Abstract
In response to the growing absence of unions from the private sector, community-based organizations known as worker centers have emerged as a new front in protecting and organizing workers. Scholars generally argue that worker centers have converged on a model of combining service provision with organizing and advocacy, supported primarily by funding from foundations and government agencies. I draw on interviews conducted with worker center staff, a dataset compiled from their public materials, and secondary research to add to the existing literature and to argue that a clear categorization of worker centers can be derived by attention to their primary workplace strategies. First, worker centers can be meaningfully distinguished by whether they attempt to raise standards in specific industries versus responding to problems in individual workplaces. But they can also be distinguished based on the extent to which they view public policy or winning agreements with employers as the primary route to systemic improvements. These divergences in strategy echo Progressive-era debates about the role for the state in redressing workplace ills. Similar to that era, strategic differences among today’s worker centers are driven less by ideology and more by the distinct structural challenges facing workers in particular political and economic contexts.
Many workers in the contemporary United States continue to face substandard working conditions, and in the absence of a resurgence in union density, organizations known as “worker centers” have emerged to redress legal violations and raise standards. Worker centers are diverse in some respects—their target constituencies, their geographical boundaries, and their funding levels—but scholars also describe a general convergence on a model. They are distinguished from unions in that they often do not seek to bargain with employers, they generally are not funded by membership dues in any significant way, and they tend to mobilize members on the basis of neighborhood, ethnic origin, or race more so than occupational or industrial identities (Fine 2007). Worker centers are considered hybrid organizations in at least two senses. First, they combine some level of service provision with organizing and advocacy (Fine, Narro, and Barnes 2018). Second, alongside their efforts to address working conditions, they sometimes have programs designed to boost the lives of working people, including those related to immigration, healthcare access, and education.
A focus on their differences from unions, however, may go too far, as some worker centers seek to emulate or complement the work of unions, by focusing on specific industries, helping workers to form independent unions, or connecting them to existing locals. When examining populations of organizations, the vantage point matters. From 40,000 feet, worker centers appear to be more similar than different. From the level of the singular case study, their differences from one another come into sharp focus. This paper aims for the middle ground. Drawing on interviews conducted with activists and secondary materials, I argue that worker centers’ efforts can be meaningfully distinguished based on their targets and their strategies. Worker centers that have homed in on particular industries are distinct from those help workers regardless of sector. But there are also meaningful differences within these two groups. In particular, some worker centers are highly focused on public policy and the state as a means to recovering workers’ wages and as a target for organizing efforts. But some centers are far less focused on policy changes as outcomes, and instead forge ways to win agreements with target companies. This particular divergence reflects Progressive-era debates about the role of the state in improving the lots of workers. In our own era, worker centers’ preferences can be traced in large part to distinct structural challenges faced by workers in particular industries and geographies.
Background and Intellectual Context
Worker centers are community-based organizations that emerged in response to deunionization and the plight of low-wage workers. After her initial survey of workers centers, Janice Fine (2006) defined them as hybrid organizations with modestly sized memberships that help workers through a mix of direct service provision (ranging from legal services, English classes, immigration services, etc.), political advocacy, leadership development, and organizing support (Fine 2005, 2006).
One key point of discussion is how worker centers differ from unions. Unions are membership-funded, and most worker centers derive the majority of their funding from foundations and government agencies (Gates et al. 2018). They are more likely to build their memberships not by drawing on industrial or occupational identities, but on those relating to race, ethnicity, immigration status, or neighborhood.
Then there is the question of what unions and worker centers actually do for workers in the workplace. In their heyday, unions were powerful market actors: They used the power of strike (or threat thereof) at the point of production to bargain with employers for higher wages and improved working conditions. Since deunionization picked up pace, unions have less of a presence in any given sector, and instead focus more on political activities, such as supporting union-friendly candidates for office. As Fine (2007) argues, worker centers often do not see themselves as market actors and they rarely have the ability to threaten production as unions did. Rather, their goal is to ensure the “broad survival of the individual, family and community” by addressing the myriad issues—not just those in the workplace—that impact their lives and their ability to care for themselves and their families (346).
Juravich (2018) compares worker centers, the Fight for $15 movement, and traditional unions and argues that they all “represent distinct approaches to different adversaries” (105). Unions seek to bargain directly with employers by leveraging structural power (i.e., the economic power of the threat to strike), but worker centers have far fewer opportunities to deploy such power (Jenkins 2002). Instead, they often use associational power by building coalitions of workers, allies, faith groups, and like-minded non-profits, and they target local employers that are generally on the smaller side. Their use of institutional power—or the regulatory power of the state (Brookes 2013)—is twofold: Worker centers use litigation or claims to administrative agencies such as state departments of labor to compel law-violating employers to pay owed wages, and they sometimes target local governments in order to raise standards.
The distinction between worker centers and unions is meaningful, but this bird’s-eye view of a population of organizations can obscure the variation among worker centers themselves. In fact, many worker centers embrace some aspects of traditional unions, such as focusing on a specific industry. This represents an important distinction to be found among worker centers as a group: Are organizations seeking changes in conditions at individual workplaces, or are they focused on raising standards in specific sectors?
Multi-sector worker centers generally adopt workplace campaigns when workers come in for unpaid wages or other violations, and they help workers regardless of industry. Sector-based organizations seek strategies that raise standards across numerous workplaces, rather than responding to problems in individual workplaces as they arise. The numbers of industry-based centers have grown since Fine’s (2006) analysis, and Hector Cordero-Guzmán, Izvănariu, and Narro (2013) argued that many worker centers were coalescing around “sectoral-based networks” of organizations, such as the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the National Day Labor Organizing Network, and the Restaurant Opportunity Center-United (see also Fine, Narro, and Barnes 2018).
While these broad groups—industry-focused versus multi-industry—share important commonalities, there are also clear distinctions among centers within both groups in terms of strategies and theories of change. Most industry-based centers seek, in some form or another, to forge agreements with employers, but one subgroup focuses more energy on passing industry-specific legislation. While nearly all multi-sector worker centers have a strong public policy component, one group in this category have an added focus on strengthening opportunities for employee voice in the workplace through several different mechanisms.
The degree to which labor organizations focus on public policy as a means to raise standards is a distinction that the labor movement has seen before. Samuel Gompers and other Progressive-era leaders in American Federation of Labor (AFL) craft unions were skeptical of policy change and state action as a means to achieve better outcomes for workers. Their skepticism was born less from ideology and more from pragmatism. While the late 1880s saw a rush of legislation to protect workers, the courts frequently invalidated such laws on the basis of freedom of contract (Forbath 1991). Eventually, for Gompers and others, wariness of the state coalesced into an approach known as voluntarism. Workers can and should improve their lots through their own organizations, rather than through intervention by the state (or the larger AFL for that matter) (Reed 1930).
What Gompers wanted from the state was to refrain from interfering with employees’ union efforts. In fact, some AFL labor leaders even opposed the passage of the New Deal’s Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) with the reasoning that minimum wages tend “to become the maximum” (Samuel 2000, 34). It was up to employees’ unions, practicing a “pure and simple” trade unionism, to fight for improved standards through bargaining with employers.
Other labor leaders argued that the AFL’s end goal of a “laissez faire” unionism, in which the government stayed out of labor relations, may be sufficient for skilled craft workers who had sufficient market power to compel employers, but more was needed for workers in mass production industries (Forbath 1991, 164-65). The New Deal ushered in an era in which the AFL’s rival federation, the Congress of Industrial Unions (CIO), embraced the rights and processes of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), along with the floor for wages established by the minimum wage, and political action and social legislation more generally (Schlozman 2015).
But today’s labor movement is in another moment that casts doubt upon the promise of both unions and federal legislation to improve the lots of workers. The NLRA, as was predicted by the voluntarists of yesteryear, has been eroded by (1) case law that has given employers the upper hand in union elections and (2) its inability to reach the growing numbers of workers who labor outside the traditional employer–employee relationship (Estlund 2002; Stone 2006). Wage theft and other legal violations appear to be endemic in many industries. Efforts to reverse deunionization have so far been unsuccessful. In response, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumpka has described a new focus on social legislation, while his critics on the left have argued that legislative efforts do not result in self-sustaining membership organizations that can build worker power in the workplace or industry (Lichtenstein 2014).
These debates are playing out with regard to worker centers as well. While at least one commentator lists worker centers among organizations displaying a “militant voluntarism” akin to Gompers-era strategies (Cowie 2016, 37), others argue that worker centers have converged on a model characterized by foundation and government funding, demands for equal treatment under the law, and new legislation to raise standards (Fine, Narro, and Barnes 2018, 34; Naduris-Weissman 2009). Instead, I find variation among worker centers that is fairly structured and less tied to ideology than to the varying structural contexts facing workers in different industries and different parts of the country. Establishing these models and the meanings behind them is important for understanding the contemporary shape of the labor movement and the possibilities for empowering workers to improve their lots.
Data and Methods
For this paper, I deploy several sources of data. One source is worker centers’ public-facing materials: websites, annual reports, and profiles on foundation websites. I created a dataset by drawing on published lists of worker centers included in Janice Fine’s (2006) book and Bobo and Casillas Pabellón’s (2016) The Worker Center Handbook, and lists of affiliate members of the national networks, and then searching for those organizations online. A total of 180 centers had sufficient information online or in academic work and are included in the analysis here. I coded these materials for (1) their frames and missions (how they describe the problems facing workers and how they seek to solve them) and intended memberships; (2) the rights emphasized, if any; and (3) strategies and tactics (wage theft claims and other legal redress; legislative advocacy; workforce development; industry campaigns, etc.). I use this dataset to speak descriptively to the activities that worker centers emphasize in their public-facing materials.
I supplement public materials with interviews that I conducted with worker center staff in Boston and Chicago in 2016-2017. Boston and Chicago were chosen for their relative density of worker centers that organize different constituencies and in different industries, while also being relatively understudied in the literature. Interviews were semi-structured and included questions that explored organizational origins, intended memberships, strategies and tactics, theories of change, relationships with other organizations, and their understanding of workplace laws. I spoke with representatives from six worker centers in Boston and seven in Chicago. Several organizations were interviewed twice over the two-year period. I also conducted interviews with actors who are external to worker centers but support their efforts and often have a bird’s-eye view of the worker center community, such as legal advocacy organizations and community labor councils. I conducted twenty-four interviews in total. The interview guide is included in the appendix.
Interviews can illuminate how worker center activists understand their own work, but they also run the risk that respondents speak more to strategic frames than to decision-making and the trade-offs that they have to make as movement organizations with scarce resources. I addressed this possibility by (1) seeking second interviews when possible, (2) by speaking with actors external to worker centers, but in their organizational community, and (3) by examining supplemental materials, including website data, annual reports, news stories, and work by other scholars. In particular, the worker center literature is rich in case studies, which often entail considerable participant observation or interviews with worker center staff. Depth is a key benefit of case studies. Scholars are able to experience the work of activists first-hand, to track patterns of behavior, and importantly, to have access to what activists do rather than just what they say. The trade-off is a lack of breadth. The methods I combined here are meant to maximize breadth while minimizing a lack of depth by drawing on numerous sources.
Findings: A Worker Center Typology
Worker centers can be meaningfully distinguished first by their targets and then by their primary strategy or theory of change. I present ideal types by focusing on the activities that worker centers most emphasized in their interviews and in websites, studies by other scholars, and so on. While there are some strong exemplars in each category, like all typologies, the categories are not mutually exclusive.
Thus, I coded worker centers for whether they report a strategic industry or occupational focus. A total of 110 worker centers include at least one industry as a strategic focus, even though some still work with workers from numerous industries. Of these centers, 51 (or a third of the sample) demonstrated an exclusive industry focus. Centers in this group include those affiliated with the Restaurant Opportunity Center-United, along with many that focus on day laborers, domestic workers, taxi-drivers, and farmworkers. The remaining centers consider themselves to be multi-sector organizations and do not focus on a particular industry.
But even organizations within these broad groups can be distinguished on the basis of their primary theory of change: Do organizations see public policy or agitating for agreements with employers as the primary avenue for change in the workplace? 60 percent of the centers included here described policy change as a primary goal. Legislative goals include both those targeting the workplace (wage theft enforcement, higher minimum wages, paid sick leave, and industry-specific legislation) and those that affect workers, but do not regulate the workplace (immigration, housing, criminal justice, education).
Multi-Sector, Policy-Focused Workers Centers
Many contemporary worker centers carry out their worker programs by focusing on legal violations and policy change and this is especially true for those centers that do not focus on specific industries. A common ideology among such organizations is one based on “community responsiveness”: Staff place a high priority on being able to help workers and their families with their immediate needs. The worker center program is therefore conducted alongside other efforts to provide services for, and sometimes organize, immigrants, residents of a specific neighborhood, tenants, and the formerly incarcerated.
Redressing wage claims is a core activity of centers in this group. Of the 180 centers, 45 percent demonstrated a strong wage theft focus. Moreover, there is an association between wage theft efforts and seeking policy changes that are not directly related to the workplace (e.g., tenants’ rights, healthcare, immigration). Over half of centers with a wage theft focus also sought policy changes in these other areas, whereas only 31.6 percent without a strong wage theft focus did (chi-square test, p < .05). Centers that have missions that go beyond workplace issues are more likely to focus on redressing wage claims in their workplace programs.
Their broader missions align with their target memberships, which map on not to specific sectors, but to specific ethnic groups, immigrants more broadly, and/or neighborhoods. They have a specific theory of change in which providing services will get workers in the door who can later be involved in policy campaigns that benefit low-wage workers and their families writ large.
Worker centers build a sense of worker empowerment in the course of redressing wage violations. Such efforts often include “direct actions” taken against an employer, building owner, or developer. The formula for direct actions and organizing in this context looks similar across organizations in this group. Take the Brazilian Worker Center (BWC) in Allston, MA, which focuses on Brazilian workers that are often employed in construction and domestic care industries, although not exclusively. They operate on a walk-in basis and screen workers for whether they have experienced a legal violation, usually involving wages. If a violation is present, the worker can work with the organization and be involved in all processes to recover their wages or accept a referral for external assistance. If the worker accepts the terms, a staff member will make a call to the employer to ask for the unpaid wages. If the employer is unwilling to come to the table to settle the dispute, they will undertake direct actions by protesting at the employer’s workplace, or sometimes their house, until the targeted individual is willing to discuss the issue. If the employer refuses to meet, the center will also file complaints to the Attorney General’s office or in small claims court. Wage complaints comprise the bulk of their workplace efforts, along with health and safety trainings. For this group and others, organizing refers to responding to legal violations with direct actions and claims, and leadership development for the workers who are assisted. Similar processes were described by staff in Rhode Island’s Fuerza Laboral, Boston’s Chelsea Collaborative (CC) and the Chinese Progressive Association (CPA), the Massachusetts Coalition for Occupational Health and Safety (MASSCosh), and Chicago’s Centro de Trabajadores Unidos (CTU).
The expectation is that workers assisted with wage claims will turn out at other efforts, including actions aimed at policymakers. Leadership development often entails training members to speak about their experiences on the job and regulatory shortcomings to policymakers. The BWC clearly articulates this theory of change, by including “services to alleviate immediate problems,” “modeling compassion,” and “teaching about workers’ and immigrants’ rights” as short-term goals that lead to the transformations needed for long-term goals of changing public policy (Brazilian Worker Center 2019). The organization was a key advocate in passing Massachusetts’ Domestic Worker Bill of Rights in 2014.
Significant tensions are often present with this approach. Centers are wary of being seen as service providers and staff emphasize the active role that workers have in the resolution of their own cases and in the organization more broadly. Requiring workers to undertake some organizational commitments is one way of filtering out cases, but worker centers also use the law to triage cases and to turn away individual workers who have not experienced a legal violation. One activist admitted to me that the work feels reactive, but that We are not like unions, with research departments, where we can find strategic targets. We are more interested in helping those that get left behind, the most vulnerable . . . and we have to do so in a multi-issue way. (Interview, November 11, 2016)
The “most vulnerable” often is interpreted, for better or worse, as those workers who have experienced a legal violation. An attorney that works closely with the Boston worker centers noted that staff often “allow the law to dictate which workers they will help. They won’t help workers that come in without a clear legal violation” (Interview, October 26, 2017). An organizer who had experience with groups in both Boston and Chicago also wondered about the payoff, expressing frustration with worker center staff spending months of effort to get someone what they are owed—“poverty level wages” (Interview, October 21, 2017).
Thus, worker centers that place a high priority on responding to legal violations still do leadership development and organizing around broader campaigns. Those campaigns tend to be policy fights to seek higher wages or other standards across industries, rather than being industry-specific. But the difficulties of prioritizing community responsiveness are clear, as the day-to-day work, even after policy wins, is eaten up by redressing individual claims. In some cities, worker centers have tried to address high levels of need and limited resources by partnering with government agencies to put on recurring wage clinics. In Boston, the worker centers that are members of the Immigrant Worker Center Coalition (IWCC) also teamed up with the Fair Wages Division of the Attorney General’s office. They meet to discuss enforcement issues and also have bimonthly clinics where attorneys from Greater Boston Legal Services and another practices provide workers assistance in preparing to go to small claims court. One former worker center organizer noted that ideally, the arrangement would free up worker center time for organizing (Interview, November 22, 2017). However, when asked about the wage clinics, staff at other worker centers noted that they still do significant work in helping workers redress wage issues.
Multi-Sector Organizations and Agreements with Employers
Nearly all multi-sector organizations work to change public policies, but some of the larger ones include an added focus on finding ways to establish worker voice in the workplace as a way to raise standards. They undertake campaigns to build worker voice by linking workers to unions when possible, forming independent unions, or finding alternative means to voice such as establishing worksite-based workers’ committees.
Worker centers in this group are discerning about where to focus their efforts. A dedication to conducting campaigns means a recognition that only some cases can be acted upon. Because they see “boss fights” as key to worker empowerment and the workers’ continued participation in the organization, the staff and members at Arise Chicago are careful to take on only the campaigns with a reasonable chance of success: You know, if there’s two of you in this intake, and there’s 60 workers in this worksite, and you’re telling us that you’re not the only ones not getting paid overtime, we’re NOT going to work with you until you exhaust your options of getting more of those additional 58 workers on board . . . We seldom have lost a workplace campaign, but that’s just because we’re good at saying that we can’t start one, until you get more co-workers. (Interview, January 13, 2017).
The organization sees itself as a conduit to unions when possible and as helping workers to establish an alternative route to collective voice when not (Interview, January 13, 2017). They draw on the “protected concerted activities” provision of Section 7 of the NLRA to do so and find the NLRA to be particularly important for emphasizing workers’ voice and helping workers to make collective goals. The critical point is that Section 7 protects workers’ ability to make extra-legal demands to their employers. In other words, demands are less driven by the floors set by legal mandates, even while these organizations draw on legal rights to protect demand-making efforts. Said the organizer when describing their approach to workplace organizing: We don’t screen for legal violations. Instead we ask the question: “what pisses you off?” I get very frustrated with other centers that are like “it’s legal what your bosses are doing to you, we can’t help you.” That makes me want to tear my hair out. It’s a question of worker power! You can do anything you want. That’s what we say for workers: “Don’t settle for getting paid what you’re supposed to.” (Interview, January 13, 2017).
Taken together, these quotes indicate an altogether distinct way of filtering cases between organizations in this group and the former. For Arise and others, the request is to “bring back more coworkers and their complaints, no matter what those complaints are.” For the organizations in the first group, the questions are “do you have an issue that is legal in nature and are you willing to work on your case and be involved in the organization?”
Organizing minority or members’ only committees is another strategy adopted by worker centers in this group. Somos un Pueblo Unido (Somos), in Santa Fe, NM, helps workers with complaints to form workers’ committees with their coworkers, which would then present a demand letter to the employer. The letter states clearly that they are acting concertedly per their rights under the NLRA. If the employer retaliates through discharge or discipline, Somos helps the workers file a charge with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Either way, they encourage the workers to keep up the committee in the workplace (Garrick 2014). Again, the idea is that once established, workers can agitate for conditions that go above and beyond those provided for by substantive law.
Arise Chicago, like some others in this group, is resolutely multi-sector in their day-to-day work—they help workers with wage claims regardless of industry or occupation—but they also target select industries that they identify according to the needs of their members and their ability to make an impact (Interview, January 13, 2017). After learning of a campaign to unionize carwash workers in Los Angeles, Arise Chicago realized that they could likely make similar inroads among Chicago carwashes, given the small size of the industry.
Some scholars have suggested that neighborhood-based industries, such as retail shops, green grocers, and restaurants, may be important strategic targets for worker center and union collaborations, since employment in such industries often overlaps with the ethnic communities that worker centers are more adept at organizing. Shapiro (2014) argues that a collaboration between New York Communities for Change and Local 338 of the Retail, Wholesale, Department Store Union (RWDSU) was successful because the parties developed a division of labor that took advantage of the strengths of the other. In particular, the worker center was granted the flexibility to do significant on-the-ground organizing and community mobilization, which helped the union to devise tactics that avoided the NLRB’s election process.
The experience of Los Angeles’ Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance (KIWA) and their campaigns in Koreatown’s restaurants and grocery stores illuminates some of the difficulties facing worker centers that seek to raise standards in neighborhood industries. KIWA had success in the restaurant industry by bringing community pressure on the more prominent employers. By their accounts they improved compliance rates in the mid-aughts from 2 to 50 percent (Fine 2006, 111). But grocery stores have more resources at their disposal, and KIWA’s efforts to establish an independent union for grocery store workers seem to have waned. Part of the problem appears to be their unwillingness to sacrifice control and vision to a partner union and to take on a struggle without a union’s greater resources. While the difficulties of partnering with unions are clear, Fine stated that KIWA “may well need the resources and power of an international union” (143). In recent years, however, it appears that KIWA has turned to public policy as the primary route to raise standards, perhaps reflecting the difficulties of organizing decentralized industries within specific neighborhoods.
The “Militant Voluntarism” of Some Industry-Specific Worker Centers
Another model is evident in worker centers that have targeted firms at the top of supply chains—public-facing firms that have the buying power to influence the working conditions of numerous suppliers. Centers in this group organize workers and consumers to leverage the market power of specific actors and to establish institutions that can provide for ongoing monitoring. This is a smaller group of worker centers but appears to be growing with the advent of the Worker-Driven Social Responsibility Network (WDSRN).
Perhaps the highest profile example has been the work of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) in Florida, which boycotted Taco Bell for four years until Yum Brands agreed to undertake joint efforts with CIW to improve working conditions for tomato pickers. Using a well-executed publicity campaign, CIW drew awareness to the plight of tomato pickers by documenting poor working conditions and labor trafficking. Their Fair Food Program (FFP) targets food retailers by pinning degraded working conditions for farmworkers on their vast purchasing power. By banding with consumers, the campaign pressures food retailers to agree to pay a “penny more per pound” of tomatoes to go to workers’ wages. Essentially, the program requires supply chain leaders to adopt legally binding standard setting agreements that require them to use their purchasing power to raise standards further up in the supply chain (Asbed, Albisa, and Sellers 2018). Suppliers and contactors who do not comply experience market consequences.
The CIW’s FFP distinguishes itself from earlier corporate social responsibility efforts by including a strong worker voice and popular education component (Sellers 2009), and legally binding agreements that are overseen by third-party monitoring bodies. While stemming illegal conditions and extreme cases of labor trafficking are an important part of their call to arms, these organizations also seek to raise standards above legal floors. Thus, advocates of the approach argue that the FFP has eradicated illegal conditions in the tomato fields of Florida and that the working environment now “is recognized as the best in U.S. agriculture” (Kyritsis and Sellers 2019).
A more recent effort in the Northeast closely mimics this effort: Vermont’s Migrant Justice has initiated a “Milk with Dignity” campaign in which dairy workers have sought responsible contractor agreements with purchasers of dairy products. An agreement with ice cream manufacturer Ben & Jerry’s is an early win for this group. Another member of the network—Minneapolis’s Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en la Lucha (CTUL)—has undertaken a similar campaign in the retail cleaning industry. One of the co-directors got his start in the movement as an organizer for CIW (Haskard 2014). Founded in 2007 as part of the Workers’ Interfaith Network, CTUL originally focused on membership and leadership development and used direct actions so that “workers learned about their workplace rights, and how to exercise those rights to win change” (CTUL 2019). Eventually breaking away from the WIN network, CTUL began an assessment of whether their organization was creating change. They decided that reclaiming wages and improving individual workplaces was akin to “putting out fires” when what they really wanted to do was “grab the pyromaniac who is lighting the fires to prevent them from being lit in the first place” (CTUL 2019).
After a series of meetings and worker surveys, they settled on the retail cleaning industry as a strategic proactive campaign. After organizing strikes and engaging with Target executives, Target agreed to adopt a “Responsible Contractors’ Policy” that establishes fair treatment standards for the workers who are employed by contractors to clean Target stores in the Twin Cities area (Fine 2014). CTUL is now extending this program to the construction industry with a “Building Dignity and Respect Campaign.”
The new campaign is similar to one by the Workers’ Defense Project in Texas, which operates in the state’s major cities, and has a Better Builder’s program to raise the floor in construction by signing agreements with developers who agree to work with contractors that commit to a living wage and health and safety training. So far, this program appears to have the most success in Austin, a more liberal city than its counterparts elsewhere in Texas. This reality is part of the reason that the organization also has an electoral arm that engages in lobbying and campaign work.
It is not surprising that the early exemplars of the more militant voluntarist approach emerged in the agricultural sector. Agricultural workers are not covered by the NLRA. They therefore do not have the unionizing rights available to other workers, but they also are not burdened by its restrictions. Thus, while statutory labor organizations are restricted from carrying out “secondary boycotts,” or any action targeted at an entity other than the direct employer, agricultural workers are not hamstrung by the ban. The CIW has been able to stage demonstrations at supermarkets and other supply chain leaders without having to worry about a lawsuit. The targeting of developers by Workers Defense Project, and of corporations like Target that contract with cleaning companies, provides an important test for whether this model can spread to other industries that are not exempt by the NLRA. The Department of Labor under the Trump administration opened an investigation of CTUL for this very question.
The Policy Efforts of Industry-Specific Worker Centers
Some industry-specific centers also have a stronger focus on policy than others, for reasons that can be traced to political contexts and industry structure. In particular, these tend to be the centers that focus on workers that are excluded, either in a de-jure or a de-facto sense, from federal labor and employment law, such as domestic workers, agricultural workers, and independent contractors. A policy focus is especially likely when the industry lacks the publicity-conscious firms at the top of a supply chain, which are targeted by centers like the CIW. In the agricultural sector, then, a divergence exists among worker centers in parts of the country where growers sell more to small restaurants and directly to consumers through farmers’ markets and community supported agriculture programs. In the Hudson River area of New York State, for example, with fewer targets for boycott campaigns (Gray 2014, 134), worker centers and their allies instead toiled for almost two decades to pass the Farmworker Labor Practices Act, which grants farmworkers overtime pay (at a threshold of sixty hours), and weekly rest days (Mulvaney 2020). By providing farmworkers the right to bargain with their employers, however, the legislation has potentially laid the groundwork for unionizing parts of the industry. Shortly after its passage, a coalition of unions and worker centers targeted the yogurt giant Chobani, drawing both upon the law and the company’s socially conscious public face to attempt to win its support for unionizing (Burns 2019).
Other sector-based centers throughout the country have forged multi-pronged strategies that combine creating or supporting. Alternative employment opportunities to low-road employers and industry-specific policies. Strategies such as job training and offering consumers “high road” alternatives to low-road companies constitute a form of voluntarism.
Take the Restaurant Opportunity Center-United (ROC-United) and its affiliates. After emerging from the original New York City affiliate, the national network organization has adopted a three-pronged strategy to address low wages, limited mobility, widespread sexual harassment, and racial and gender discrimination in the restaurant industry. First, they engage in highly strategic workplace campaigns targeted at high-end restaurants and used to set an industry example. Second, they have developed a network of “high road” employers who are committed to provide training and upward mobility opportunities for employees. They partner closely with these restaurants and also work to raise consumer awareness of high-road options. Finally, they have a robust legislative advocacy program that includes efforts to abolish tipped minimum wages and establish a “complete wage,” which includes a living wage, non-wage benefits, fair scheduling, and workplaces free of harassment and discrimination (Brady 2014; Jayaraman 2013; Restaurant Opportunity Center-United 2020).
Instead of targeted consumer boycotts or unionizing restaurants one-by-one, ROC-United seeks to raise standards in the decentralized restaurant industry by making examples of both high-road and low-road employers, and then using policy changes to compel the rest. The campaigns directed at strategic targets employ both protest tactics and lawsuits to compel employers to the table, redress legal violations, and during the course of settling, agree to change other practices. In her exploration of ROC-New York’s successful campaigns, Marnie Brady (2014) points out that enforcement of settlement agreements is a real challenge, as ROC-NY rarely retained access to the restaurant after a settlement was achieved. This is a significant divergence from the monitoring agreements that the organizations in group 3 are able to achieve.
This set of strategies is similar to those deployed by other worker centers that have memberships in highly decentralized industries, such as day laborers. Day labor centers provide a space where workers can find work and they help workers to reject jobs that fall below a given rate. Alongside this, they help workers redress wage claims and engage in legal and political advocacy against anti-solicitation ordinances and similar. The goal is less to control the supply of labor in the market and instead to provide a higher road alternative for workers and employers alike. While some worker centers may also seek to organize informal hiring sites, there are often too many for them to reach (Doussard 2013; Meléndez et al. 2014). And Fine (2007) has argued that worker center staff are often ideologically opposed to confronting workers who accept lower wages at hiring sites (349). This was echoed by one of my interviewees who stated that they don’t condemn hiring sites where wages are low, and instead encourage workers to come to the worker center where they focus on raising awareness that “your work is worth this amount and you should negotiate for that, and feel empowered to ask for that” (Interview, February 7, 2017).
Finally, centers that help domestic workers look fairly similar: they help workers recover wages, seek policy changes, and in some cases, provide an alternative hiring site where workers are organized to negotiate fair contracts. At the national level, the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) has a sister organization—Hand in Hand—that acts as a network of employers of domestic workers and helps them to improve their employment practices. In the realm of policy advocacy, affiliates of the NDWA have succeeded in passing Domestic Worker Bills of Rights in nine states.
Discussion: Organizational Antecedents
An examination of worker centers reveals neither overwhelming homogeneity nor unlimited variation. Instead, they can be categorized based on their workplace targets (multi-industry, or industry focused) and their primary strategy (more or less policy focused). There are strong tendencies: nearly all multi-industry centers have a strong policy component, and nearly all industry-centered workplaces have at least some efforts to help workers fight for agreements with employers or secondary targets for improved conditions. But there are important exceptions to this generalization: some industry-based centers are more focused on policy than others and some multi-sector centers seek unionizing and other ways to help workers win agreements with employers. Table 1 synthesizes these findings.
Models of Worker Center Organizing.
These differences among worker centers can be traced to both structural contexts and organizational factors. The epidemic of wage and hour violations facing low-wage workers is a highly important part of the context facing nearly all worker centers. The experience of wage theft at the individual level represents an immediate loss and a threat to both survival and worker dignity. Wage theft also drives down standards within a given industry. Worker centers are thus under immense pressure to find ways to address it, and centers in each group do so, albeit in different ways. For industry-focused centers, the structure of the industry in question is important for the strategies that they pursue.
The worker centers in the first group—multi-sector, policy-focused—are more likely to be parts of organizations with broader mandates focused on a neighborhood, or specific ethnic group. Worker centers in this group exhibit an ideology of “community responsiveness” as the staff often place a high priority of responding to the immediate needs—of which workplace issues are only one—of members who come to the organization for help.
In practice, being responsive to a community means that they do not turn away workers on the basis of industry or occupation. But they do turn away workers if their workplace situations are not legal in nature. The theory of change here rests on service delivery to meet members’ immediate needs and grow a membership base and then turn out those members at policy campaigns. The law provides a crucial backdrop for state-centered worker centers as demands are driven by legal floors and organizing is driven by the goal of policy change. These tend to be some of the smaller organizations that operate their workplace programs with lower levels of funding. Worker centers in politically liberal cities and states are more likely to have success with such efforts and are therefore more likely to pursue them.
Some multi-sector worker centers retain a strong focus on public policy, but have an added component of fostering worker campaigns with the goal of unionizing, or finding other ways to forge agreements with employers, and ongoing forms of worker voice in the workplace. Organizations like Arise Chicago and New Mexico’s Somos un Pueblo Unido are fairly prominent and are recognized as some of the better funded organizations in their regions. But there is a potential endogeneity issue here: Some centers report an influx of funding after adopting more proactive workplace organizing campaigns, as was the case with Somos (Garrick 2014). More funding may be an effect of proactive workplace campaigns, rather than a cause. Organizations in this group are less likely to focus on legal violations as the reason for mobilizing. They often have narrower organizational mandates than the centers in the first group.
Among centers that focus exclusively on a given sector, we can distinguish between those that are policy-focused and those that have adopted the more voluntarist approach of compelling supply chain leaders into raising standards and limiting their business to suppliers and contractors who comply with those standards. The state is only a background player in such agreements, which more closely approximate the “militant voluntarism” tradition of the earlier labor movement.
This distinction can be traced to industry differences. The linchpin for organizations that eschew legislation and adopt the voluntarist model is an industry in which large, branded companies can be pressured to raise standards among suppliers and labor contractors: CIW and agreements with supermarkets and fast food restaurants to adopt a code of conduct for tomato suppliers; CTUL and agreements with Target and custodial cleaning contractors in Minneapolis; and Workers Defense Project and agreements with developers in Austin, TX. In contrast, worker centers that focus on workers in decentralized industries with many independent employers, as well as those that are excluded from federal labor and employment law, such as domestic workers, agricultural workers, and independent contractors, are highly likely to focus on winning legislation for these workers at the state and local levels.
Conclusion
In this article, I have distilled the literature on worker centers and interview data to show that worker centers’ efforts can be categorized according to their targets (specific industries, or individual workplaces in numerous sectors) and the level to which their strategies rely upon public policy or more voluntarist strategies aimed at compelling employers into agreements to raise standards. These are ideal types, and some organizations use components of all models. But the strategic focus of each center comprises the bulk of their activities and includes a specific theory of change.
The strategic differences among worker centers echo earlier divides found in the Progressive-era labor movement, in which some unions rejected a strong role for the state in the face of a judiciary that was highly hostile to worker organizing. Today, some worker centers are highly focused on policy advocacy as a key strategy for change, and others seek various agreements with corporations, sometimes without a strong role for the state. Like the Progressive era, these distinctions have their roots more in structural opportunities and obstacles than in any pure ideological differences. The omnipresence of wage theft in some parts of the labor market is part of this overarching structure. And depending on the structure of the industry in question, and the composition of the local and state political bodies, worker centers may seek to systematically reduce wage theft and raise standards through changing public policy or by forging agreements with specific companies.
There are mixed assessments and prescriptions in the literature about whether workers’ organizations are better able to help workers by targeting state policy or targeting employers directly. Steve Jenkins (2002), a former organizer with Make the Road-New York, published an essay concerned with what he considered the dominant form of worker center organizing. Worker centers’ focus on policymakers and foundation-funding, he argued, prioritizes the roles of elite advocates who often fail to tackle the difficult questions of how workers can build economic power (referred to in his essay as “social” power) and levy real challenges to the structures that oppress them. Other scholars have pushed back on his argument by pointing out that the challenges facing workers today call for struggles to be waged on numerous fronts with strategies to fit the particular targets (Juravich 2018; McAlevey 2014).
It is likely that both policy change and workplace campaigns are important parts of efforts to raise standards. Janice Fine (2006) argues that worker centers simply have more power in the public policy sphere. Achieving changes in an industry through economic action is difficult given an oversupply of workers that are regarded as low skill and employed by small contractors that operate in competitive markets. But at the state and local levels, worker centers have been successful in organizing groups of workers and allies to directly confront policymakers (Fine 2006, 160; Fine, Narro, and Barnes 2018). Moreover, Fine (2005, 156) argues that the most significant gains for working people, including the minimum and overtime wages, workers’ compensation, and the abolition of child labor, all came through changes in public policy. There is also contemporary evidence that worker centers’ efforts in some policy realms can pay off. Wage theft protection acts do appear to decrease the prevalence of wage theft, for example (Galvin 2016). And the wages of the lowest earners appear to be increasing in recent years, despite continued decreases in union density, because of increases in state and local minimum wages (Tedeschi 2020).
Of course, policy fights are less winnable in Republican strongholds (Rhomberg 2018, 264). This appears to be the case even for those worker centers who operate in blue cities within red states, as evidenced by the rise of state-level preemption laws in the South and Midwest that nullified hard-won increases in local minimum wages (Huizar and Lathrop 2019). In addition, policy changes do not seem to change the day-to-day work of centers that focus on legal violations. Standards may be raised on the books, but non-compliance is ongoing, and many activists still spend most of their efforts responding to the workers who come in with legal violations. The tensions and difficulties of such an approach are clear. Responding to legal violations is incredibly time consuming, and a focus on them can limit the ability of centers to address questions of power-building (Jenkins 2002). Bobo and Casillas Pabellón (2016) likewise argued that given the shortcomings of laws that protect workers, “the best protection for workers is a union. The second best is some other form of association in which workers join together in asserting their rights” (259-60).
Given that industry-specific centers often deploy an array of strategies to win changes, the more pressing question for worker centers may be less about public policy versus workplace campaigns and more about whether or not to adopt a specific industry target. This is a point of considerable debate among activists. Jose Oliva, a founder of Arise Chicago’s organizational predecessor, and now a director at the HEAL Food Alliance, has argued that focusing on target industries has several advantages, including encouraging worker centers to focus on direct intervention in the workplace and creating a division of labor that decreases the likelihood of turf wars (Lesniewski 2012, 143). Arise Chicago maintains that a multi-sector focus is advantageous because it allows them to connect with workers from all over the city, who they can then turn out to target their council members in their own wards during policy campaigns (Interview, January 13, 2017). Nevertheless, it is important to note that Arise Chicago does undertake industry-specific work when they believe that they can launch a serious intervention.
The research presented here and elsewhere suggests that focusing at least some efforts on an industry moves an organization to undertake the strategic analysis and problem solving that is often necessary to systematically raise standards. Bobo and Casillas Pabellón (2016) also point out that targeting an industry can help worker centers grow organizationally. When CTUL, for example, adopted corporate cleaning as a target, their focused efforts drew more attention from funders because “funders like gutsy organizations that are winning” (114). Finally, while worker centers often have members who labor in industries that are known to be difficult to organize, there are now success stories in diverse sectors that can provide models for a variety of campaigns. In industries with branded companies that are vulnerable to public shaming, the CIW model may be the route to go. But even in decentralized industries, worker centers’ unique mix of strategies have resulted in important wins for workers. Sometimes policy changes won by community organizations pave the way for them to partner with unions and organize shops in even the most exploitative of industries, such as carwashes (Garea and Stern 2010).
There are also examples of organizing campaigns in neighborhood-based industries. In particular, there appears to be significant promise for worker center-union collaborations. These are not without challenges: The successful ones have involved significant growing pains that stem from different ideologies and the questions of joint control over strategy when the union is funding the campaign. Both Shapiro’s (2014) aforementioned account of the collaboration between RWDSU’s Local 338 and New York Communities for Change and Hetland’s (2015) examination of the collaboration between the same union and Make the Road-New York speak to processes of organizational learning and problem solving that helped to overcome initial challenges.
Thus, centers may not need to make a decision between a policy-focused or a more voluntarist approach. Given the different structural challenges facing workers in different political and economic contexts, there is clearly room for both. But if centers wish to move beyond, or to complement, workplace programs that are largely centered on responding to legal claims, an industry focus for at least some of their activities provides important opportunities for organizational growth and power building. Seeking collaborations with unions and other organizations is one way that worker centers may do so while still retaining their accessibility to workers in need of immediate services.
Footnotes
Appendix
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Kate Andrias, Sandra Levitsky, Katelyn Parady, and Kiyoteru Tsutsui for their comments on an early draft of this paper. I also thank an anonymous reviewer for suggestions that helped the article immensely. I’m especially grateful to Rachel Best and Andrew Schrank, who read numerous versions and gave valuable feedback at every turn. Finally, I’m greatly indebted to the labor activists that took time from their schedules to tell me about their work and share crucial insights from their experiences with me.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research for this article was supported by the National Science Foundation Division of Law & Social Sciences, Grant 1727590.
