that could result in a no-match letter, 12.7 million (or over 70 percent) belong to native-born U.S. Citizens. Additionally, some employers have used no-match letters to selectively retaliate against workers when they try to organize a union or otherwise exercise their workplace rights like file complaints for unpaid wages, workers’ compensation, sexual harassment, discrimination. The letters have also selectively been used by employers against people of color resulting in racial profiling in the workplace. Even though the DHS rule has been halted, the injunction only addresses the DHS rule and does not prevent the Social Security Administration (SSA) from continuing its traditional practice of sending no-match letters to employers. So we are calling on SSA to stop this practice otherwise employers will likely be confused about how to respond when they receive the SSA no-match letter, and management-side attorneys may still advise employers to follow the rule to protect themselves from liability.
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