Worker centers sprang up independently, sometimes not even knowing that kindred groups of workers in other cities had established similar centers.
This is the introduction to our series The Alt-Labor Chronicles: America’s Worker Centers.
In the American economy, millions of workers fall through the cracks. Sometimes that’s the clear intent of public policy. When Congress enacted the landmark New Deal legislation that gave workers collective-bargaining rights and established a federal minimum wage, they excluded farmworkers and domestic workers. President Roosevelt and the bill’s authors needed the votes of Southern senators and congressmen to turn the bills into law, and since farm and domestic workers in the South were overwhelmingly Black, they were sacrificed on the altar of Southern white supremacy.
That was hardly the only crack into which America’s workers have historically descended. The informal economy of day labor and pickup construction jobs, off-the-books garment sweatshops, temp agencies, small shops and giant corporations that rely on gig labor: All these sectors and more generate jobs or gigs where wages are stolen, where overtime goes uncompensated, where legal standards either don’t apply or are easy for employers to ignore.
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Many of these jobs are held by immigrants who may fear deportation if they protest. Many of these jobs are spread across so many small workplaces—restaurants, diners, fast-food outlets, three-person construction jobs—that no union has the resources to organize them.
Unions have been having a rough time even in large workplaces, as their recent defeat at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, makes depressingly clear. What recourse is there, then, for those workers whom the law, the logic of large-scale organizing, and the attention of society all ignore?
Many of these workers have crafted a recourse themselves. They’re called worker centers.
Since the closing years of the last century, day laborers, domestics, restaurant workers, and more recently drivers employed as “independent contractors” for companies like Uber and Lyft have formed groups that have tried to pressure employers to treat them fairly. Some have set their own standards for wages and hours when the government won’t; some have lobbied government to set such standards itself. Some of these groups have begun and grown within ethnically distinct communities; several immigrant groups have drawn on the radical traditions of their homelands, and some Black groups on the legacy of the civil rights movement and Black nationalism. Those that have survived—funding is an ever-present challenge—have notched victories at workplaces, exposing and stopping wage theft or discriminatory treatment. Some have anchored coalitions that have become adept at politics, persuading legislatures to create a minimum wage and overtime pay for workers (most notably domestic workers) whom federal law has never covered.
It may surprise you to learn that worker centers began in the South, in North Carolina and Mississippi and states where unions were scarce to begin with and have all but vanished in recent decades. They began in places where Black workers encountered hatred and discrimination at workplaces like a local Kmart and formed groups to change management practices. They began, too, in West Coast cities, where day laborers realized they’d have to come together to set wage standards for themselves, lest lowballing employers drive their wages down to nothing. They began among restaurant workers in a host of cities, and more challengingly still, among nannies and housekeepers and care workers in New York.
And they began independently, sometimes not even knowing that kindred groups of workers in other cities had established similar centers. “They weren’t networked at all,” says Nik Theodore, a professor of urban planning and policy at the University of Illinois and one of the leading scholars of the worker center movement. He described it as “a conjunctural moment,” a response to the increase in low-wage employment in recent decades, to blocked social mobility, to the glaring exploitation of immigrants and other minority workers.
In time, the Restaurant Opportunities Center stopped wage theft at a host of eateries. The day laborers organized themselves on street corners, formed soccer teams and held city-vs.-city tournaments so they could get to know each other and form a national organization. The domestic workers pressured legislatures to win a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights that set legal standards for their wages and hours; today, their agenda of bringing dignity to care work is part of President Biden’s infrastructure vision.
Initially, the union movement hadn’t known what to make of these new organizations, and some feared that they’d undercut the pay and benefit standards that unions had won for their own members. But worker centers reassured the unions, by prohibiting any strike-breaking by their members and working with unions on common projects to benefit workers. In time, many unions came to embrace them. At the behest of AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, himself the son of Irish immigrants, the Federation formed a partnership with the national day laborers’ organization in 2006, and added the leader of the New York taxi drivers alliance to its executive council. In those instances where workers could be organized into unions, worker centers provided strategies and organizers for those efforts.
The centers also came to offer their members a range of services: job training, legal assistance, child care, lobbying expertise. In California, Secretary of Labor Julie Su (President Biden’s yet-to-be-confirmed pick for deputy secretary of labor) enlisted worker centers in the government’s efforts to investigate and stop wage theft.
For all that, worker centers’ existence has always been somewhat precarious. As is not the case with unions, worker dues don’t amount to much, and most centers have long relied on foundation funding. Yet despite their structural inability to be self-sustaining, they’ve managed to serve as the nation’s alt-labor movement in recent decades.
This week and next, with funding from a grant from the Ford Foundation, the Prospect will publish a number of articles that tell the story of the nation’s worker centers. We begin today with an article on immigrant worker centers. On Tuesday, we’ll look at African American worker centers; on Wednesday, at how worker centers have diversified and developed intersectional approaches on issues of gender and sexual orientation; and on Thursday, at the changing relations between worker centers and unions. Next week, we’ll post stories on how worker centers have entered the political fray, and provide oral histories from some of the centers’ leading activists.
Until social provision becomes more humane and workers win (again) the effective right to organize and bargain collectively, the worker centers they’ve built will enable many of those who’ve fallen through the cracks to gain a modicum of power, stop employer abuse, and win better public policy. As they say on Law and Order, these are their stories.
This series was made possible by a grant from the Ford Foundation.
