Constituting Challenges in Differing Arenas of Power: Worker Centers,the Fight for $15,and Union Organizing

The Viability of Unions and the Alt-Labor Movement

The literature on the viability of unions and alt-labor is mixed. We explore each in turn, beginning with questions about traditional unions. Some scholars have asked, “Has the American labor movement reached the end of the line?” David Rolf proclaims that, “In the strategic arms race between big business and labor, labor has been left in the dust. The reality is for all intents and purposes, the twentieth century model of American labor relations is gone” (Rolf 2016, 21). Jonathan Rosenblum concurs:

Today’s union movement, in spite of the best intensions and yeoman efforts, is grounded and will not fly again. You need to look no further than the inexorable downward trend of overall union density . . . And there will be no rescues from outside—no political savior, no legislative bombshell, no single dramatic blow that turns things around. (Rosenblum 2017, 176)

For Rolf and Rosenblum—both veterans of the fight to achieve a $15 wage at the Seattle Tacoma (SEA-TAC) airport—unions no longer provide the model for worker organizing.

One central critique of the union model for workers’ rights focus is that it is out of touch with the growing precarity of the labor market and the disappearance of regularized work especially for low-wage workers, immigrant workers, and workers of color. In the “fissured workplace,” as David Weil has described it, the era of large firms employing large number of workers as direct employees is over (Weil 2017). Instead, the reinformalization of work in the “gig economy,” according to Guy Standing, has created a new class of workers—the precariat (Standing 2011).

For example, as Katz and Krueger (2016) suggest, “The percentage of workers engaged in alternative work arrangements—defined as temporary help agency workers, on-call workers, contract workers, and independent contractors or freelancers—rose from 10.7 percent in February 2005 to 15.8 percent in late 2015.” As Kopf (2016) writes, “In other words, nearly all of the 10 million jobs created between 2005 and 2015 were not traditional nine-to-five employment.”

Critics argue that unions and labor relations in the postwar era in the United States both in practice and in culture are ill-equipped to organize these kinds of unregularized workers, and it is reflected in the catastrophically low level of union density among precarious workers and independent contractors (Alter 2013; Gupta 2015). Many of these workers are not eligible for union membership, and many are employed in occupations and workplaces far outside where unions typically represent workers.

Furthermore, critics also point to the labor movement’s continued focus on collective bargaining at the expense of other more outward looking activities. Referring back to his earlier research with James Medoff (Freeman and Medoff 1984) in his article “What Can Labor Organizations Do for U.S. Workers When Unions Can’t Do What Unions Used to Do?” Richard Freeman details what unions can no longer do given political and economic changes as well as growing levels of management opposition. He suggests that the impact of these changes on union density calls into question the continued primacy of collective bargaining. “Making collective bargaining the core activity of unions worked well when unions bargained for a substantial share of the workforce” (Freeman 2014, 51).

Now that the vast majority of American workers are not union members, the centrality of collective bargaining for the few has raised serious concerns about the relevance of the union model. Sarita Gupta, the executive director of Jobs with Justice, proposes an alternative model:

We believe that the definition of collective bargaining must go far beyond that if we’re going to make real shifts in the global economy. So at Jobs with Justice, we are prioritizing experiments that seek to expand the theater of bargaining, partnering with unions, community groups, and worker centers who have now begun exploring new strategies for worker bargaining and confronting corporate power. (Gupta 2015)

Finally, critics suggest that unions have also been less than successful in organizing regularized workers in their traditional target areas and that an alt-labor approach may indeed prove more fruitful. In an article titled, “Minimum Wage Fights More Easily Won than Representation,” Harold Myerson writes that,

Blocked from unionizing workplace by ferocious management opposition and laws that fail to keep union activist from being fired, unions have begun focus on raising wages and benefits for many workers than they can ever expect to claim as their own. (Myerson 2015, 2)

Not all scholars and activists are in agreement that the level of union density nor the changing nature of employment has rendered unions obsolete. Lance Compa writes,

We can’t deny or minimize problems or challenges. But we often go too far in decrying unions’ fate. Get a grip; the labor movement is stronger than it looks. A lot of good organizing is going on, and most unions are doing an effective job at the bargaining table.

He argues that looking at the overall union density levels masks that union density varies widely by industry and region. He continues, “Unions are a force in important regions and industrial sectors, still politically potent, and still bringing new groups of workers into their ranks” (Compa 2105b, 2).

While noting the important innovation made by a variety of alt-labor organizations, Compa does not see them as viable alternatives for unions:

But let’s be frank: Even with great people doing great work, converting these movements into sustainable, self-financing membership-based organizations is still a work in progress. In most cases, the established labor movement is a major source of financial, logistical, and organizing support for these new formations. (Compa 2015b)

Manheim (2013) documents the significant contribution of foundations to alt-labor efforts, and critics are concerned that the involvement of mainstream foundations such as Ford and Carnegie are pushing alt-labor away from the labor movement and organizing.

Central to the critique of alt-labor is that they remain largely advocacy organizations. Jenkins (2002, 62) argues that,

Oppressed people can only transcend the limitations imposed by elite decision-makers when they have the power to force the institutions they are confronting to accept their demands. I will refer to this type of power as “social power.” Unlike advocacy, which is based on a group’s ability to persuade elite institutions to take action, social power must be based in some capacity by the group to coerce the decision-makers to make the changes they seek.

Although Jenkins’ use of the concept of “social power” is not conventional, his argument that resorting to moral persuasion rather than more collective powers is a key limitation of the advocacy approach. Compa (2015a, 1) concurs, “. . . employers would be happy to deal only with small, dispersed, resource-stressed groups that might give them a hard time in the public relations arena but cannot wield serious countervailing power.”

Similarly, Peter Olney reflects on what he sees as the failure of the OUR Walmart (Organization United for Respect at Walmart) campaign based on its focus on the public image of the firm.

OUR Walmart was a public relations irritant to the company, but it never was a strategic challenge to Walmart’s power or its business model. Perhaps the campaign contributed to recent increases in minimum wages; perhaps it contributed to the growing national conversation about increased inequality; perhaps Walmart’s recent increase in its starting hourly wage to $10 was the result of this campaign (though it may also have been the result of tightening labor markets because other employers have raised their wages as well). But none of these is “organizing,” and none builds a powerful union. (Olney 2015)

To look more closely at the efforts of unions and alt-labor, we turn to how each uses power and the arenas of power in which they operate. To do this, we need first to interrogate how power has been thought of in labor, alt-labor, and other activist organizations.

Forms of Power in Workers’ Rights Advocacy

Power is one of the most underdeveloped concepts in the labor and workers’ rights movement. As McAlevey (2016) suggests, it is too often only focused on the power of elites. Consequently, how workers and their movements gain power is undertheorized. Traditionally, power in the labor movement has been thought of as the economic power. For rank-and file-oriented trade unionists, this economic power was the power to disrupt production (Burns 2011; McAlevey 2014). This economic focus was also true for more conservative industrial relations scholars in the postwar era who saw collective bargaining as a process taking place within the economic context of an industry and firm (Bok and Dunlop 1970). I would argue that workers’ rights activists in the labor movement and beyond employ many types of power beyond just economic power and that we need to have a much more detailed understanding of power.

As Wright (2000) and Silver (2003) suggest, it is first important to distinguish between structural power that is a result of the firms’ location in the economic system and associational power that derives from the formation of collective organizations. In the context of new efforts at labor community alliances, Brookes (2013) has broadened this concept of associational power to the notion of coalitional power. She also reminds us that unions can derive what she calls “institutional power”—a product of the state and other regulatory processes. Drawing from Bourdieu, Jennifer Chun (2009) suggests the importance of symbolic power in contemporary labor struggles. This typology of structural, institutional, coalitional, and symbolic power provides a much more nuanced framework to examine power in labor and alt-labor activity.

A number of scholars have suggested that organizations at different levels use different kinds of power. For example, Janice Fine (2005, 1) suggests that “Low-wage workers in America today have greater political than economic power.” Similarly, Rhomberg and Lopez (2016) argue that different kinds of workers’ rights organizations use different kinds of power, and that the Fight for $15, for example, has largely used symbolic power. When we analyze campaigns with this more complex understanding of power, I would argue that campaigns in both labor and alt-labor organizations use multiple types of power.

As well, it is not enough to simply look at the types of power used but to examine the levels or arenas in which this power in used. For example, institutional power—what Janice Fine calls political power—can be used by a community-based worker center to pressure the city council to stop doing business with a local contractor, or by the Fight for $15 to bring a state referendum on raising the state minimum wage. We cannot understand power in the abstract but need to contextualize power by how it is used and at what level. I use this more detailed conception of power alongside the idea that this power is used in a number of different arenas to examine the use of power in community-based worker centers, the Fight for $15, and unions.

Worker Centers and the Exercise of Power

There are a wide variety of worker centers in terms of their origins and activities (Fine 2006; Israel 2014). For the discussion here, I focus on single-site community-based worker centers and not the multi-location worker centers associated with larger organizations such as the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC) (Jayaraman 2013). ¹ These are the most localized workers’ rights organizations and are largely involved in direct service. For the most part, they are organized to address individual employment problems on a local level. Increasingly, much of their work focuses on combatting wage theft that has reached epidemic levels (Bobo 2011). In most instances, these worker centers serve unregularized workers working as independent contractors, some of whom are undocumented. Much of our employment law and its enforcement is based around regularized employment, and in many ways, these worker centers have stepped into the void created by the states and municipalities abdicating their responsibility under the law.

For example, the Metro West Workers Center in Massachusetts works regularly with undocumented workers in the construction industry who are routinely cheated out of their wages (Juravich 2015). When you look at their activities closely, it is clear that they do not just use one form of power but creatively use a variety of approaches to get wages paid. For example, they used institutional (political) power when they submitted complaints to the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office on behalf of a number of workers working for subcontractors of Pulte construction who had been shorted on their pay (Juravich 2015). They also used coalitional power when organized clergy and members of the city council to stop a subcontractor who was not paying workers appropriately on a Community Development Housing project.

Manny Gines was employed by the carpenters union to work with undocumented workers on wage theft issues and works regularly with Metro West Workers Center. He is also experimenting with workplace organizing of the construction crews who get to know each other over time. He fully understands that at a macro level, the undocumented drywallers he works with do not have structural (economic) power. Yet Gines recognizes that in the short term, they do have economic power the day the drywall arrives, and they are under a tight timeline to complete the job. As Gines reminds us, even these very marginal workers may have more structural power than we give them credit for.

Finally, Metro West and the carpenters union also used symbolic power in the fight to secure workers’ wages. For example, Gines set up a picket line on Christmas Eve in front of a house of a contractor who was having a large holiday party at his home. He had been delinquent in paying workers who gathered outside in a poignant demonstration about how different their holidays would be without being paid (Gines 2015).

As is clear in this example, local worker centers have creatively used a variety of types of power to get justice for the workers. For the most part, they operated in a local/municipal arena of power, and this was where their strength lay. It also needs to be noted here that these are efforts at “small justice.” Not to diminish what back pay means to an individual low-wage worker, but the solutions are, for the most part, individualized, short-term resolution to violations that have already occurred. They are not about establishing contracts or rules for future work or altering power relations, nor are they about collective rights moving forward. They are stopgap measures.

Yet we must be careful to diminish these efforts or to judge them by standards of other organizations operating at different levels. At this moment in time, these efforts at “small justice” are important and significant at the local level for nonregularized workers who for the most part have been jettisoned from the formal labor market. Some of these workers may in the future organize in unions or in other alt-labor formations, but at this point, this “small justice” offers some small but important relief.

Power and the Fight for $15

The Fight for $15 represents a very different kind of alt-labor activity. Although it has operated on a number of different levels, its most recognized accomplishments are changing the discourse about low-wage work and setting new wage levels in a number of municipalities and states. ² For the most part, it has been a policy-related effort, not focusing on individuals as we saw in the case of the worker centers nor at the employer level where unions operate. Instead, these public policy efforts are aimed at ratcheting up wage levels for all citizens—a tide to raise all boats.

As a policy effort, it goes without saying that it is focused on institutional (political) power. But it was not a typical policy effort for unions, which often are conducted in concert with the Democratic Party. As Luce (2014) suggests, this often led to a labor agenda being subjugated to the internal interest of the Democrats and party politics.

In many ways, the Fight for $15 has been an end run around business as usual in the labor movement in terms of outsourcing public policy to the Democrats, and as Rolf suggests, a way around the gridlock in Washington. “With federal governments’ power often arrayed against working people and interesting gridlock and partisanship preventing federal action, the worker advocates of the 1990s and 2000s have increasingly tuned to municipal government to win campaigns that advance workers’ issues.” He continues, “At the core of this strategic vision is the conviction that cities—not the national government—are the arenas where progressive prospects have the best prospects for enduring success” (Rolf 2016, 61).

In addition, by using ballot referenda, as in the case of the SEA-TAC airport campaign (Rolf 2016), the Fight for $15 advocates moved outside of the control of the Democratic Party and directly to the public. We have seen in a number of these campaigns the key role played by labor and community-based “think-and-act tanks”—a new generation of research and advocacy organizations—that created a capacity outside of the traditional Democratic Party apparatus (Dean 2010).

I would argue, however, that none of these policy successes would have been possible without the way in which the Fight for $15 used symbolic power to reframe low-wage work. Much like the Occupy movement that reframed and reshaped how we think of inequality, the Fight for $15 forever changed how we think about low-wage work and workers. And we watched as this resonated with not only workers and their union but also a wide swath of Americans and even politicians who adopted this framing as policy initiatives moved forward.

But Rolf and Rosenblum are very clear that getting a $15 wage on the ballot is only the very first step of the process. At that point, they needed to build a broad-based campaign using coalitional power. As Rosenblum (2017, 173) writes, “Sea-tac blended traditional union organizing with deep community relationships that reached across faith, cultural, and language boundaries.” In many ways, this was the real work, which required deep and broad organizing at a number of different levels representing powerful and innovative approaches.

No one anticipated how the Fight for $15 would catch fire in setting the goal for many efforts at the state and municipal levels to raise wages. The Fight for $15 reports, “We’ve already won raises for 22 million people across the country—including 10 million who are on their way to $15/hr . . . .” (The Fight for $15 n.d.). In addition to efforts to raise wages, we have seen a number of efforts in a number of other areas of workers’ rights, including sick and vacation time and the rights of pregnant workers.

Several factors need to be considered in evaluating whether this momentum for the Fight for $15 will continue. The first concerns the nature of these referendum-based campaigns. In the 1990s, we saw the emergence of the living wages efforts that focused the wages of employees and contractors of municipalities. In many ways, these efforts were precursors to the Fight for $15. At the time, Richard Freeman wrote that one of the issues surrounding these campaigns was whether they were cull de sacs or ends in themselves, or whether they were just a victory along the way in the larger fight for workers’ justice.

In the same way, are passing referendums for $15 an hour the end of the campaign or just the first stage of a broader movement? One of the concerns is that once the temporary coalition achieves victory, they will dissolve, and nothing will be kept in place organizationally to continue the fight. This is a problem with these kinds of advocacy campaigns in terms of what is left behind. We know that in many of these agreements, wage increases are phased in over a number of years, and it takes constant vigilance to make sure that these efforts are not undermined. One important avenue of continued involvement is where there are clear enforcement provisions about wages, which can be used to continue mobilization. We also know that issues of workers’ rights are more than just about wages; they are about how campaigns can stay in place after a victory.

There are also a number of political developments that may call into question Rolf’s dream of the wide proliferation of municipally based campaigns such as the one at SEA-TAC. As the PEW Charitable Trust suggests,

Democrats are looking to Democratic cities and counties to stand up for progressive policy. But they may want to temper their expectations. State lawmakers have blocked city action on a range of economic, governmental and human right issues, including liberal priorities as minimum wage increases, in recent years. And the stage looks set for more confrontation between cities and states this year. (Quinton 2017)

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) funded by the Koch brothers has drafted and is spearheading preemptions in a number of red and blue states. According to a report by the nonpartisan National League of Cities (2017), “Currently 24 states preempt local minimum wage ordinances to some degree, with North Carolina and Alabama doing so in 2016.” After the 2016 election, twenty-five of the fifty states have Republican control of both houses and the Governor’s office, so there is a strong potential for further preemption.

Unions and Power

Unlike the local focus of worker centers or the policy initiatives of the Fight for $15, the labor movement had traditionally focused on bargaining with employers. While union contracts provide guarantees of wage levels and benefits, at its core, the contract places restraints on management rights. The contract prohibits certain arbitrary management practices and in its place sets rules and procedures for the operations of the workplace. And it does not single out individual workers, but these restraints on management rights apply collectively to all members of a bargaining unit.

With these restraints on management rights, union contracts alter power relationships. A community-based worker centers may be able to get workers wages they are owed, or a referendum may get workers a few dollars an hour more, but neither organization can provide workers the ability to say “no” to the employer, backed up by the union contract. By their ability to alter power relations and provide workers with power on the job, I would suggest that unions provide “big justice” in ways that alt-labor cannot. As Bruce Western and Jake Rosenfeld (2011) remind us, union contracts were constraints on firms, and in this way, unions were significant equalizing institutions. They estimate that one-fifth to one-third of the rising inequality was due directly to the decline in union density.

While community-based worker centers and the Fight for $15 are largely advocacy efforts, unions are membership-based democratic organizations. Critics of union democracy question the convention-based model of democracy and the authority that incumbents wield, but structurally, unions are not top-down advocacy models where members have no regularized form of participation. Democracy in the labor movement has not always come easy, but unions have set up a democratic structure that allows for membership participation that few alt-labor organizations offer.

As I suggested above, unions have typically thought of their power as economic power—the power to stop production. From a broader perspective, the focus on economic (structural) power was one of the ways that business unionism maintained its inward focus. Unionism was not part of a larger battle for social justice but an economic fight to better wages and working conductions for its membership. This was not about raising the tide for all boats.

Many have argued that the ravages of neo-liberalism with its deindustrialization, outsourcing, and globalization, and the low level of union density that followed, have all but taken away the economic power of unions in the United States. As we saw in the wreckage of unions, as in the 1980s and 1990s, it was clear that the simple postwar economic power of unions was deeply challenged.

There are some who have suggested that the only way the revival of the labor movement will be possible is through the restoration of this kind of economic power. A number of analysts have suggested that reviving the strike is central in restoring this economic (structural) power (Burns 2011; McAlevey 2014; Rhomberg 2012). “Not the ineffectual strike of today, where employers sit on picket lines waiting for scabs to take their jobs,” writes Joe Burns (2011), “ but the type of strike capable of grinding industries to a halt—the kind employed in the first half of the century.”

Others have suggested that central to the transformation from business to more social unionism is stepping away from the insular inward-looking bargaining-based focus on structural (economic) power. Rather than trying to return to the glory days of the economic power of industrial unions, a revival of the labor movement should instead begin with a new outward social justice orientation and the use of multiple sources of power.

The basis of this new labor movement is the use of coalitional power with the deep kind of coalitions that Amanda Tattersal (2010) suggests. This was one of the fundamental features of the victory by the Chicago teachers—the deep involvement with parents and the community (Alter 2013). I would argue that the use of this kind of coalitional power is not new in the labor movement. For example, it would be hard to suggest that the Flint strike could have been won with economic power alone without the deep coalition support they had in the community. Finally, unions are embracing symbolic power as an important source of power, particularly with the exposition of social and new media.

Even with declining density, the more than fourteen million members in the United States represent a powerful base for fighting for workers’ rights. They still provide fundamental rights and benefits to their members that alt-labor in its current form cannot provide. The question on the table is to what degree inward-looking business unionism will isolate and continue to weaken unions, or whether the labor movement will step up and embrace a social movement unionism, and become part of the larger fight for social justice.

Conclusion

Using a more fulsome concept of power, it is very clear that community-based worker centers, the Fight for $15, and unions all use a number of different types of power. What distinguishes them is that they use this power in different arenas against very different kinds of adversaries. In this way, we have to move beyond the false equivalency that alt-labor is somehow an alternative for unions. We also need to reject the discourse of valorizing one approach and recognize that the efforts by worker centers, the Fight for $15, and unions are all part of the larger fight for workers’ rights, and none are simple substitutes for each other. Here, I would argue that Compa’s critique of alt-labor only makes sense if you see alt-labor as a candidate to replace unions. If we can accept that they are alternative organizations operating in a different arena of power serving very different workers on a local level, then we do not need to use the criteria that we would need to use in evaluating a union.

But this is not to suggest that we have arrived at some easy division of labor with a number of workers’ rights organizations each working on separate activities. In fact, these movements are far too separated from each other, which greatly hinders the larger effort. And there continues to be a number of contestations that need to be addressed to build a more integrated movement for workers’ rights.

One of the central questions is the degree to which unions will continue to support and grow alt-labor efforts. First, given our exploration of power, unions need to look beyond alt-labor efforts instrumentally as simply incubators for new organizing campaigns. Instead, support for alt-labor needs to continue and grow dramatically, not because it will necessarily yield more union members but because it is a way to fight injustice, which needs to remain at the core of what unions stand for.

It would be easy to see labor continuing to support alt-labor because its own efforts in organizing and rebuilding itself are foundering. Oswalt, for example, proposes,

The truth is we should feel optimistic about “traditional” labor because of Alt-labor, not in spite of it. The two futures are linked, and supporting Alt-labor may be the smartest way for unions to put fuel to the flashes and get to the fixes. (Oswalt 2016)

While it is fundamental for unions to midwife innovations in alt-labor, it would be a catastrophic mistake to outsource the efforts at social unionism to alt-labor. The remaking of an inclusive, outward looking labor movement should not just happen at the margins in alt-labor organizations, but this type of post-heroic leadership, as Linda Briskin (2011) has called it, needs to penetrate the very core of the labor movement.

Despite operating in different arenas, there are also important moments of cross-fertilization. For example, the labor movement has much to learn from worker centers dogged commitment to “small justice” and solving individual problems. Many have argued that unions, especially with mergers and the creation of mega-locals, have moved too far away from what the union means for workers on a day-to-day basis in the workplace. Ariovich (2010) argues that larger changes in union structure will not be embraced without members seeing how it connects to them in their workplace.

Worker centers and unions have much to learn from the work of the Fight for $15 in reframing how one thinks of low-wage work. This effective use of symbolic power is fundamental in elevating struggles out of the mundane details. And continued efforts by the Fight for $15 on referendums as well as the more institutional alt-labor organizations need to look to unions in terms of a model for membership-driven organizations. While the advocacy work they have done has been critical, the question remains as to how they will include workers as central players in ongoing efforts.