A Critical Industrial Relations Approach to Understanding Contemporary Worker Uprising

The Worker Empowerment Research Network (WERN), a cross-university and multi-disciplinary research group, put together an overview report that documents current organizing efforts in the United States. Building on their recent work, they show that there is a significant “voice” and “representation” gap amongst the U.S. workforce and indicate the challenges to achieve union election wins and first contracts due to ever more sophisticated employer anti-union tactics and campaigns. At the same time, the authors point to a “major upsurge” in worker organizing and collective action. Specifically, they highlight a surge in very visible organizing activity (e.g., contestations at Starbucks), a recent wave of strikes and worker unrest with demands going beyond the traditional scope of collective bargaining, as well as a growing number of new worker centers, specifically Black worker centers, that have been created as alternatives to unions. According to the authors, these new approaches to strengthening worker voice and potentially building newly sustainable organizations are rooted within a specific sector, firm, or worker identity. At the same time, the authors argue, however, that despite this surge in organizing, this has not “yet resulted in major increases in the number of workers covered by a representative organization. Nor is there a broad-based or coordinated social or political movement calling for reforms of labor policies… for occupational groups… or for those who mobilize for racial and social justice.” They conclude by asking whether we should consider this upsurge as a “temporary phenomenon” or a “historic inflection point” in U.S. labor employment relations.

In this essay, we respond to their report and interrogatory with a Critical Industrial Relations Theory lens (Lee & Tapia 2021). In other words, we consider whether this “current upsurge in activism” should be framed merely as activism against employer opposition as an end game, or whether it is necessary to ground our conceptualization of contemporary worker organizing and collective action in the counter-narratives and the historical context of those workers who occupy space in broader justice fights, organizations, and movements for a multi-racial democracy. We suggest that theorists should be critical as to whether these are “new approaches,” and scholars should confront tendencies to describe as “innovative” worker contestations that have long been in the tactical repertoires and histories of feminist, immigrant, and BIPoC liberation movements.

For these reasons, we engage Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality, which call for deep socio-structural analysis that more thoroughly considers systemic inequities and worker identities when examining worker organizing. This is important from theoretical and practical points of view, as the alternative would leave IR scholars and practitioners taking on a colorblind approach that misses a deeper understanding of the phenomenon, as well as its potential challenges and solutions. In doing so, we integrate our own research in Critical Industrial Relations to highlight practical implications for the future of “whole worker” organizing when considering the existing statutory framework of the NLRA. More specifically, critical approaches to IR shift traditional IR frameworks, questions, and presumptions from primarily shared economistic class analyses to consider social identity-based counter-narratives of how, why, and for what purpose workers organize. As a result, this makes visible the hidden obstacles to inclusive solidarity and raises an alternative framework that contextualizes current organizing efforts—rather an upsurge or not—as part of a larger, historical worker fight for social justice and inclusive democracy.

Our work in critical industrial relations centers intragroup identity-based variances in our understandings of worker organizing (Lee & Tapia, 2021) and intersectional movements and campaigns for worker justice, such as the 2017 Women's March (Lee & Tapia, 2023), the Fight for $15 (Tapia et al., 2017), and most recently, Amazon warehouse worker organizing (Lee et al., 2022). In line with Smiley and Gupta (2022), we frame worker organizing as more than simply (or even primarily) a means to statutory representation under the NLRA, but rather as broader political advocacy and fight for inclusive democracy, in which we pay specific attention to historical antiracist struggles. For example, in our work on Amazon warehouse workers in the U.S. South, we link Amazon's employment practices to the military-like police control that has defined the Black experience in the South since the slave patrols during the Civil War.

At the same time, when we study collective action and workers as agents of change, we ground our understanding of contemporary events in the historical context of movements in which women and Black and other workers of color have taken the lead. For example, in our paper on the 2017 Women's March, we highlight how a “fourth wave” white-dominated feminist campaign became an intersectional movement (Lee & Tapia 2023) by contextualizing the theory and praxis of the uprising in the earlier social activism and writings of Black (feminist) activists/scholars. This allowed us to employ an identity-conscious framework and to consider counter-narratives to understand the lived experiences from which Women March leaders drew inspiration (Lee & Tapia 2021).

Throughout our research we note the importance of accounting for the “whole worker” organizing, expanding our view of collective bargaining and paying specific attention to the intersections of a worker's identity. As Smiley and Gupta (2022) state, “Organizing people as workers is not enough … Economic democracy in the twenty-first century cannot be achieved solely within a framework focused exclusively on worksites. Rather we must explore a more expansive definition of collective bargaining that adapts to the context of global capitalism and all its features … What happens to workers on the job is intimately connected to what happens in their communities, in their schools, and in their lived environments. It is also intimately connected to their gender, race, ethnicity, ability, and citizenship status … Improving workers’ lives on the job cannot be separated from improving their lives when off work” (2022, p. 61–62). In praxis, this means that transactional coalitions between trade unions and community groups are then also not a way forward towards democracy. Rather, what is needed are intersectional institutions capable of addressing worker demands that give equal consideration to identity-based oppressions.

Furthermore, when examining strikes, for example, we have argued for a reconceptualization of labor contestation through critical race theory (Sapre & Tapia 2022). This means to not consider movements such as Black Lives Matter as something artificially separate from worker strikes or worker power, as for many workers of color, acts of resistance have never been unidimensional given the intertwined nature of racism and class issues. Indeed, struggles, especially by Black workers against injustice, have deep historical roots within which mass disruption or massive civil obedience have long been key tactics to delegitimize the white supremacist ideologies and institutions (including labor institutions) maintained within our capitalist system (Robinson 1983). This is also why, as labor historian Danielle Philips-Cunningham (2020) aptly points out when referring to the 2020–21 Georgia Senate runoff campaign, we need to more deeply understand the organizing power of Black women in Georgia in “shaping American democracy” through their fights for labor, criminal justice, and voting reform.

Thus, when examining worker centers, and especially as WERN notes the creation of Black worker centers, we need to understand the extent to which there has been a void in the structure and jurisprudence of the NLRA. More specifically, much like the amplified structural obstacles faced by Black women seeking protection under Title VII due to their intersectional identities (Crenshaw, 1989), workers engaged in concerted advocacy for their whole selves are often left unprotected by the NLRA, whose standard for political advocacy in the workplace creates a false tipping point at which marginalized worker pursuits of social justice suddenly become “purely political” and too attenuated from working class interests. Thus, when IR scholars distinguish unions from worker centers that go beyond the “traditional scope of collective bargaining,” we must consider the ways in which our understandings of the scope of collective bargaining and restrictions on workplace advocacy for broader social justice default—both in laws and institutions—to white and privileged groups’ constructions of worker justice.

As an alternative, if we take a critical lens to our core labor laws and institutions, we challenge traditional colorblind approaches to colorblind laws and bring attention to the ways in which workers’ non-class identities might inform the ways we understand motivations, consequences, and sustainability of their mobilizations. In this case, traditional approaches to the NLRA potentially obscure a fundamental lack of remedy and access incorporated in its design (Flynn et al. 2016) for workers from marginalized social identities whose economic interests as employees are not severable from their political interests as humans seeking political and social democracy. Moreover, while the remedial failures of the NLRA are well-documented, they are not often analyzed from an identity-conscious frame. Thus, we believe this moment calls for IR scholars, much like Crenshaw (1989) did in using Title VII to reexamine the hidden obstacles to inclusive workplace democracy, to address the “false reality” of the extractability of the labor question from the political question.

More specifically, we suggest that there is a constructed (false) reality in which the severability of labor and political advocacy is considered neutral and objective, even though it is not. Under the Supreme Court's decision in Eastex Inc. v. NLRB., 437 U.S. 556, 566–67 (1978), the existing standard of protected worker political advocacy under the NLRA requires concerted activity for mutual aid or protection to be in “employees’ interests as employees,” and bars certain concerted activity deemed to be purely political as “so attenuated” from workers’ identities that it cannot be reasonably permitted in the workplace. ¹ This “false reality” experienced by racialized workers can be seen clearly in recent tensions between the NLRB and the courts in which NLRB determinations that Black Lives Matter activity by workers is protected activity have occasionally been struck down by federal courts that have found the same mutual aid “so attenuated” from worker interests as to lose Section 7 protection. Hence, if the current upsurge in worker organizing is in relevant part because of issues of, for example racial injustice, the NLRA's spectrum of protected political advocacy (Griffith & Lee 2012) might fail to protect the workplace democracy concerns of the “nonwhite, low-income, and less-educated” folks identified by the authors earlier as those more inclined to want a union.

This forces us to ask when do racialized bodies become workers and fights for full humanity become routine questions of labor and employment? Is it simply whether those bodies ask the NLRB for statutory representation? For example, are Black, immigrant, and woman-identified workers organizing in unions AND also becoming members of worker centers and abolitionist movements? And if holding space in all, when is their collective activity for primarily statutorily unprotected political aims, and when is it protected under Section 7 of the NLRA as “employees’ interests as employees”? Does their collective activity for mutual aid or protection become of less interest to us when their demands are seen by our laws, institutions, and theories as “so attenuated” from their labor market experience that those same workers seeking a “stronger voice, power, and representation” lose the protection of the NLRA while simultaneously seeking the right to bargain promised under it?

To conclude, we need a deep understanding of how traditional IR questions, such as what workers want, vary by social identity to understand where they are going, and how long they’ve been on that journey. If we take this moment—in theory and in praxis—to recenter our understanding of what workers want from a truly intersectional approach to workplace democracy, we must dive deeper into the non-work identities and the whole worker experience of those leading at this moment. The ability for contemporary labor leaders to bring forth transformation or sustainability in the world of worker rights, particularly if their notions of worker justice include more than performative notions of equity and humanity, arguably turns on critical structural reconsiderations of labor institutions (including the NLRA and labor organizations themselves) that are not often explored.