The Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE) and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) together lost more than 100 members in the attacks on the World Trade Center September 11. In the chaos of the disaster’s aftermath, they found a way to extend the union hand to all affected workers and their families.

Together, with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, they opened the Immigrant Workers Assistance Alliance (IWAA)in midtown Manhattan to make sure affected immigrants got help applying for the services and benefits available to them. Caseworkers were SEIU and HERE members who had also lost their jobs at the Trade Center.

Between November and January, the Alliance helped more than two thousand workers, union and non-union, find the help they needed to pay bills and cover basic needs. Multi-lingual, multimedia outreach in New York advertised a hotline number; displaced workers handed out leaflets in 10 languages in immigrant neighborhoods. Larger relief organizations, charities and agencies taught caseworkers how to help workers access their funds and services. Some of those helped were undocumented immigrants who had been afraid to approach official sources of assistance.

Besides language skills and training in referral, the IWAA caseworkers brought tremendous passion and empathy to the work of helping displaced immigrants. Clients said that they felt more comfortable sharing their personal information in their native language with other displaced workers. Informally, the center became a place where unemployed service workers traded tips about job vacancies and shared their experiences coping with the trauma of losing jobs, family members and friends.