Organizing Temporary,Subcontracted,and Immigrant Workers

Organizing Warehouse Workers in Inland Southern California: Opportunities and Challenges

Inland Southern California is home to about one billion square feet of warehouses and distribution centers (hereafter, warehouses). Warehouses are the most recognizable part of a vast distribution network that expanded during the 1990s and 2000s to accommodate growing trade through Southern California’s ports (Bonacich and Wilson 2007). Inland counties enabled the Long Beach and Los Angeles Ports to expand to record heights because they provided access to the large land parcels and cheap labor required by modern mega-warehouses (De Lara, forthcoming). In addition to storing and keeping track of products for distribution to big box retail and wholesale stores, tens of thousands of warehouse workers employed in the region help to prepare, assemble, and package the goods for sale (Struna et al. 2012). Because the demand for retail goods fluctuates, logistics firms frequently use temporary agencies to recruit warehouse workers (Bonacich and Wilson 2007; Gonos and Martino 2011).

Most blue-collar warehouse workers in Inland Southern California are Latino, male, and have high school educations or less. Immigrants make up somewhere between 25 and 40 percent of these workers, while 30 to 40 percent are women (Allison, Herrera, and Reese 2015). These workers, especially temporary ones, commonly earn less than US$15/hour and face unstable employment, with about 70 percent unemployed for several months or more out of the year (Allison, Herrera, and Reese 2015; Bonacich and De Lara 2009; De Lara 2013). Another survey found that 65 percent of local warehouse workers either personally experienced or witnessed a workplace-related injury; surveyed workers attributed these injuries to dangerous machinery as well as managerial pressure to work fast (Struna et al. 2012; WWU and Cornelio 2011).

The concentration of highly exploited warehouse workers in Inland Southern California promised a lucrative pool of potential union members. Key CTW leaders, including representatives from the SEIU, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (hereafter, Teamsters), funded WWU in 2008 with a mandate to organize warehouse workers across the United States. The intent was to focus on emerging economic sectors that formed part of the new global economy and which labor had largely failed to organize. ² Indeed, this campaign was initiated at about the same time as two other major, union-sponsored regional efforts to organize warehouse workers. These include New Labor’s warehouse worker campaign in New Jersey, sponsored by CTW and other unions, and Warehouse Workers for Justice in Chicago, formed in 2009 and supported by United Electrical Workers (Gonos and Martino 2011; Luce 2014).

Few of the region’s warehouse workers belonged to unions prior to the 2008 WWU campaign. While Teamsters Locals did represent warehouse workers at a few companies, these workers made up a small share of the union’s overall membership. Both the Teamsters and the International Longshore Workers Union (ILWU) had attempted a number of small-scale organizing campaigns that targeted specific individual warehouses prior to the WWU launch. ³ In contrast, WWU was framed as an industry-wide project that organized at the regional scale to capture warehouses that fed the retail portion of the global commodity chain. More specifically, union leaders made a key decision to define warehouse work by targeting blue-collar occupations, many of which were occupied by contingent and immigrant labor. This meant that other logistics workers, including direct-hire clerical workers who were also based inside of the region’s warehouses, were not active targets for the campaign.

Yet, warehouse workers’ social and employment status posed a number of organizing challenges. First, organizers discovered that many warehouse workers were undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Central America. As such, they were vulnerable to antiunion employers who could use the threat of deportation to stifle union campaigns. Such threats are common among employers, who regularly fire and intimidate workers to prevent successful organizing campaigns (Bronfenbrenner 2009). A second barrier was the decentralized structure of the warehouse industry, especially its reliance on subcontracting and temporary labor. The lack of a clear central boss posed a challenge to traditional union organizing methods (Bonacich and Wilson 2007; Gonos and Martino 2011).

While other scholars have brought attention to the legal and practical challenges of organizing subcontracted workers (e.g., see Bonacich and Appelbaum 2000; Chun 2009; Fine 2006; Jenkins 2002; Luce 2014; Milkman 2006; Waldinger et al. 1998), less attention has been paid to temporary agency workers, which represent a growing portion of the U.S. labor market (Luo 2010). As of 2014, more than 2.87 million workers, representing 2 percent of the labor force, were employed through temporary help agencies (National Labor Relations Board 2015).

Legally, temporary workers’ right to collective bargaining is ambiguous, shifting, and complicated, due in no small part to the active efforts of temporary agencies and union avoidance industries and the shifting political composition of the National Labor Relations Board (for an excellent review of legal cases involving temporary workers’ collective bargaining rights, see Feldman and Klaas 1996; Hatton 2011; Krasas Rogers 2000; Vacarro 2002). Unions have shied away from temp worker organizing, especially because contingent bargaining units are determined on a case-by-case basis (Hatton 2011). ⁴

Within this context, the rise of the temp industry has weakened U.S. labor unions’ bargaining power because contingent workers tend to fear employer or agency retaliation for exercising their ambivalent labor rights (Hatton 2011; Krasas Rogers 2000). Although unionization could help to improve temporary workers’ wages and benefits and help to stabilize their employment, previous research finds that temps’ desire for permanent employment and belief that employers will reward them for good job performance encourage their self-discipline and compliance (Smith 1998). It also suggests that the organization of temporary work fosters ad hoc and individualistic coping and resistance strategies rather than collective forms of resistance (Krasas Rogers 2000). Temporary workers may also perceive conflicts of interest with unions, such as when unions (typically dominated by regular employees) seek to limit temporary employment or establish seniority clauses (Campbell 1996; Malo 2006; Polvieja and Richards 2001; Reynolds 2002).

As Huws (2006) suggests, when labor laws are lax and organized labor is weak, employers have used temporary workers to reduce the bargaining power of unions by creating a contingent and disposable “reserve army of labor” (Marx [1867] 1990). ⁵ Most unions oppose and seek to restrict nonstandard work contracts as employers have used them to divide the workforce, increase job insecurity, break strikes, and undermine unions (Campbell 1996; Hatton 2011).

Aside from the legal challenges of unionizing temporary workers, temps pose a number of daunting organizing problems. They have high turnover; are widely dispersed across multiple employers, industries, and occupations; and are often concentrated in smaller, nonunionized workplaces. In recent recessionary periods (2001-2003 and 2007-2008), temporary workers faced particularly high levels of unemployment, with employment rate declines of 20 percent, compared with 2 percent decreases in total employment (Luo, Mann, and Holden 2010). The working conditions and subjectivities among temporary agency workers also vary considerably. While disproportionately women and people of color, this workforce varies demographically and in terms of their occupations and skill levels; it is also subject to dynamic and variable institutional arrangements between temporary agencies and employing firms (Campbell 1996; Choudry and Henaway 2012; Garsten 1999; Krasas Rogers 2000; Malo 2006; Smith 1998).

Despite, and in light of, the legal and practical challenges of organizing immigrant, subcontracted, and temporary workers, U.S. labor activists have pursued various strategies to organize them, sometimes with success. Below, we consider how the WWU campaign builds upon, or contrasts with, these earlier efforts.

Strategies for Organizing Immigrant, Subcontracted, and Temporary Workers: Prior Research

CTW staff decided to focus on immigrant workers early in the campaign. Until 2000, the leadership of the AFL-CIO cited undocumented immigrants’ vulnerability to deportation, to justify its historic failure to organize such workers (Delgado 1993). Yet a number of immigrant-led union campaigns in the janitorial, hotel, manufacturing, and construction sectors during the 1990s reminded labor leaders that immigrants could in fact organize themselves into collective bargaining units (Milkman and Wong 2000). Indeed, immigrant social capital and dense social networks—the same forces used to recruit workers into marginal industries—served as important assets in these campaigns. Successful organizing campaigns and mounting political pressure from within labor’s ranks caused the AFL-CIO to change positions on immigrant workers. As a result, several national unions launched immigrant worker initiatives. By 2010, the renewed focus helped to close the unionization rate gap between immigrant and nonimmigrant workers (Milkman 2011).

How have unions managed to organize within the “irregular” or nontraditional labor markets occupied by low-wage immigrant workers? SEIU and HERE in particular have used community-based social movement tactics to compensate for a decentralized and marginalized labor force. As Chun (2009) argues, when “irregular,” subcontracted, temporary, or marginalized workers are lacking in social power, they can use “symbolic power,” the power of naming themselves, their rights, and their opponents, by engaging in “classification struggles” and “public dramas” that appeal to the values and ideas of broader sectors of society. Through “classification struggles,” workers establish, often through litigation or legislation, their rights to engage in collective bargaining as workers, and they establish which employers should be held accountable for their working conditions in the context of subcontracting, independent contracting, or temporary employment. Using dramatic collective actions involving allies, workers’ testimonies, and media attention, they also create “public dramas” that appeal to broader sectors of society (such as students, consumers, and the media) to increase public pressure on employers to improve workplace conditions. These tactics tend to be most effective when they target “institutions that are susceptible to public opinion such as governments, brand-driven corporations, and universities” (Chun 2009, 18-19). Building community-labor alliances and using social movement tactics to support organized workers is certainly not new within the U.S. labor movement, but it builds upon methods developed by the United Farm Workers (UFW) in the 1960s and union corporate campaigns that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. It also builds on consumer boycott campaigns, such as those carried out by United Students against Sweatshops, and more recent campaigns targeting low-wage and marginalized U.S. workers (Brecher and Costello 1990; Clawson 2003; Fine 2006; Luce 2014; Milkman 2000; Ness 2002; Reese 2011; Tait 2005). Such strategies have enabled subcontracted farm workers, garment workers, and janitors to win union contracts as well as better wages and working conditions from companies (Bonacich and Appelbaum 2000; Leary 2005; Luce 2014; Musynske 2009; Waldinger et al. 1998).

Other efforts to organize subcontracted low-wage immigrant workers have been carried out by worker centers (Milkman 2011). Jenkins (2002) argues that worker centers often rely on advocacy power when workers lack social power and are difficult to unionize. This is true for low-wage immigrant workers in industries like garment and janitorial, where firms tend to be small and dispersed or heavily reliant on subcontracted labor. He suggests that the advocacy model has been effective in organizing some of the most powerless social groups and in correcting labor law violations. Fine’s (2006) study of immigrant worker centers in the United States similarly claims that these centers have helped to provide collective voice, leadership development, legal support, and other resources to low-wage workers within industries that are difficult to unionize. She finds that litigation and collective actions, such as pickets and national consumer boycotts, carried out by these workers’ centers have succeeded in correcting illegal practices and winning back pay for victims of wage theft. She concludes that “most of their successes at broad labor market intervention have so far come via public policy rather than direct pressure on firms and industries” (Fine 2006, 266).

We argue that prior efforts to organize temporary agency workers in the United States have similarly relied upon the use of “symbolic” and “advocacy” power. As Hatton (2011) demonstrates, active union resistance to the growth of temporary employment in the United States was rare until the 1980s, when temps began to spread into more male-dominated and unionized sectors and when temporary agencies abandoned their earlier efforts to placate unions. Since the 1990s, unions sought to improve temporary workers’ rights through collective bargaining, litigation, and advocacy power. Yet, these efforts have been “isolated and piecemeal” (Hatton 2011, 18) and marked by uneven success.

Efforts to make gains for temporary workers through unionization and collective bargaining in the United States have occurred, but rarely. For example, in New Orleans in the mid-1990s, SEIU Local 1000 successfully organized garbage truck workers hired through a temporary agency and won a union contract for them through an effective strike. Through contract negotiations in the 1990s, other unions, such as the Communications Workers of America and the Labor Pool Workers Union in Atlanta, transformed temporary positions into regular, full-time positions, while American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees created a unionized pool of temporary workers that was given hiring priority for full-time, permanent job openings (Hatton 2011). More generally, the myriad legal and practical challenges discussed above discouraged unionization among temporary employees.

In light of such challenges, unions in the late 1990s and early 2000s experimented with empowering temporary agency workers and improving their employment conditions through a membership organization as well as a “high wage,” nonprofit temporary agency designed to compete with low-wage, for-profit temporary agencies. Mobilizing temporary workers into a membership association proved difficult, however, given their preoccupation with making ends meet and their wide scattering across worksites and occupations. Despite some initial successes with job placement, most of these agencies, which struggled to compete with for-profit temporary agencies and to provide workers ongoing training and high-paying temporary jobs, closed their doors (Hatton 2011; Neuwirth 2004, 2006; Reynolds 2002).

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, community-labor alliances (networks or partnerships between community and labor organizations) and unions sought to improve conditions of temporary agency workers through still another type of strategy: seeking public policy changes through the use of “symbolic power” and coalition building or the use of “advocacy power” and litigation. Community-labor alliances organized temporary workers into workers’ centers, membership associations, or multiemployer bargaining units. These organizations provided information to temporary workers about their rights and the quality of jobs of different user firms along with other benefits. They also promoted employer codes of conduct and state and local legislation to improve temporary workers’ employment conditions. Networks among these organizations eventually led to the formation of the National Alliance for Fair Employment in 2000, which promoted grassroots organizing and federal, state, and local legislation to expand temporary workers’ rights (Carre and Tilly 1998; Hatton 2011; Reynolds 2002). Given the enormous political influence of the temporary help industry and pro-business bias of policy makers, only a few legislative campaigns succeeded (Hatton 2011). For example, activists obtained legislation to prohibit or cap transportation and other fees charged to temporary workers in Illinois (2005), Florida (2005), and Rhode Island (2004), and legislation in Rhode Island (1998) requiring agencies to provide information to temporary workers regarding their job descriptions, pay rate, and work schedules. Campaigns targeting Labor Ready, initiated by construction workers’ unions, obtained legal rulings against unfair fees and deductions from temporary workers’ paychecks in Arizona in 2002 and in New York in 2006 (Hatton 2011; Reynolds 2002).

In summary, unions have, on rare occasions, used unionization and contract negotiations to improve temporary workers’ employment conditions, but the legal and practical obstacles for unionization among temporary workers discourage this. Most organized efforts to improve temporary workers’ employment conditions have done so either through litigation and advocacy power, or through symbolic power to build support for new regulatory policies; the power and influence of businesses, including the temporary help industry, have limited the success of these efforts, however. Such strategies resemble those carried out by unions and worker centers on behalf of subcontracted immigrant workers (Chun 2009; Fine 2006; Jenkins 2002; Luce 2014; Milkman 2011).

Data and Method

Our research on WWU is based on participant observation as well as information provided to us by organizational staff and student interns. As Chair of University of California-Riverside’s Labor Studies Program, Reese supervised over fifty students completing internships with WWU or WWRC between Winter 2008 and Fall 2013. Struna, as UCR’s Labor Studies Coordinator, also helped to supervise these interns between 2010 and 2013. In these roles, we have reviewed the course assignments produced by student interns for these organizations and discussed their activities with them. Since 2011, Reese also serves as a member of the WWRC Board. Struna has completed field research on WWU, and interviews with twenty-one current and former warehouse workers since 2010, of which he draws on eleven interviews for this article. De Lara has conducted more than one hundred interviews with warehouse workers, WWU staff, and local community leaders. Material for this article was drawn from over thirty interviews with current and former warehouse workers and union staff, including staff with CTW, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), and the Teamsters. Each interview lasted anywhere from one to two hours. Most of the interviews were audiotaped and transcribed. De Lara’s forthcoming book about global commodity chains and worker organizing in Southern California is based on interviews, participant observation, and socioeconomic data analysis. Along with other volunteer work for WWU and WWRC, all three authors participated in multiple actions, meetings, presentations, and tours of the warehouse district organized by WWU and WWRC staff between 2008 and 2013. We have also engaged in informal conversations with worker leaders and WWU and WWRC staff. In addition, we have reviewed media and Internet coverage of WWU’s and WWRC’s activities and research about this industry to supplement our fieldwork.

Phase 1: Targeting the Regional Warehouse Industry (2008-2009)

One of the most significant elements of CTW’s early warehouse campaign was its industry-wide regional organizing strategy, which drew upon organizers’ own previous experiences with low-wage immigrant workers through the SEIU, HERE, and the UFW. CTW leaders believed that any attempt to improve wages and working conditions in the region’s warehouses would require an industry-wide approach. According to this logic, by raising the wage floor across the entire industry, individual firms would be unable to undercut union companies.

Organizing Inland Southern California’s warehouse sector, which spanned a wide geographical area, was an especially vexing problem because the initial staff only included two researchers, a community organizer, and a few worker organizers. To avoid employer retaliation by warehouses, temporary agencies, and retailers against workers that might support their campaign, CTW initially shunned traditional workplace-based organizing methods. Instead, they located potential members through a community-based recruitment model. They identified workers through door-to-door canvasing, at neighborhood markets, churches, and public parks; through an automatic telephone survey; and through information obtained from staffing agencies. Organizers then engaged in house visits and small group meetings where workers were residentially concentrated to build leadership among warehouse workers; worker leaders recruited additional members and identified potential targets for collective action.

The first mass meeting, held in January 2009, drew approximately two hundred people, including warehouse workers and members of local community organizations and churches. From the beginning, organizers stressed the social movement aspect of the campaign, urged attendees to recruit friends and coworkers, and unveiled a text messaging communication system. To make the meeting accessible to workers (mostly Latinos and about 40 percent of whom were women), child care and simultaneous translation equipment were provided for the attendees, many of whom were Spanish-speaking immigrants. At the meeting, workers shared their grievances about low wages and bad working conditions and expressed unity and willingness to take action. Organizers also began to identify their campaign as a regional effort and encouraged workers to sign up as members of WWU. WWU enabled organizers to cultivate a social movement narrative that allowed workers to join without first having to become union members. It later solved a thorny political issue for the national CTW staff, who were negotiating with the Teamsters over how future members would fit into local unions. From the beginning, CTW leadership wanted to create an organizing campaign among warehouse workers without threatening Teamsters locals, some of which viewed warehouse workers as part of their jurisdiction. Thus, the WWU not only provided a community-based social movement model, it also enabled nationally and internationally coordinated planning around commodity chain workers without undermining local union authority.

Worker meetings and events were crucial because local CTW staff were under constant pressure to show that they had a viable campaign. CTW national leadership met regularly to analyze early organizing results and to determine whether the campaign should continue. Early success and the ability of organizers to cultivate a large list of possible warehouse workers led CTW leaders to fund a “blitz” campaign, during which they hired a large team of short-term professional organizers, mostly from other unions or recent college graduates. Members of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now were also hired to help with these efforts.

Phase 2: Targeting Walmart (2010-2013)

By 2010, WWU was forced to switch strategies and targets, partly in response to its loss of funding from the Teamsters. While CTW leaders in Washington, D.C., expected new dues-paying members to materialize quickly, local staff believed that any meaningful victory would require a longer term investment and a regulatory approach to worker organizing. Bypassing regional public officials (mostly Republican), they instead sought assistance from district courts, state regulatory agencies, and the state legislature. This regulatory strategy resembled some worker center campaigns that strategically targeted specific companies through complaints against wage theft and other labor law violations (Fine 2006) and that relied upon the “advocacy power” of lawyers and legal interns to make gains for workers (Jenkins 2002). While union recognition was not an immediate goal, organizers hoped that workers would eventually be convinced of the need to form a union, and that regulatory pressure on retailers would help to facilitate union recognition and contract negotiations.

The new strategy also involved focusing on one major target, Walmart, which brought together a number of national CTW unions into a concerted multinodal, global commodity chain campaign. Walmart’s status as a large, highly visible, and profitable industry leader dependent on its network of contract relationships meant that organizing its warehouses would have a significant impact across the entire sector. This focus also allowed WWU to join (and receive new funding from) UFCW’s transnational “Making Change at Walmart” campaign, which involved organizing Walmart workers across its global supply chain. Together, the Walmart campaign would include retail workers (organized by UFCW), port truckers (organized by the Teamsters), in addition to warehouse workers (organized by WWU in Inland Southern California, Warehouse Workers for Justice in Chicago, and New Labor in New Jersey) as well as workers in Walmart’s global supply chain (namely, in South Korea, Chile, China, and Bangladesh).

This new focus also meant a change in scales, from targeting a regional industry to challenging a transnational company’s retail and distribution chain while targeting state regulatory agencies and legislators. As WWU remained active in its regional alliances, coalition building became more strategically focused around Walmart; this helped to broaden and maintain media interest in WWU’s campaign as various anti-Walmart actions took place both nationally and internationally (Luce 2014). Yet, it also meant that organizers limited their support for workers from warehouses that did not serve Walmart.

The switch in strategy also led to the formal development of the WWRC. The WWRC was officially formed as a legal entity at the end of 2011 to pursue additional funding streams for its legal cases. It also allowed local staff to develop self-sustaining funds that would enable elements of the campaign to continue, even if CTW withdrew funding from it. WWRC received several grants from private foundations and the U.S. Department of Labor to hold legal clinics to educate members about their legal rights and how to file complaints against labor law violations. WWRC staff and interns then followed up with workers to support them through the process of filing their complaints. One WWRC staff person was also hired through UFCW funds to organize the community in support of several “site fights” targeting Walmart.

Along with documenting health and safety concerns in collaboration with university researchers (Struna et al. 2012; WWU and Cornelio 2011), WWRC compiled personal testimonies and other supporting documents to build strong legal and administrative cases against health and safety, wage and hour, and workers’ compensation violations in warehouses that served Walmart or its subcontractors. In most cases, complaints were simultaneously made against multiple employers (temporary agencies, warehouses, and retailers). This strategy was bolstered by worker education sessions that produced worker leaders who could identify and document labor law violations in their own workplaces, and who fostered an organizational base with coworkers within specific workplaces.

WWU’s campaign was reinvigorated through a series of protests and collective actions by warehouse workers and their allies. In the spring of 2011, additional funding enabled WWU to hire more organizers. Several of the new organizers were drawn from other unions, but others were recruited from the pool of warehouse workers who now made up the membership base. Collective actions were organized in conjunction with various legal and administrative cases or to protest employer retaliation against workers involved in these cases. Unfair labor practice strikes were frequently held as bookends to the campaigns—kicking off or closing actions at particular facilities—and often proved a catalyst for reinstatement of fired workers, or significant improvement to health, safety, and wage practices.

In April 2012, WWU joined the “National Guestworker Alliance, Bangladesh Center for Workers Solidarity . . . New Labor, Warehouse Workers for Justice, and Jobs with Justice” in a call to Walmart to establish and enforce “core principles” that “ensure and protect the basic rights and safety of the workers who labor to produce and transport the merchandise that arrives on its shelves every day” (WWU 2013b). To bring greater media attention to their own particular demands, WWU organized several dramatic collective actions that September—namely, a fifteen-day strike by warehouse workers and a six-day, fifty-mile public march (with a series of rallies) by warehouse workers and their supporters from WWU’s office in Ontario, California, to Los Angeles (LA) City Hall (Bailey 2012; Luce 2014). Marchers stayed nights in churches of various denominations (some of which were affiliated with Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice). While only a few dozen warehouse workers marched the entire route (sometimes in triple-digit heat), hundreds of workers and supporters rallied at various points along the march. Approximately ten of the core marching workers spontaneously joined the march without prior preparation by organizers, having refused to cross the picket line at the Walmart-contracted facility in which they worked as temps. Three days, and twenty-four miles later, the temps found themselves in a joint rally with retail workers in the parking lot of a Walmart store. As the marchers entered East LA later that week, nearly two hundred members of the UFW joined in support, and at the final rally at LA City Hall, the marchers were met by four hundred or so workers and community supporters, such as local Occupy activists, student activists, and members of Making Change at Walmart. Members of CTW’s affiliates and other unions also joined WWU in solidarity. Dolores Huerta, cofounder of the UFW, was among the featured speakers.

At the culminating rally, Governor Jerry Brown’s administration announced that he intended to (and subsequently did on September 30, 2012) sign legislation (AB 1855) that WWU had promoted. The new law extended to warehouse workers’ existing labor codes requiring companies and employment agencies hiring workers to guarantee they have sufficient funds to pay the worker and to comply with labor laws (Katzanek 2012b). Immediately following the strike and fifty-mile march by Inland Southern California warehouse workers, Walmart also agreed to develop a plan to improve its safety standards through random inspections of its subcontractors (Lee 2012).

Meanwhile, WWU/WWRC’s regulatory strategy led to a series of legal and administrative victories for warehouse workers, which further contributed to the pressure on state legislators and Walmart to take action, and set important legal precedents. In 2011, WWU members filed multiple complaints with California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health (OSHA) that led to the assessment of fines of more than US$250,000 against the Walmart-contracted warehousing firm, NFI/National Distribution Centers, and the warehouse’s in-house temporary staffing agency Tri-State (Cal-OSHA Reporter 2012; Lifsher 2012). WWU members and organizers produced legal victories in their campaign against wage and hour violations in the industry as well. In Mira Loma, Premier Warehousing, a firm contracted by Schneider Logistics (which provides logistics services for Walmart), was fined over US$600,000 subsequent to their failure to properly document wage rates and payments as “part of a concerted effort to deny workers their hard-earned wages,” according to California Labor Commissioner Julie A. Su (California Department of Industrial Relations 2011). In addition, Schneider’s in-house temporary staffing agency, Impact Logistics, was assessed a fine of US$499,000 on related charges as part of the same decision. Schneider, Premier, and Impact Logistics were also named in a lawsuit filed by WWU on behalf of workers subject to wage violations in a U.S. District Court (Carrillo v. Schneider Logistics, et al. 2013).

Four days after WWU filed its employment lawsuit against Schneider Logistics, Premier Warehousing terminated its contract with Schneider Logistics “more than a year before it was scheduled to expire” (Katzanek 2012a)—effectively terminating one hundred workers, including the employees who brought suit against the firms. In response, WWU mobilized a protest by workers and their allies against these firings. They claimed that the warehouse workers were illegally fired in retaliation for pursuing the employment lawsuit against Schneider. They also filed for, and won, a preliminary court injunction against the firings; the court injunction required Schneider to rehire the fired workers (Pierceall 2012). Afterward, Schneider directly hired the workers as full-time employees with hourly pay (WWU 2012).

More recently, WWU members secured a US$4.7 million settlement for 568 workers in a second wage theft case against Schneider Logistics (WWU 2013a). While not all workers had their jobs reinstated despite protests and concerted legal campaigns, legal and administrative victories vindicated workers’ claims of systematic wage and hour law violations—in this case over a five-year period where supervisors doctored time cards and forced workers to forgo meal breaks during ten- to twelve-hour shifts (WWU 2013a).

Most importantly, the legal strategy resulted in naming Walmart as a codefendant in the “Everardo Carrillo et al. v. Schneider Logistics, Inc., et al.” (2013) case, another wage theft case involving Schneider Logistics and about 1,800 warehouse workers employed between 2001 and 2013 in Mira Loma. Wage and hour violations included violations in minimum wage laws, unpaid overtime, and failure to provide legally required work breaks. The case, settled in 2014, resulted in a wage and hour settlement of US$21 million (including back wages, penalties, and interest), to be paid entirely by Schneider Logistics (Lopez 2014). Even so, the district court’s consideration of the global retailer as potentially responsible for the working conditions of its warehouse and temporary agency contractors could help to discourage major corporations from using contract relationships to leverage the race to the bottom for workers locally and globally. In this way, WWU/WWRC sought to improve working conditions within warehouses by restricting “the power of key economic players to exert control over entire business networks” (Rawling and Howe 2013, 235).

In addition to penalizing specific offenders of labor laws, WWU’s legal/administrative strategy set important legal precedents which gained the attention of warehouse industry leaders. For example, the International Logistics and Warehouse Association (ILWA) held safety meetings with presentations by Cal/OSHA inspectors in June 2012 to communicate Cal/OSHA policies to its warehouse and temporary agency membership. The nearly 200 members in attendance incredulously learned that even temporary agencies are financially responsible for providing required safety equipment in warehouses. Likewise, the passage of California AB 1855 encourages warehouses across the state to improve their health and safety conditions—even in facilities WWU did not target directly.

Conclusion

WWU’s model of combining community and global supply chain organizing techniques with an innovative legal/administrative strategy provides a blueprint for organized labor in the post-Fordist era of contingent work. Through a combination of dramatic collective actions and legal cases, WWU and its supporters made gains for temporary, subcontracted, and immigrant warehouse workers by mobilizing both symbolic power (Chun 2009) and advocacy power (Jenkins 2002). WWU members and supporters demanded—through street protests, marches, and pickets as well as legal advocacy—that big box retailers, warehouse companies, and temporary agencies recognize that temporary and subcontracted warehouse workers had the right to fair pay and safe working conditions, and that retailers be held accountable for warehouse workers’ employment conditions, even when they did not hire them directly. Through these combined actions, as well as coordination with other efforts to organize across Walmart’s global supply chain, they gained media attention for the plight of warehouse workers in Inland Southern California, portrayed as super-exploited, low-wage immigrant, and Latina/o workers. In addition to building leadership and solidarity among the region’s warehouse workers, the campaign resulted in a series of legal and administrative victories for warehouse workers, new state regulatory legislation pertaining to warehouse workers, and increased pressure on Walmart to agree to improve and monitor the working conditions among its contractors.

On the other hand, there are important limits on what the WWU campaign achieved that resemble those identified for other worker centers. As Fine (2006) points out, active memberships of worker centers tend to be small and their organizations depend upon foundation and government support, which can constrain their activities and make them difficult to sustain over time. Jenkins (2002) similarly claims that worker centers’ reliance on professional staff and foundation funding limits their ability to develop workers’ leadership in meaningful or proactive ways, beyond the agenda established by fiscal sponsors. Likewise, WWU/WWRC’s reliance on external funding has both limited and rendered uncertain its financial sustainability. The ability to plan and carry out a long-term strategic campaign has been constrained by uneven and limited union funding. CTW withdrew nearly all of its financial support of WWU in early 2014. Between 2014 and 2015, the campaign survived through WWRC with the help of unions, private donors, and federal and foundation-supported grants, albeit with a much smaller staff. Labor law reforms to facilitate the unionization of temporary agency and subcontracted workers remain vital to improving the potential social power of those workers as well as union investments in organizing them, both within and beyond the logistics sector (Hatton 2011; Krasas Rogers 2000).

Second, similar to the gains made by other worker centers (Fine 2006), most of the gains made by WWU have involved improved implementation of existing labor rights at particular workplaces, rather than industry-wide gains in wages or benefits through private employer concessions. Indeed, union strategies were limited by the conservative political landscape of Inland Southern California, which encouraged WWU/WWRC to instead target state agencies and the state legislature. Riverside and San Bernardino Counties were relatively poor counties, with low levels of unionization and were dominated by Republicans who desperately sought to attract business investments to the region, limiting what could be politically gained at the local level. In contrast, some cities and counties dominated by liberal Democrats and less desperate for economic development, including nearby Los Angeles, have established living or minimum wage ordinances and collective benefit agreements with local employers resulting in significant “bread and butter” gains for low-wage workers outside of unionization (e.g., see Meyerson 2012, 2014; Pastor, Benner, and Matsuoka 2009).

Finally, the WWU campaign highlights some of the strengths and challenges of global commodity chain organizing models. On the one hand, these models are powerful reminders that local workers play key roles in the global circulation of capital. Global strategies can strengthen worker power and gain additional media attention by rescaling local struggles upward and forging connections with other workers along the commodity chain. On the other hand, defining a local target or naming the boss can prove difficult when the global commodity chain is particularly complex and seemingly faceless. Moreover, effectively carrying out and sustaining globally coordinated actions can be daunting when workers are unevenly organized, have unequal or limited access to resources, and face highly variable political conditions locally.

The WWU campaign is only one of various other recent efforts by unions and international labor federations to organize warehouse workers within the United States and to carry out global supply chain strategies (Gereffi and Christian 2009; Luce 2014; McCallum 2013). We hope that our case study will help to inspire further research on other contemporary campaigns to organize warehouse workers and other types of commodity chain workers both within and beyond the United States. Comparing the strategies and outcomes of such campaigns would help to illuminate further the conditions under which contingent and marginalized workers mobilize and make gains under neoliberal globalization.