Abstract
In recent decades Los Angeles has emerged as a dynamic national center of organization and advocacy for low-wage workers in the United States. This edited volume, written by scholars, graduate students, and current and former local activists, brings together valuable accounts of this remarkable movement, providing an inside view of the world of worker centers, immigrants’ rights groups, and public campaigns at the forefront of low-wage labor organizing. According to the editors, what makes the “L.A. model” distinctive is the dense networking and interaction among local activists and organizations that share a broad strategic repertoire and history of cooperation, and the development of a mutual learning and support relationship between these groups and more established union organizations. These innovations have succeeded in winning support among the enormous population of immigrant and undocumented workers in the metropolitan Los Angeles labor force.
The book is organized thematically into three parts that analyze community-based and activist organizations, campaigns focused on industries and occupational groups, and alliances with the larger union labor movement. In Part I, chapters by Jong Bum Kwon on the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance (KIWA) and Nazgol Ghandnoosh on the Pilipino Workers’ Center (PWC) discuss how these organizations negotiate a mix of labor, ethnic, and transnational identities in their respective communities. Kwon, for example, argues that KIWA relies on public demonstrations to contest the cultural narrative of Koreatown as an entrepreneurial enclave. In a chapter on the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles (CHIRLA), Caitlin Patler documents the cross-ethnic coalition-building achieved through various advocacy and legislative reform campaigns for immigrants’ rights. CHIRLA has also served as an important source of support for other groups like KIWA and has helped foster the creation of new organizations and networks like the Multiethnic Immigrant Worker Organizing Network (MIWON) and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON). In one sense, the constituent groups have had to develop co-operative ties in order to manage the intense competition for scarce resources among non-profit community organizations. Their critical mass of relationships and experience, however, has strengthened the capacity of the overall movement to take on larger challenges.
The chapters in Part II examine more closely the campaigns of specific groups of workers, including taxi drivers, car wash workers, day laborers, and garment workers. Many of these campaigns focus on enforcing minimum legal standards and protections for workers in sectors where violations of such laws are common. The venues for engagement and struggle, then, often take political form outside the workplace, targeting regulatory processes or legislative arenas in city, county, or state government. The authors emphasize that traditional legal advocacy tactics cannot succeed without being accompanied by the mobilization of workers and the community. In turn, however, the chapters show the ways that popular support and institutional leverage are not mutually exclusive strategies, but must go hand-in-hand.
Worker centers, legal advocacy, and community mobilization are non-union strategies for governing low-wage labor markets. The chapters in Part III, however, show that they can also intersect and provide crucial support for campaigns for unionization and collective bargaining rights. Joshua Bloom’s chapter on the Service Employees International Union drive among African American security officers usefully reminds us that community campaigns are not limited to immigrant workers. In the course of the campaign, union and community leaders mobilized discourses of race as well as labor, and worked to overcome organizational tensions between the union and its allies in order to build a deeper, more lasting alliance. In a chapter on UNITE HERE’s campaign among workers in the hotels near Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), Forrest Stuart shows how the union used protest tactics to dramatize the issues and win not only union recognition and contracts at several hotels but also city ordinances for a living wage and other worker protections. These and other case studies in the book show how organizers have worked to find alternative arenas or create new institutional spaces to bring public attention to low-wage workers and help govern their labor markets.
On the whole the book is well-written, with a sense of immediate immersion in the campaigns, though the proliferation of organizational and legislative acronyms can be confusing. Groups and individuals show up repeatedly across the chapters, supporting the book’s thesis of network density but also giving it somewhat of an insider feel. Most of the authors adopt a movement-centered, strategic organizing perspective, but it would have been good also to turn the focus outward to the broader structural and institutional terrain, the particular conjuncture of urban economic, demographic, and social forces, and the range of opportunities in the local political context. This would have allowed for a better comparative analysis of the “L.A. model” and how its specific features may or may not be replicable beyond the unique conditions of Los Angeles.
Finally, as editor Ruth Milkman acknowledges in her introduction, the worker centers and advocacy groups discussed here rely mainly on generating publicity and building community support to bring pressure on employers and prompt intervention by the state. They rarely have the capacity to maintain a large membership base, and they are far from having achieved a new, stable institutional order. They are part of a leading edge of organizational innovation focusing on largely unrepresented workers, and they contribute to an exploration of ways the American labor movement might be able to “re-democratize” the workplace and the economy. Working for Justice offers a valuable set of case studies that should interest not only labor specialists but also urban sociologists, political scientists, social movement scholars, and students of immigrant incorporation and racial and ethnic formation in the United States.