Setting Up No-Match Action Networks

When the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced in August a policy that gave employers a freer hand to punish workers with mismatched social security numbers, a committee of unions, workers’ centers, and immigrant rights groups in Chicago swung into action.

The Chicago Committee Against No Match has organized hundreds of activists throughout the Chicagoland region to respond immediately to the firing and harassment of workers whose names come up on no-match letters. The Social Security Administration has issued about 100,000 of these no-match letters to employers in recent years, despite a finding from the agency’s inspector general last December that 12.7 million of the 17.8 million discrepancies in SSA’s database belonged to native-born workers. The new DHS rule is now on hold following a federal judge’s injunction. Led by the United Electrical Workers (UE) and the Chicago Workers’ Collaborative (CWC) workers’ center, advocates in Chicago are using the reprieve to ramp up their network. The network’s goal is to put workers’ needs at the center of the immigration debate and raise the employer’s cost for abusing no-match letters, said Mark Meinster, a UE representative in Chicago.

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