The CLEAN Carwash Initiative

South Los Angeles: Ahead of the Austerity Curve

The broader macroeconomic transformations described above impacted LA prior to the rest of the United States. Global competition encouraged the proliferation of low-wage and subcontracted work beginning in the mid-1970s, along with sweatshop conditions and an influx of immigration into the city (Milkman, Bloom, and Narro 2010, 4-5). Even as the overall city economy grew through the 1980s and 1990s, LA, and South LA in particular, became notorious for inequality and urban blight. In 1970, the poverty rate in LA was 10.9 % by 1990 it had grown to 15.1 percent. In 1990, African American men earned 73 percent of median white male earnings, and Latino men earned just 47 percent (Scott 1993, 1). When widespread rioting broke out in South LA in 1992, it brought attention to the historically African American area’s unusually high unemployment, lack of resources, and isolation (Sides 2012).

At the time of the riots, Latinos constituted 45.5 percent of the population of South LA (Sides 2012). Today, with over 1 million undocumented immigrants, LA is home to the largest undocumented population of any U.S. city. South LA was 66.3 percent Latino in 2010 (Fortuny, Capps, and Passel 2007). While the riots spurred much community organizing and some needed reforms, many problems remained and are today perpetuated by harsh cuts to social services. In 2010, 17.5 percent of LA residents lived below the poverty line while in South LA 40 percent lived below the poverty line (U.S. Census 2012). The erosion of the tax base over decades and the 2008 recession spurred a financial meltdown and expanded state and local deficits; nationwide, state revenues fell 13 percent between 2007 and 2009, the largest drop since World War II (Crotty 2012, 79-81).

California cut funding to public health, elderly and disabled care, early education funding, and higher education and cut its state workforce by 30,000. In total, it has cut $11.6 billion from its budget in the last five years and decreased general spending to its lowest level since the 1972-1973 budget (California Department of Finance 2012). With its education cuts, the state reduced K-12 aid to local school districts by billions of dollars and cut many programs, including adult literacy and help for high-needs students (Johnson, Oliff, and Williams 2011). This is a particularly troubling trend for immigrant communities like those in South LA, as the social safety net has historically supported immigrant integration and has been shown to limit the intergenerational transmission of poverty, especially in immigrant families (Terrazas 2011).

It is within this environment that carwash workers labor in conditions that openly contradict minimum wage and safety standards. A product of Southern California’s car culture, there are an estimated 500 carwashes in operation in LA County that collectively employ over 10,000 workers. While many carwashes in West LA are mechanized tunnels, the average carwash in South LA is based on labor-intensive hand-wash service. Carwasheros routinely work long hours in poorly ventilated and damp areas and are exposed to a variety of dangerous chemicals without adequate protective clothing (Justin McBride, interview, September 2013). Workers report their shoes’ melting from touching acidic products, chemical burns, and working long hours in the sun without water (Carwash Workers Organizing Committee [CWOC] 2008). In a recent interview with a twenty-six-year-old carwashero, one author was struck by the deep, dry, and bloody cracks in the man’s hands from years of handling harsh cleaning chemicals (Exar Amador Garay, interview, March 28, 2013).

These highly competitive carwashes generally employ around ten workers, most working in shifting job roles and under forty hours a week to avoid overtime. The employers and employees are almost exclusively immigrants. Owners are of Persian, Korean, Latino, and South Asian descent, while employees are almost all males of Latino descent (except front-office employees, who tend to be Latina women). The preponderance of men in the industry can make life uncomfortable for women as it can create an atmosphere of impunity for sexual harassment, especially if managers encourage it. Carwasheras have reported carwashes where men openly watch pornography or make uncomfortable advances. In one carwash, workers reported that a (female) manager actually forced female employees to turn tricks in the tunnel with customers (Justin McBride, interview, September 2013). For these reasons, the CLEAN initiative has given much importance to building a gender and anti-racist analysis in the movement and has fostered the organization of a Women’s Committee within the initiative. It has also built connections to immigrant and diaspora movements throughout LA, which it has used to leverage power in the campaign. The second CLEAN signatory was the president of the Korean Owners Association, who was pressured into signing with help from the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance.

Unscrupulous employers also routinely practice wage theft. The average carwash worker earns an estimated $12,500 annually with no benefits. Owners pay between $35 and $65 for 7-12 hours, and many workers are paid off the books. Meanwhile, carwashes service as many as 1,000 cars a day, with prices ranging from $5 to $150 and employer profit margins averaging as much as 29 percent (CWOC 2008). The situation for carwash workers is systemic. One UCLA study found low-wage workers in LA on average lost approximately $40 to wage theft for average weekly earnings of $318, and approximately 88 percent reported suffering pay-based violations in the previous work week (Milkman, González, and Narro 2010, 2-4). With strained public budgets, federal and state enforcement of safety and employment laws is barely visible. Nationally, between 1980 and 2007, the number of federal wage and hour inspectors declined by 31 percent, while the labor force grew by 52 percent. Similarly, the budget of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration was cut by $25 million between 2001 and 2007; at its current staffing and inspection levels, it would take the agency 133 years to inspect each workplace just once (Bernhardt et al. 2009, 2-4).

In the 1990s, legal aid attorneys, many from the Coalition for Low-Wage Immigrant Worker Advocates (CLIWA), began to address these conditions after carwash workers filed numerous complaints with local and state agencies. This was the genesis of what would become the CLEAN initiative. Advocates and workers soon found they were unable to collect on many claims—mainly because of the fluid nature of the industry and employer insolvency—and, with the help of the labor movement, pushed through AB 1688, “The Carwash Worker Law,” in 2003 (Garea and Stern 2010). The law mandated increased enforcement and required employers to pay a surety bond to cover suits and to pay into a fund in the event of insolvency. While the passage of the law galvanized the community actors behind it, it was a constant struggle to compel state enforcement and employer compliance, and undocumented workers often faced barriers to access its protections (Barry, Koukhab, and Osmer 2009). Although immigrants are protected by most of the same employment laws as U.S.-born workers, they often lack critical information and may be wary of engaging public institutions or rebuking their employers due to their immigration status. A 2012 survey of a fifteen-square-mile area of South LA revealed approximately half of carwashes in operation failed to register with the State Labor Commissioner or failed to post a required surety bond against wage theft, meaning they are operating in an underground fashion (Justin McBride, interview, September 2013).

In 2008, the CLEAN campaign was launched after two years of collaboration between the UCLA Downtown Labor Center, CLIWA, AFL-CIO, and USW. During this time UCLA’s Victor Narro was instrumental in building the necessary institutional connections. While litigation and legislative strategies brought discernible victories, worker advocates came to realize that they were precarious and depended on vigilant activism to sustain, as is frequently the case with worker center organizing on the basis of individual rights (Fine and Gordon 2010). Legal advocacy also left workers as relatively passive participants. In order to fundamentally reshape the industry, workers needed to organize with the support of institutions to enforce their own standards through collective bargaining and push employers towards establishing a wage floor.

The carwash industry is made up of hundreds of independent employers, so the only way to effectively set standards, organize, and build power for bargaining was to develop an industry-wide strategy. The coalition members envisioned that the initiative could both lift up the industry and become a transformative force in LA’s low-wage economy by broadly engaging community groups. As about 30 percent of the U.S. labor market is made up of low-wage work, and the typical low-wage worker earns a 20.6 percent higher wage as a union member, organizers hoped the initiative would tie into local struggles against inequality and inform other low-wage worker organizing drives, encouraging broad industry-wide community campaigns to establish collective bargaining (Schmitt 2012).

The CLEAN Model: Building Worker Power and Leadership

From the beginning, the initiative’s structure has benefitted from the in-depth insight and participation of carwash workers engaged in active organizing drives, community allies, and labor partners. It has three bodies, and each serves a unique function: a steering committee, a community action board (CAB), and CWOC of USW. CLEAN’s steering committee consists of representatives from the national AFL-CIO and USW; representatives from key community organizations, the Maintenance Cooperation Trust Fund, the UCLA Downtown Labor Center; and USW and AFL-CIO Campaign staff. This group oversees the CLEAN Initiative, ensures its financial sustainability, and promotes its development. Carwash workers active in the campaign make up and lead CWOC. CAB consists of leaders of more than a dozen worker centers and progressive organizations that are on the frontlines of the struggles for social and economic justice in Southern California. ¹ CAB meets regularly to consult, strategize, and plan with the steering committee and CWOC.

Since 2008, through aggressive community action campaigns that included public shaming, targeted litigation, picketing, and boycotts, workers and USW have won union recognition at four carwashes. They negotiated collective bargaining agreements that guarantee a wage of $8.16 an hour, access to health and safety equipment, special protections for immigrant workers, a voice in workplace issues, and a grievance and arbitration procedure. Since virtually the entire industry does not comply with minimum standards, this is a significant wage increase of over $3.00 an hour for most carwash workers from the previous unlawful rate of pay of $50 for up to a ten-hour day—for a full time worker it amounts to over $6,500 extra per year. While workers at some unionized carwashes have reported struggling with management over receiving enough working hours now that they have higher pay rates, through collective bargaining, they are empowered to address these and other workplace concerns (Justin McBride, interview, September 2013).

CWOC is also a key component of CLEAN’s organizing strategy. Carwash workers from dozens of carwashes are members of CWOC and meet regularly to share workplace strategies, participate in training and leadership development, and build solidarity. Leadership development has increased dramatically in workplace committees in individual carwashes too. Workers have established workplace committees in more than twenty-five carwashes. In these smaller groups, workers organize to collectively solve workplace issues without the benefits of a union contract. CWOC currently has over 40 active core members, and over 200 members who attend meetings or participate in other activities. By developing worker organizing and leadership skills, carwash workers become ongoing advocates in their workplace, which supports compliance with minimum standards and, ultimately, may raise standards across the industry. For most workers, CWOC is a support system and an avenue for increased agency. Upon joining, carwash workers receive a CWOC identification card. For undocumented workers, the cards are not just a sign of union engagement but also an invaluable form of secondary identification and a way to access local resources with community partners.

In 2009, CLEAN, in conjunction with the UCLA Downtown Labor Center, further strengthened its leadership development programming with the creation of the Carwash Worker Leadership Brigade, a program designed to train workers as a core of grassroots activists—brigadistas—at work and in their communities. The project provides participants with intensive weekly training on the fundamentals of leadership and community organizing. The group also receives industry-specific training on a variety of subjects, including workshops focused on addressing wage and hour violations, identifying health and safety issues in the carwash industry, and understanding the environmental impact of carwashes.

Much of CLEAN and CWOC’s leadership development programming can be traced back to the influence of one of the initiative’s early community partners, the Instituto de Educación Popular del Sur de California’s (IDEPSCA’s) long-time development of popular education in Southern California. Raul Añorve, IDEPSCA executive director, and Pablo Alvarado, now executive director of the National Day Labor Organizing Network, a close partner of AFL-CIO, spearheaded this technique among day laborers in the LA area. Through popular education workshops with day laborers, organizers applied the techniques of Paulo Freire, the father of critical pedagogy, to empower workers to critically examine the linkages between their situation and broader societal problems (Dziembowska 2010, 143-44).

For Freire, popular education should be a dialogical process by which the oppressed liberated themselves through reflection, analysis, and the development of collective action plans. Leaders were to coordinate the process but did not direct without collective reflection and support (Minkler and Cox 1980). Two of the initial CWOC organizers came from IDEPSCA and had a background in day labor organizing. The organizers brought their experience to CWOC, where it allowed them to build organizational power with the workers not just on the basis of labor organizing but also, according to a former CLEAN communications coordinator, by making connections to other issues important to the carwashero community, like immigration status, race and ethnicity, gender, and class (Roca-Servat 2010, 12-13).

In all, CLEAN’s organizing model weaves together multiple strategies to win justice for carwash workers, including union and community organizing and legal and legislative advocacy. Its methods of persuasion include targeted litigation, administrative complaints, mobilizations, and public education. Yet CLEAN’s most effective organizing tactics are often those in which the workers directly confront workplace exploitation. Workers regularly organize boycotts and picket low-end carwashes, and many creative and effective actions, such as street theater, take place on meal breaks or after hours with community support and involvement. For example, at the Melrose Carwash, over seventy workers and activists from various community groups performed street theater dressed in a variety of bright outfits representing a myriad of dangerous chemicals, after workers had complained for months about the harsh soap used. At another carwash, workers and members of Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice performed an exorcism of the evil spirits of wage theft from the carwash, and another time a Rosh Hashanah delegation delivered a basket of bitter herbs to the owner. Events like this not only effectively shed light on the poor working conditions in the industry but also allow workers and community activists to build relationships in a memorable way.

Expanding Health Care Access for Carwasheros

Not surprisingly, health inequities reflect the poverty and income inequality in South LA. One study by the Community Health Councils, a “Health Equity Scorecard,” found South LA had the highest overall rates of disease and premature deaths in the county from such preventable conditions as heart disease, diabetes, and lung cancer. Compared with the more affluent West LA and LA County overall, South LA had 43 percent fewer health resources than LA County and 115 fewer than West LA. In South LA, there are approximately 11 pediatricians for every 100,000 children, compared to 193 pediatricians for every 100,000 children in West LA. Facing state budget cuts, five hospitals have closed since 2000 in South LA, which now only has one, overtaxed, full-scale emergency room (Park, Watson, and Galloway-Gilliam 2008, 3-5, 22). Research using an ecological approach has also found that South LA lacks healthy food options and that businesses regularly promote unhealthy foods, compared to other areas of the county (Lewis et al. 2005).

Besides these structural inequities, immigrant communities face unique challenges to health care access. Immigration status has a profound impact on health care access: in California, one study found undocumented Mexican immigrants had 1.6 fewer physician visits than U.S.-born Mexicans and other undocumented Latinos had 2.1 fewer visits compared with U.S.-born counterparts (Ortega et al. 2007, 2354). In the last few decades, lawmakers have tested the public’s willingness to accept cuts to public benefits by first targeting the immigrant community. Legislative and regulatory restrictions passed in 1996 restricted public services for non-citizen immigrants, with the exception of emergency Medicaid. Social service providers report that immigrant families, even those of mixed status with benefit-eligible children, fear that attempting to access federal benefits will negatively impact their immigration status (Hagan et al. 2003, 445, 452). Parents also report that 7 percent of immigrant children are in fair to poor health, compared with 3 percent of native-born children (Capps et al. 2005, x). Furthermore, at the time of this writing, the current draft of the immigration reform bill—the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013 (S.744)—would subject newly regularized immigrants to the Affordable Care Act’s requirement to have health insurance or pay a tax penalty; however, during the duration of their provisional status, these people will not be eligible for the Affordable Care Act’s premium tax credits and cost-sharing reductions that help make health insurance affordable.

In 2010, CWOC worked with IDEPSCA to organize two health fairs at the UCLA Downtown Labor Center for carwash and day laborers (CLEAN Carwash Campaign 2010). This movement for accessible health care grew into an institutionalized relationship with St. John’s Well Child and Family Center, a major South LA nonprofit network of health centers and school-based clinics, to expand clinic access for carwash workers and their families. Through its Social Medicine Program and under the visionary leadership of director Jim Mangia, St. John’s seeks to advance good health that “reflects and gives life to social values like opportunity, social justice, equity, and democracy” (St. John’s Well Child and Family Center n.d.). With the partnership, carwash workers can access the clinic’s full array of medical services at no cost and can receive care from health providers trained in the hazards common to the carwash industry. The partnership is designed to connect health care access to CLEAN’s workplace organizing—workers access the clinics with their CWOC ID cards—and St. John’s community organizing, which engages diverse groups in an effort to reshape the health environment in South LA.

It was for these reasons that Manuel Aguilar, a Salvadoran immigrant in South LA, joined CWOC and regularly participates in St. John’s Clinic Right to Health committee, a group that seeks to educate policymakers about the unique health care needs of low-income workers. According to Aguilar, “My children are getting bigger, and they are going to need access to quality health care. If we don’t fight for it now, they may not have much of a future” (Manuel Aguilar, interview, January 2012). He and many other carwash workers sit on the committees and join St. John’s mainly Latino and Black patients, staff, and community members in calling for health equity in LA. The staff union, SEIU Local 721, as well as Strategic Actions for a Just Economy and Esperanza Community Housing Corporation take an active role in developing the committees’ programs. Through the committee, carwash workers actively confront the conditions of austerity that place them in vulnerable conditions, visiting lawmakers and participating in events to defend community clinic funding from budget cuts.

With the St. John’s partnership, the CLEAN Initiative, carwash workers in the Right to Health Committees, the clinic staff, and the Esperanza Community Housing Corporation are working to develop a more comprehensive community health program in South LA. A CLEAN staff expert developed a training session for clinic providers on hazards in the carwash industry, and St. John’s is training health care professionals in work-related health issues (Lisa Hubbard, interview, March 23, 2012). More to this end, the CLEAN steering committee seeks to integrate with Esperanza Community Housing Corporation’s community health promoters programs. Esperanza’s promotoras are trained in a variety of roles, from community health leaders, to patient advocates, to community organizers, and reach more than 20,000 community residents annually (Esperanza Community Housing n.d.).

Promotoras have become widely accepted in underserved communities and have been shown to have positive interventions on health outcomes for heart disease, diabetes, cancer, nutrition, and other health maladies (Waitzkin et al. 2011, 317). While this expansion is still in the planning and strategy phase, as with tying CWOC cards to clinic access, the promotoras could serve an important role in organizing carwash workers in their communities. By connecting workers with promotoras, health care would go beyond superficial health and safety solutions—like providing gloves to protect workers from chemical burns. Instead, promotoras would assess the totality of a worker’s lifestyle, from housing, to work, to nutrition, and serve as a liaison to both health resources and local efforts to address negative social conditions, like tenants’ organizing for safe and affordable housing or community members’ fighting for social services.

In line with Freire’s philosophy, and reflecting other applications of popular education to health care, these health care partnerships do not end with health but rather seek to address the total oppressive social structure (Minkler and Cox 1980, 314-17). In cities across the United States, non-citizens, excluded from most institutions of power, begin to form their political identities in union activity and in residential settings where they establish connections within their neighborhoods (Roca-Servat 2010). In the course of their interactions and participation with government agencies, carwash workers have begun to overcome feeling isolated from the political system and increasingly believe in their ability to shape public institutions (Roca-Servat 2010). The workers in the CLEAN initiative take these connections further by first empowering themselves through extensive analysis and then holistically organizing against the inequities and injustices that have most affected their lives. While the St. John’s partnership is still in its infancy, it is one of the more promising aspects of CLEAN’s organizing that connects it to the vibrant social movement landscape of LA.

Moving beyond Models: CLEAN and the Community

In January 2013, CLEAN moved its base of operations from East Hollywood and opened the Carwash Worker Center in South LA, which is now the center of the initiative. The building is a safe space for carwash workers and their families, who regularly participate in a number of training programs, including English classes, training in car detailing skills so workers can move up in the industry, and expanded leadership development training. When comprehensive immigration reform becomes a reality, the worker center will be key in assisting carwash workers to navigate what is likely to be a complex maze of regulations as well as the registration and application process. The move to South LA represents the steering committee’s recognition that much of the campaign’s power has been built in the carwash workers’ neighborhoods through extensive local networking among workers through various organizations. South LA is home to a vast infrastructure of community and immigrant rights groups, which have undergirded the union organizing campaign from the beginning. LA’s robust civil society has supported organizing by day laborers, janitors, and garment and hotel workers. As Ruth Milkman et al. (2010, 7) put it, many organizers consider LA to be the “major R&D center for twenty-first century unionism.”

In the process of creating a union-worker center, the initiative has had to address the complications of integrating two distinct but not incompatible strategies for building worker power. Worker centers tend to be community oriented with informal membership and dues structures, and they typically employ individual problem-based strategies. Unions, conversely, utilize institutional strategies, through contracts, somewhat scientific worksite organizing, and collective bargaining, for cementing workplace gains. CLEAN continues to struggle to find a balance between union organizing, community mobilization, and providing critical worker center services to carwash workers. However, the steering committee and the CAB member organizations have drawn from their collective experiences to provide insight into the development of the carwash worker center and its relation to winning collective bargaining for workers. The unique makeup of the initiative has allowed it to be flexible as members organize in the community but also to concretize economic gains made through union organizing.

By moving to South LA, CLEAN took a firm step toward building a “community union” and incorporating the needs of the carwasheros into its service-providing worker center programs, while continuing to fight to lift up the carwash industry by establishing collective bargaining widely. But in the quest for labor innovation and new models of representation, practitioners must not lose focus on the sources of worker power. Examining radical urban movements in the 1960s, Ira Katznelson argues that, in American urban politics, “there is a radical separation in people’s consciousness, speech, and activity of the politics of work from the politics of community.” Workers are workers at work but residents, ethnics, political party supporters, consumers, and family members at the community level (Katznelson 1982, 6, 12-18). As the initiative seeks to blur institutional lines between traditional union structures and worker center programs, it is also working to challenge the subjective divisions between workplace and community objectives. Through extensive worker training, worker-driven programs, and solidarity actions the initiative’s organizing drive builds community support, and by establishing standards in the carwash industry, it supports the overall advancement of the low-wage community.

The stable allocation of resources and institutional support for these kinds of relationships allow the initiative to further activate carwash workers as agents of change in South LA, in both the workplace and the community. Besides funding from AFL-CIO and USW, much of the CLEAN initiative’s resources have come from progressive allies in the philanthropy community. Funders have recognized, reflecting on the CLIWA experience, that workers are better served through long-term organizing and institutionalized power than individualized projects that only address temporary (if reoccurring) problems like wage theft.

CWOC activists regularly incorporate action geared toward lifting up LA’s low-wage workers. Carwash workers march in the annual Workers’ Memorial Day demonstration, which honors workers killed on the job in the previous year, work to expose the public to the realities of wage theft through their participation in the Los Angeles Wage Theft Coalition, and support other non-traditional campaigns. For example, carwasheros assisted Restaurant Opportunities Center LA at actions against the Capitol Grille to secure paid sick days. Interestingly, Restaurant Opportunities Center LA is also partnering with St. John’s to provide access to health care for over 75,000 restaurant workers who lack insurance and has shown great support for carwash workers at various events, which is indicative of the growing networks of low-wage worker organizing in the city (Reddy 2012). The initiative has also supported the Bus Riders’ Union in numerous actions at the Metro Board advocating for inexpensive and accessible bus service and to prevent bus lines used by low-wage workers from being eliminated during budget cuts. This is an issue of key importance for carwash workers who, ironically, generally cannot afford cars.

Similarly, through the Leadership Brigade program, carwash brigadistas have become some of the best-known members of the LA progressive community. They are regular attendees at actions arranged by community allies, in the process sending a message of solidarity and educating others about the carwash struggle. Brigadistas have taken a leadership role for workers in other industries, educating trash and recycling workers and warehouse employees about safety hazards, participating in a caravan with other unions to support locked-out borax miners in Death Valley, and helping to draft a local ordinance to combat wage theft as part of the Wage Theft Coalition. The initiative’s level of activism was such that CLEAN was one of only two labor groups invited to participate with the Community Coalition—a historic local organization founded to address the roots causes of crime, substance abuse, and poverty—in the South LA Summer Power Festival. This event solidified CLEAN’s place in South LA, as only groups deeply engaged in the community were invited to participate (Justin McBride, interview, September 2013).

For workers like Luzelena Oseguera, the Brigade program has provided a space to develop critical organizing and advocacy skills. Oseguera was fired for attempting to organize at a carwash, but with Brigade training and support, through a grant-funded scholarship, she was able to become a health and safety expert and support other workers in their union organizing activity. She is currently working with several other Brigade graduates to create a carwash worker cooperative, which would allow workers to keep carwash profits for themselves (David Campbell, interview, May 2012). Again, while this project is still in its infancy, if successful it would contribute to dramatically restructuring the industry, demonstrating the centrality of worker leadership development to the overall initiative.

In the next year, CLEAN hopes to win at least four new carwash signatories to the CLEAN Agreement or a collective bargaining agreement and to help workers build worksite committees at twenty new carwashes in LA, with a special focus on South LA. Achieving that goal would bring the initiative closer to full sustainability from a membership dues structure. That would further insulate the initiative from the uncertainty of outside funding streams and would ensure that CLEAN remains a space for workers to reshape low-wage industries and agitate for community change. In seeking justice for carwash workers, the initiative confronts the fact that, even with a union contract, many carwasheros are still without documents, which isolates them from public services and keeps them in the shadows. Carwash leaders will continue to work to raise consciousness in marginalized communities and build connections with immigrant rights groups, DREAMers, and community groups like Strategic Actions for a Just Economy and the Black Worker Center to address institutionalized racism and systematic disparities based on race, gender, class, and legal status and will push for reform.

Conclusions

Union organizing remains central to CLEAN’s mission and is the core of its efforts toward institutional sustainability. As more workers win collective bargaining, the union will have greater leverage over the industry and will be able to push for higher standards, contributing to overall community development. But as laid out here, the initiative is not a traditional worksite organizing campaign. CLEAN leaders envision the initiative becoming an economic justice organizing hub in South LA, blurring artificial lines between movement and institution as well as work and community. In today’s economy, traditional workplace organizing is increasingly tenuous, and it is clear that rebuilding the power of the labor movement will require new strategies. In this case, CLEAN has built up its union organizing drive by connecting with non-traditional allies and mobilizing whole communities to reshape the exploitative industry.

CLEAN’s success in organizing carwashes has inspired similar community-based organizing efforts in other cities. In Chicago, after learning of the LA campaign, carwash workers with the ARISE worker center contacted USW and received a commitment to help workers organize the industry. ARISE has organized worker leaders from multiple car washes to form an Organizing Committee (ARISE Chicago n.d.). In New York, workers from five carwashes have won elections under the auspices of the National Labor Relations Board in which they chose the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union as their exclusive bargaining representative. In the spirit of the CLEAN initiative, that campaign is an amalgam of worker center and union organizing strategies, led by two prominent New York worker centers: Make the Road New York and New York Communities for Change (Semple 2012). In New Mexico, workers at the Squeaky Clean Car Wash formed a Comité de Trabajadores and with the United Workers Center of New Mexico are also currently attempting to form a union. Representatives from the various campaigns met recently to discuss strategy and best practices and to build a common analysis of the industry.

Beyond the carwash industry, warehouse workers, taxi drivers, fast food workers, public employees in right-to-work states, domestic workers, and other marginalized groups are organizing and building collective power by connecting with and expanding community networks. Where unions and worker centers collaborate and work in partnership, communities are mobilizing and connecting with unions, showing more interest in supporting organizing campaigns and collective bargaining (Theodore 2010). With the rampant growth of low-wage work and lawmakers chipping away at already eroded social safety nets, the labor movement needs to adopt strategies that bring workers out of a state of precariousness, in the process training them to become informed agents of change in exploitative industries. The success of building this kind of worker power may be difficult to measure using standard metrics, as a broad and inclusive movement includes both union and non-union workers. However, with progressively less density in most industries, unions cannot neglect the importance of connecting with communities to leverage demands against employers, especially in dispersed low-wage and often informal industries like the carwash industry. The workers and organizers of CLEAN initiative have sought to build this kind of power and are challenging us to rethink the way we evaluate the role of unions in representing workers.