Whose Movement Is It? Strategic Philanthropy and Worker Centers

Introduction

Worker centers have been hailed by American sociologists as an exciting new organizing model given the declining power and density of labor unions nationwide during the neoliberal era (Fine, 2006; Milkman, 2010). ¹ As deindustrialization, labor deregulation, and the post-Fordist reorganization of work have transformed US political economy, jobs in traditionally union-dense industries have been gradually supplanted by low-wage positions in sectors where organizing is either exceptionally difficult or legally unprotected. As real wages for the working class continue to stagnate or decline, these processes have further weakened organized labor (Gottheil, 2014; Milkman, 2010: 4–6). In the 1990s and early 2000s, worker centers began to proliferate rapidly, offering an alternative model for organizing in such sectors. ² From the start, most worker centers have employed tactics such as legislative advocacy, litigation for enforcement of labor protections, service provision, and campaigns against individual employers, rather than direct economic action tactics like strikes (Fine, 2006). The strategic choices and public discourse of these local nonprofits ³ signaled a relatively expansive notion of rights, opening possibilities for a renewed labor movement (Fine, 2006).

Over the ensuing years, these heterogeneous organizations have evolved along divergent paths. Some groups, both local and national, have developed contentious, demands-based campaigns against employers, focusing on the material conditions faced by their worker-members. But as other prominent local center leaders founded national groups and sought grants from more established nationwide funders, their campaigns protesting worker exploitation were replaced over time with workforce training, smartphone apps, and alliances with employers. This article analyzes a few of the factors contributing to these divergent paths taken by two sets of worker centers in New York City. Along with the workers and organizers who are questioning this shift, we ask, whose movement is it? ⁴

In addressing this question, we draw on written materials from both foundations and worker centers, such as websites, annual reports, and grant application guides. Our analysis also draws on perspectives shared by workers and organizers in our ongoing working group organized as part of the Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research at the CUNY Graduate Center. The group engages activists from a variety of local worker centers and migrant rights organizations in a series of discussions about foundation funding, the nonprofit organizational form, and labor organizing. The insights of these workers and organizers have made significant contributions to our own thinking.

We begin by defining and periodizing strategic philanthropy, distinguishing it from previous grantmaking trends. Next, we explore how the strategic funding techniques and discourse of the Ford Foundation and the Ms. Foundation for Women have influenced the projects and nationwide expansion of two of their grantees, National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) and Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC United). In the following section, we examine the projects undertaken by these two national worker center groups, each of which has forgone both the practices and the discourse of confrontation. We then contrast these cases with three local groups based in New York City that have retained their initial militancy: Laundry Workers Center United (LWC), the newly reorganized Domestic Workers United (DWU), and New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA). We conclude by describing several of these three groups’ long-term priorities, including worker leadership, alternative funding strategies, and worker-led decision-making. We argue that each of these priorities has contributed to the differentiation of their organizational trajectories from those of NDWA and ROC United.

Although they operate in different industries, we chose these two national groups based on several similarities. Before becoming NDWA’s first director in 2010, Ai-jen Poo headed DWU; before co-founding ROC United in 2003, Saru Jayaraman (2011: 632) also started a local group, Restaurant Opportunities Center New York (ROC-NY). Members and staff of both ROC-NY and DWU protested against employers, prioritizing political education and leadership development (Fernandes, 2016; Gottheil, 2014). For scholars such as Janice Fine (2011a: 611), the creation of national groups was a promising sign that worker centers had ‘significantly evolved and matured, institutionalizing themselves and substantially expanding their strategic capacities.’ Yet rather than bringing the work of their local counterparts to scale, both NDWA and ROC United have turned to strikingly similar entrepreneurial projects, including employer alliances and market-based initiatives. ⁵

We selected Ford and Ms. Foundations based on their distinct relationships to these national nonprofits. Despite its small size, Ms. Foundation played an instrumental role in launching NDWA and ROC United. In the process of funding the early development of these organizations, in written documents Ms. Foundation deployed the discourse and practices of venture capitalists. Although at times Ford staff used similar language, they often acted as later-stage investors, developing grantee organizations into stable institutions and providing a far more significant proportion of their budgets over a much longer period. ⁶ Both funders drew on the logic of financial investors, ultimately prompting NDWA and ROC United to ally with employers and create entrepreneurial ventures.

Worker centers differ considerably from labor unions in the US, although some unions have either formed independent worker centers or collaborated with existing ones (Fine, 2006: 11, 15). Currently, labor unions act as the exclusive collective bargaining representative for employees at a specific workplace or with a particular job classification. Union campaigns are usually limited to winning representation and negotiating collective bargaining agreements. Worker centers generally do not seek to bargain collectively on behalf of their members. Rather, the scope of their campaigns extends beyond the workplace, securing members’ rights not only as workers, but also as tenants or migrants (Fine, 2006; Gottheil, 2014). At times, members of LWC (2015) have chosen to create unaffiliated unions among fellow restaurant workers. Yet for domestic workers and others who are excluded from federal labor law protections, it would be much more difficult to engage in collective bargaining. Centers organizing domestic workers have therefore tended to use tactics such as legislative campaigns to improve their wages and conditions. The traditional American labor movement also dwarfs its worker center counterpart in scale. And crucially, while unions are financed primarily by membership dues, foundation grants provide a far more substantial proportion of worker center funding (Fine, 2006; Gottheil, 2014). Fine (2006: 217–218) found that philanthropic grants constituted 61% of her respondents’ small budgets, 51% of which were US$250,000 or less. Our national cases rely heavily on institutional funders. In 2013, for example, foundations provided at least 86% ⁷ of the US$5,531,356 in total revenue reported by NDWA. ⁸ Due to this reliance on foundations, compliance with grantmakers’ constraints is an urgent necessity for the financial solvency of most worker centers.

As we examined the factors influencing the trajectories taken by two sets of worker centers, we therefore paid particular attention to strategic philanthropy. This framework applies the logic and practices of financial investment, such as goal-setting, metrics, and evaluation techniques, to the grantmaking process. Strategic funding has become a standard practice among US foundations over the past two decades, ⁹ dramatically reshaping the field of worker center organizing.

Periodizing Philanthropy and Strategic Funding

Americans have used business as a model for philanthropy since the golden age of free market liberalism (McGoey, 2012). In his ‘Gospel of Wealth’, robber baron Andrew Carnegie (1906 [1889]) first argued that those who are able to amass large amounts of capital on the free market are best able to decide how to spend it for the greater good. As American foundations matured and proliferated during the early and mid-20th century, their relationship to nonprofits was largely limited to the funding of university research and pilot projects, or R&D, in the hope that governments would adopt some of the funders’ ideas (Kim, 2009: 46; Letts et al., 1997: 37). Hun Kee Kim (2009: 36) describes the shift from this liberal moment to a neoliberal moment among foundations. ¹⁰ As the state withdrew from many areas of social services provision during the 1970s and 1980s, nonprofit organizations experienced dramatic growth in both size and number (INCITE!, 2007; Kim, 2009: 36). Kim (2009: 36, 47) argues that in the late 1970s, foundations made a strategic shift towards social action by funding these nonprofits, including many 1960s social movement organizations. Funders institutionalized and professionalized the work of social movement grantees, some of whom gradually abandoned broader structural critiques (INCITE!, 2007; Roelofs, 2003: 5–6). Yet as both Kim (2009: 49) and Erica Kohl-Arenas (2016: 12) note, neither funders nor nonprofit staff universally act to promote a defined class interest. While foundations played a crucial role in the political neutralization of leftist social movements, institutional power operates through multiple negotiations over time (Kohl-Arenas, 2016: 12).

During the late 1990s and early 2000s, funders began to express frustration with the slow progress of grantees in meeting foundations’ goals and solving social problems (Franklin, 2014: 128; Frumkin, 2003:7-8). Foundation staff and boards sought to address these problems more effectively and efficiently through strategic funding, which applies the logic and practices of financial investment to grantmaking through techniques such as goal-setting, tactical prescriptions, monitoring, and evaluation. Proponents of strategic funding argued that foundations did not replicate the practices of venture capitalists closely enough, suggesting that such practices could improve the field of philanthropy (Frumkin, 2003: 7–8; e.g. Letts et al., 1997). Since the 1990s, strategic philanthropy has become a standard practice among American foundations (Franklin, 2014: 128; Jenkins, 2011: 755, 767–768).

Contemporary neoliberal logics differ sharply from the classical free market liberal rationalities that guided early philanthropists. As Wendy Brown (2015) argues, the late neoliberal framework for the conduct of the individual is based on the logic of financial investment, subordinating political and social man to homo economicus. When neoliberal reason spreads across a sphere that classical liberals imagined as non-economic, it models the organization, the individual, and the entire sphere on the logic of financial investment. Accordingly, strategic philanthropists approach grants as investments and grantees as entrepreneurs, despite the fact that they do not expect a monetary return. Adam Smith and other classical liberals warned of the necessity of maintaining a separation between the social and economic spheres, and prioritizing restraint among the wealthy to avoid the moral problem of poverty (Kim, 2009: 66). By contrast, neoliberal conceptions of inequality locate its solution in improving the moral economic behavior of the poor, rather than restraining the indulgence of the rich (Kim, 2009: 66–7). As we will explore in the pages that follow, this displacement of risk and responsibility onto low-wage workers and the poor through entrepreneurship has important implications for the foundation funding of worker centers.

Foundations as Investors: Strategic Philanthropy in the Neoliberal Era

The process of strategic funding comprises at least three stages: foundations set measurable goals for their grants, prescribe specific tactics, and monitor and evaluate their grantees. John Gledhill (2004: 340) argues that such techniques are part of ‘an “audit culture”’, a form of neoliberal rationality that he describes as ‘continuous assessment and demands for evidence that goals are being realized’. For Gledhill (2004: 341), audit culture exerts specific disciplinary effects upon nonprofit workers, as they are constantly evaluated based on their ‘procedural efficiency of action in terms of the agency’s mission rather than its substantive impact on the lives of human beings’. Each stage of the strategic grantmaking process extends audit culture from foundations to their grantees.

Before conceiving of specific grants, many strategic philanthropists consult experts for help in determining their goals. In delineating the social problem to be addressed as well as specific approaches and benchmarks, this process sets limits for potential solutions proposed by grantees. To ensure that grantees reach these goals, foundation staff often tie tactical prescriptions to their grants. Ford (n.d.(a)), for instance, terms these ‘grantmaking approaches’. Under their Capacity Building and Technical Assistance category, Ford (n.d.(a)) aims to improve grantees’ efficacy by investing in their infrastructure, management, or endowments. With such approaches, funders aim to improve their grantees’ competitiveness in the nonprofit marketplace by investing in specific organizational capabilities. Finally, strategic philanthropists monitor and evaluate their grantees, measuring the performance of nonprofit staff in terms of the foundation’s goals (see Gledhill, 2004: 340–1). Program staff at Ford (n.d.(b)) conduct two reviews and require a signed contract with an organization prior to making the grant; during the funding period, they require a site visit and two grantee reports.

Each of these techniques provides a way for funders to ensure that the actions of their grantees align with their own goals, which are not necessarily shared by workers or organizers. In a training during the early years of DWU, for instance, leaders stated that their organizational goals were to dismantle systems of oppression such as globalization and imperialism. ¹¹ By contrast, when Ms. Foundation (2002: 15) funded DWU through its fiscal sponsor in 2002, the grant fell under their ‘New Voices, Proactive Strategies Initiative’. In their annual report for that year, Ms. Foundation (2002: 15) described the initiative: ‘The program supports organizing and community-centered advocacy efforts aimed at shifting public and corporate policy toward a greater recognition of the roles that the private sector (business) and public sector (government) must play to lift women and families out of poverty’. Rather than challenging global structures of oppression, foundations have sought market-based solutions to poverty and worker exploitation.

Professionals at Ford often use the language of supply-side economics to articulate the labor issues that they seek to redress by funding worker centers, suggesting such solutions as workforce development and alliances with employers. Many of Ford’s (n.d.(c)) grants to NDWA, ROC United, and other national groups, for instance, were funded through their Promoting the Next Generation Workforce Strategies Initiative (Foundation Center, n.d.). In Ford’s (n.d.(d)) description of this program, they point to the lack of opportunities for individual upward mobility, emphasizing that ‘as the job market in the United States has shifted dramatically over the past three decades, growing numbers of Americans suffer from chronic unemployment or are trapped in low-wage jobs with limited resources to support a family and move up the economic ladder’. By naming the underlying problem as one of individual opportunity and access, Ford staff approach workers as disadvantaged labor market competitors in which nonprofits can invest, guiding their grantees away from campaigns focused on structural issues.

As in the private sector, foundations hope that their grantees will grow in size and funds, resting on the assumption that scaling up is an important outcome (Bradach, 2010). At each stage in the growth of private sector businesses, entrepreneurs seek financiers with the amount of capital and style of investment appropriate to the scale of their organization. In the nonprofit sector, funding roles are neither as straightforward nor as clearly tied to stages of organizational growth as in the business world (Gugelev and Stern, 2015: 42). Yet like investors, foundations have different styles, with widely varying levels of funding, involvement with grantees, and risk tolerance.

In their early years, both ROC-NY and DWU were frequently supported by small, progressive community foundations, such as New York Foundation and The New York Community Trust (Foundation Center, n.d.), which fund organizing and advocacy work at the local level. Yet in the US, the total pool of grant dollars allocated to social change is proportionately small compared to other funding areas, and funds for local community organizing groups are even more limited. Jagpal and Laskowski (2013: 1) found that overall, social justice philanthropy accounted for only 12% of total grants made by their sample of foundations, while the community foundations in their sample only allocated 7% of their grant dollars to social change. Moreover, as Janice Fine (2006: 255) pointed out, even the most reliable funders usually limit the number of consecutive years they will fund the same grantee. Many worker center leaders thus seek new funders on a regular basis (Fine, 2006: 255). To fulfill the growth imperative described above, worker centers need more substantial grants over a longer period of time from later-stage investors, which tend to be large national foundations. Yet as Fine (2011b: 46) also notes, ‘many national funders hesitate to fund at the local level, preferring to go through regional or national intermediaries’. Launching a national worker center organization, many of which re-grant to local affiliates, enables worker centers to appeal to established later-stage investors, who can fund further growth.

Ms. Foundation bridged the funding gap between local funders and such large, later-stage national investors. They acted as an earlier national investor, financing the initial development of NDWA and ROC United. In their 2011 Annual Report, foundation staff describe their role in financing the convening at which NDWA was founded as well as its state-by-state legislative strategy: ‘Energized by New York, the Ms. Foundation is helping transform a regional win into a victory nationwide’ (Ms. Foundation, 2011: 7). The foundation has also supported ROC United since 2008, its first year as an independent national nonprofit, when they funded the group to develop its leadership board (Ms. Foundation, 2010: 19). As an early-stage national investor, Ms. Foundation also uses the practices and language of a venture capital firm. In their 2011 Annual Report, they described the risk they took in funding DWU, recalling that ‘in the early 2000s, the Ms. Foundation took a chance on this burgeoning movement, providing the then-nascent New York group, Domestic Workers United (DWU), with their first grant to conduct policy advocacy. The Ms. Foundation’s faith in the grassroots leadership emerging from the ranks of domestic workers proved more than justified’ (Ms. Foundation, 2011: 6). Investing in small, innovative start-ups like DWU is risky, but the return is high, especially as the organization grows and new national groups are created.

In the process of applying for foundation grants, staff of these growing worker centers must tailor their proposals to grantmakers’ goals while simultaneously attempting to focus on their own organizational aims. In some cases, this may simply entail using new kinds of language and continuing their existing work. In others, as Fine (2006: 255) describes, staff may propose projects that do not cohere with their own goals in order to procure scarce funding. Over time, such repeated institutional negotiations between strategic philanthropists and grantees can lead worker center staff to gradually reshape their language and practices. The decision of NDWA and ROC United’s founders to develop national organizations, and to change their politics and language, was likely influenced by funders’ desire that they fulfill this growth imperative.

Going National: Organizational Structures and Leadership

Local worker centers have been forming national organizations since 2001, when the National Day Laborers Organizing Network (NDLON) brought together 12 groups from the construction and demolition industries. ROC United was created by ROC-NY staff in 2003, and DWU played a key role in the 2007 formation of NDWA as a loose coalition, although DWU has since broken away from the alliance as NDWA has developed a centrally directed structure. Both of these national umbrella groups are organized as large administrative bodies whose many paid staff have corporate titles, such as Directors of Special Projects and of Human Resources. Local or member organizations often relate to national groups as affiliates, participating in centrally directed campaigns. Both ROC United and NDWA re-grant a small portion of their funds to their affiliates, acting as funders themselves. In 2013, for example, NDWA received at least US$4,754,250 in grants from a variety of grantmakers, including Ford, NoVo, and Surdna Foundations; ¹² in the same year, they re-granted approximately US$896,810 to 29 organizations. ¹³ Structurally, most of NDWA’s member organizations already existed as independent nonprofits, while ROC United founded new ROC chapters in several cities. Despite this difference, these two groups have transformed in parallel ways. As they created national counterparts, they not only bureaucratized, but also took on the logic of finance, replacing organizing campaigns with market-based projects.

Especially given the small size and number of local worker centers, national coordination and infrastructure can lend significant advantages to grassroots organizing campaigns. Some national organizations, such as NDLON, have retained a focus on these strategies even as they have grown, demonstrating that national groups can strengthen contentious political struggle. In a different direction, the tendencies of ROC United and NDWA towards conservatism, bureaucracy, and hierarchy mirror the historical transformation of many American unions (Voss and Sherman, 2000). Labor scholars have demonstrated that various factors support union militancy, including the ideology of their elected leadership and the level of worker participation in organizing drives (Markowitz, 1998; Stepan-Norris, 1997). ¹⁴ Given the influence of funders on the choices of nonprofit staff, we focus primarily on the role of strategic philanthropists in extending neoliberal logic and practices to national worker center grantees. In a parallel to many labor unions, these two groups have lacked worker involvement in both leadership roles and decision-making processes at the national level.

Building relationships with philanthropists, applying for large grants, and administering funded projects require professional staff and leaders to contribute significant time, resources, and expertise. As Erica Kohl-Arenas (2016: 12) observes, foundations often exert power on social movement organizations through a piecemeal process of negotiations with such nonprofit professionals, who gradually shift their priorities away from contentious politics and direct action campaigns. In the cases of NDWA and ROC United, an absence of worker involvement in leadership and decision-making appear to have laid the groundwork for their embrace of market-based approaches in lieu of broader campaigns for structural changes. These factors, which contrast with the alternative worker center examples we describe in a later section, likely contributed to the transformation of NDWA and ROC United.

National groups often highlight the fact that prominent members of their staff and boards, especially Executive Directors, are minorities or women. While race and gender are important axes of power in the United States, this rhetorical emphasis obscures the class backgrounds and non-worker status of these professionals, both of which can facilitate the cultivation of relationships with grantmakers. It also masks the lack of worker leadership in these organizations. At the time of writing, NDWA (n.d.(a)) employed only two former domestic workers out of 30 staff members, while ROC United (n.d.(a)) employed two former low-wage restaurant workers of their 17 total staff. ¹⁵

Non-worker, middle class directors such as Poo and Jayaraman have been criticized for cultivating publicity around their own leadership, rather than encouraging workers to take on such roles. In an Indiegogo (2015a) fundraiser for ROC United’s new smartphone application, perks for donations included dinner with Jayaraman in exchange for US$1000. The Indiegogo (2015a) page states that for US$100, ‘Saru Jayaraman, author of “Forked: A New Standard for American Dining”, will personally sign your advance copy of her forthcoming book’. Likewise, Poo is one of only seven staff members labeled spokespersons on NDWA’s (n.d.(a)) website, indicating that she may be contacted by the press. Her page offers short and long bios, low- and high-resolution photographs, and the contact information for her assistant (NDWA, n.d.(b)). If this culture of celebrity helps facilitate relationships with grantmakers and the press, it may also make it more difficult for organizations without well-known directors to attract media attention and large grants.

Worker Centers as Entrepreneurial Actors

Prior to going national, some local worker centers such as DWU waged campaigns against employers and used Marxian frames of analysis in their political education, discussing the need to fight the state and corporations. ¹⁶ Since their founding as national organizations, NDWA and ROC United have increasingly pursued foundation-sponsored projects for workforce development, alliances with employers, and revenue-generating ventures. These have gradually supplanted the systemic critiques and grassroots organizing of their local predecessors.

Following the logic of supply-side economics, strategic philanthropists have funded NDWA for workforce development projects since its inception. In 2011, for instance, Surdna Foundation (2011) stated that they funded NDWA specifically to ‘support strategic policy research to advance quality jobs and career ladder models for domestic workers’. Accordingly, Poo has related that NDWA’s professional development trainings were a response to the relatively short supply of skilled eldercare relative to the national rise in employer demand. She noted that given this trend,

We suddenly realized there’s a tremendous opportunity to lean into that change. We can improve the experience of immigrant women who are going into those jobs and improve their readiness and training as well as improve the quality of those jobs, including career advancement. (Poo, quoted in Conrad, 2013)

By funding such training programs, these foundations have begun to regulate and professionalize the domestic service pool of mostly poor immigrant women for professional employers. These initiatives echo Peggie Smith’s (1999) historical account of 19th-century reformers who regulated domestic work to guarantee the supply of Black women’s labor for white, middle class employers.

These national organizations have also promoted alliances with good employers as a cornerstone of their work. Employers’ abuses appear to occur on the individual level, and encouraging good employer behavior is seen as more realistic than fighting for structural changes. Following this logic, ROC United’s RAISE (Restaurants Advancing Industry Standards in Employment) program encourages restaurant owners to voluntarily improve wages and working conditions by providing them with free benefits. ROC United’s (n.d.(b)) website states that RAISE ‘provides restaurant owners with a path to the High Road to Profitability. By taking this path, members can promote sustainable business practices for employees and consumers while boosting their bottom line’. In exchange for improving the quality of jobs on the demand side of the labor market, the organization offers to help boost restaurant owners’ profits. Specifically, ROC United’s (n.d.(b)) website states that RAISE ‘offers owners access to critical information, an invaluable support network, and problem-solving opportunities’. Among other free services, the program provides ‘recognition for those restaurants who demonstrate a high level of respect for their workers, signifying to their customers that they provide an Exceptional Workplace’ (ROC United, n.d.(b)). Restaurants can also gain access to advertising by applying for a listing in ROC United’s (n.d.(c)) Diners’ Guide App for consumers. Social justice concerns and profitability are no longer in conflict, and labor rights are mentioned only in tandem with employers’ goals. The principle of encouraging good behavior at the level of the individual employer has gradually replaced the systemic analyses of labor exploitation cultivated by some early worker centers through political education.

In 2014, NDWA began directly brokering domestic labor through CareTango, a nanny referral service with its own CEO. In a mass email introducing the venture, the CEO stated that ‘through our decades of working together with domestic workers and consumers, we created a business model that ensures that domestic workers are receiving high quality jobs and that families have access to quality care that meets their specific needs’ (NDWA, 2014). The online service emphasizes not only the quality of jobs on the demand side, but access to a steady supply of well-trained domestic labor for the middle and upper class families who pay a fee for the matching service. Running a labor brokerage engages employers not just as allies to the organization, but as its paying clients.

If their foundation funders acted as investors, these worker center organizations have also become revenue-generating innovators. The website of Fair Care Labs (n.d.), a branch of NDWA, states that ‘Our main focus is on raising market norms and standards, partnering with the private sector, and building scalable and sustainable business ventures’. Fair Care Labs also worked on a smartphone app called NeatStreak (DePillis, 2015). According to Poo, ‘We are trying to develop a suite of tech tools that can be helpful to workers in negotiating and asserting their rights – and ultimately in doing their jobs better’ (quoted in DePillis, 2015). For Fair Care Labs, worker productivity is the bottom line. Similarly, ROC United launched a smartphone game, TopServer, in 2015. The app, which engages players in a virtual version of the organization’s CHOW workforce training programs, aims to generate revenue for ROC United (n.d.(d)). According to a mass email from the organization, TopServer ‘features top notch graphics, engrossing gameplay, and most importantly, it will help the millions of people in the restaurant industry move up to living wage fine dining jobs’ (ROC United, 2015). Not only are these organizations’ staff and leaders echoing the discourse of finance, but they are employing this logic in their entrepreneurial projects.

When Janice Fine (2006: 2) completed the first large-scale academic study of worker centers, she emphasized that ‘the combination of organizing with service and advocacy is what sets these centers apart’. Smartphone apps, labor brokerages, and private sector partnerships are neither organizing, nor advocacy, nor service. Rather, they transform labor struggles into market-based ventures that seek to guarantee a supply of well-trained labor for employers, meet the strategic goals of funders, and motivate workers to ameliorate their situation by competing more effectively in the labor market.

New Paths Forward for Worker Centers

The national umbrella organizations we have described here rely heavily on grants from national funders to finance their projects. Fine (2011a: 623) contends that by taking the legal form of the nonprofit organization and relying on foundation funding, worker centers have gained tactical flexibility in comparison to unions, which are bound by the anachronisms of American labor law. This argument operates on at least two assumptions: first, that there are only two possible forms that labor organizing could take, each of which carries considerable legal restraints, and second, that nonprofits must rely on foundation funding. As Fine (2006) noted in her earlier work, however, there are other ways to organize and to maintain financial sustainability without sacrificing autonomy. Groups such as LWC, NYTWA, and a newly restructured DWU seek alternative sources of funding, build worker leadership, and focus on grassroots organizing.

One of the strengths of LWC (n.d.(a)), which organizes workers in multiple industries, is its member-led political philosophy, which centers on organizing, leadership development, and building the political power of workers. LWC’s (n.d.(a), n.d.(b), n.d.(c)) campaigns against abusive employers and landlords are led by workers, who select and orchestrate tactics. Worker leadership development is a key part of this political philosophy. Organizer Virgilio Aran related that

The most important part of our job is to immediately develop more leaders who can carry the movement forward. And that was something that we were very deliberate about. So today, I’m a member of Laundry Workers’ Center. So I became Co-Founder and President, and the first Executive Director, ¹⁷ and I stepped down after three years. And as the bylaws require, I’m just a simple member of the organization. Because part of our understanding is that if a movement has to continue, it has to have a very clear method of leadership development. (LWC, 2015)

After Aran stepped down, Mahoma López Garfias, a former restaurant worker and a rank-and-file leader from an earlier LWC (2015, n.d.(d)) campaign, became Co-Director. This emphasis on rotating leadership and developing a membership base has motivated LWC (n.d.(b), n.d.(e)) to initiate campaigns among new constituencies over time, such as food service and warehouse workers, and even tenants. These choices are not a panacea; for instance, long-term campaigns require effective and consistent leadership, which may be lost with frequently rotating leaders. Yet the organization’s continued emphases on worker leadership and rank-and-file decision-making appear to have contributed to their ongoing militancy.

The funding choices of LWC leaders have enabled the group to maintain a level of financial autonomy. Membership dues, while optional because of workers’ low wages, are an important source of funding for the organization (Toth, 2015). Drawing on internal funding sources, however, does not always promote democracy. Despite relying largely on membership dues, many American unions have ossified, tending towards what Kim Voss and Rachel Sherman (2000: 303) describe as ‘bureaucratic conservatism’. Yet dues can operate as one of several accountability mechanisms for worker center leaders and staff. Members who help pay salaries and other expenses may rightly feel entitled to input into how their organization is run (Fine, 2006, 2011a: 610). Dues are also a symbol of political consciousness, indicating workers’ investment in and collective ownership over the organization. For LWC, other sources of income include foundation grants and fundraising events, both in person and online (Foundation Center, n.d.; Indiegogo, 2015b; Ninety-Nine Pickets, 2014). Seeking funding from other sources in addition to foundations helps afford LWC a degree of leverage in determining their own agenda, enabling them to focus on political education and worker leadership.

The same appears to be true for NYTWA. Member dues are also a key source of the organization’s funding, in addition to fundraisers and foundation support (Ford, n.d.(c); Foundation Center, n.d.; Tigas and Wei, 2015). ¹⁸ NYTWA, which has paced its organizational growth in proportion to the increase in dues-paying members, has also won repeated victories against employers’ associations and the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission through strikes, pickets, and other forms of direct economic action (Israel, 2014; Mathew, 2008). In 2011, several leaders of the local organization founded a National Taxi Workers Association (NTWA). Yet unlike the two national cases we have described, the organization’s leaders have emphasized the importance of assisting rather than directing nascent local chapters across the country. NTWA President Bhairavi Desai has specified that ‘the role of the National is to embolden the local’ (NYTWA, 2011). She stated that as local chapters direct campaigns, the NTWA would concentrate on base-building, dues collection, and infrastructure (NYTWA, 2011). NTWA has focused on building sufficient local power before implementing a heavy national infrastructure. For this reason, NTWA has minimal funding compared to the local chapters.

While the large-scale workforce and structure of the taxi industry has facilitated direct actions such as strikes, the fact that the domestic work industry is comprised of individual employers in private homes poses unique challenges for organizers. Yet worker-leaders of a newly restructured DWU have sought to revive their earlier direct action tactic of protesting outside the homes of abusive employers. Given the right conditions, many believe that strike actions could one day be a possibility. The worker-members of DWU are focusing on the long-term project of rebuilding their membership base in New York City. They envision a grassroots organization that relies on volunteer labor and community resources. A range of other local organizations, such as Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees, have supported DWU leaders in this process. Alongside NYTWA and LWC, the workers reorganizing DWU are demonstrating that neither exclusive reliance on strategic philanthropists nor the extension of neoliberal logic to labor organizing are inevitable for worker centers. Each of these groups centers demands-based campaigns against employers among their various activities, and LWC (2015) and NYTWA have even orchestrated successful strikes.

While none of the individual factors we have described is sufficient on its own, together they have enabled these groups to retain independent orientations. Both DWU and LWC prioritize worker leadership at all levels, which helps account for their emphasis on improving the material conditions their members face. Workers experience daily the hardships of being exploited and are less likely to settle for limited reforms in place of more substantive changes. Leaders such as Bhairavi Desai of NYTWA and Virgilio Aran of LWC emphasize worker leadership and rank-and-file decision-making, which have facilitated the development of new worker leaders. Based on the long-term processes of grassroots mobilization, base-building, and political education, the work of these three organizations provides a stark contrast with the projects of NDWA and ROC United.

Conclusion

Worker centers still operate on a small scale relative to unions, yet paying attention to these organizations is crucial. Unions do not organize in many of the growing industries where worker centers operate. Moreover, academic analyses have tended to celebrate the worker center model, and are yet to critically analyze the influence of these national worker center organizations on low-wage and migrant worker organizing. In this article, we have aimed to offer such analysis, highlighting strategic funding as one factor leading to these organizations’ transformation.

Despite their explosive growth since the 1970s, American foundations’ influence on nonprofits is disproportionate to their aggregate domestic grantmaking (Kim, 2009: 5). We do not see strategic funding as a coordinated conspiracy or a case of individual power-seeking behavior, but rather, as Inderjeet Parmar (2015: 260) argues in his account of foundation funding abroad, as fundamentally undemocratic. Strategic philanthropists apply neoliberal logic to their grantmaking practices. As some of their grantees take on this logic, they gradually replace grassroots activist campaigns with market-based projects devised by paid staff. Identifying both rationalities and structures enables us to acknowledge grantmakers’ material power in the current neoliberal conjuncture. Thoughtful critique of nonprofits and foundations allows us to imagine and forge alternative organizational forms. In turn, a critical analysis of philanthropy is necessary to resist its hold on leftist movements, opening up the possibility of broader anti-capitalist struggle. At the small scale on which worker centers operate, such struggle often takes the form of movement building and political education, as workers and organizers build a militant base over many years.

Such analysis and struggle is taking place in some worker centers. Each of the three locally based groups we have described combines direct action tactics with an analysis of the broader global structures that generate worker exploitation. By fostering worker leadership, cultivating members’ involvement in decision-making, and finding alternative funding sources, these groups have retained the confrontational politics on which they were founded. In New York City, domestic worker activists are challenging the assumptions behind strategic philanthropy, questioning the influence of foundations on worker centers, and rebuilding DWU on their own terms. Organizations like LWC and NYTWA seek to build worker-led direct action groups that rely on a solid base of member dues, rather than solely on foundation grants. Contesting the underpinnings of neoliberal logic, these worker leaders and their supporters are forging an alternative path forward for the worker center movement.