Mary Altaffer/AP Photo
Activists rally outside New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office to call on a $15 minimum wage.
Over the past quarter century, a new form of worker organization – worker centers – have arisen among groups of workers, primarily immigrants and African Americans, for whom unionization isn’t usually an option, largely due to the limited scope of the laws governing collective bargaining rights. To tell the stories of these organizations, the Prospect has conducted oral histories with a range of worker center activists and leaders. Here, edited and condensed for space, are excerpts from five of them. Victor Narro, now at the UCLA Labor Center, was a key figure in the organization of day laborers in Los Angeles and in the formation of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, and in the campaign to unionize carwash workers. Saru Jayraman is the founder and longtime leader of the Restaurant Opportunities Center and the One Fair Wage campaign. Tanya Wallace-Gobern is executive director of the National Black Workers Center. Eddie Acosta was the AFL-CIO’s first coordinator of the Federation’s work with worker centers. Neidi Dominguez served as co-director of the Clean Carwash Campaign, then as the AFL-CIO’s coordinator for its partnerships with worker centers and later founded Unemployed Workers United during the COVID pandemic.
They were interviewed by Prospect writing fellow Brittany Gibson and Prospect intern Jarod Facundo.
ORIGINS
Victor Narro, project director, UCLA Labor Center: When I first moved to Los Angeles and began working at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, one of my first cases was day laborers getting constantly harassed by the police. Another was their conflict with the homeowner association. The businesses in the area hated them. Nobody liked the workers. The sheriffs harassed and intimidated them daily to leave the corners.
Then, as a part time organizer at the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA), I met Pablo Alvarado. We connected, and I appreciated what he was trying to do. We started from so little; we were just trying to fight for the workers’ daily ability to have a space where they could be picked up by employers. We weren't even thinking about worker exploitation yet. We were thinking about harassment by law enforcement and what we would need to win that fight.
Eddie Acosta, organizer, AFL-CIO: The day laborer centers went out to the corners and taught people about their rights. They talked a lot about wage theft, and safety and health problems. Others actually set up hiring halls right where employers would come and ask for a worker or just some jobs to be done. And then the worker center would dispatch them.
Victor Narro: After three years at CHIRLA, the opportunity came to be the Workers' Rights project director. I took the job. This was 1996. I think there were only really like five worker centers in the entire country at the time. Today, we have close to 300.
There was a group in Northern California, Mujeres Unidas. They were working with domestic workers and there was also a day laborer program in San Francisco. Then we learned about Workplace Project in New York, so I flew out there, spent some time with the project, saw what they were doing with day laborers and domestic workers. We started developing a day laborer program in Los Angeles. Then other groups started doing the same thing around the country. In 2000, all these groups came to Los Angeles for a big three day gathering, and from that we created the National Day Labor Organizing Network.
Saru Jayaraman, co-founder, Restaurant Opportunities Centers United: The beginning was 9/11. I was working as an organizer and an attorney at another workers’ center on Long Island, called the Work Place Project. And on that morning, as you know 73 workers died at the restaurant [Windows on the World, atop the World Trade Center], 250 workers lost their jobs. And a few months after the tragedy, I was called by their union—at that time, it was HERE—asking if I would be interested in being considered to lead a new center. In their minds initially it was going to be a relief center for workers who’d lost their jobs and the families of victims because they as a union couldn’t accept foundation grant money to do this kind of relief work.
Initially, we were going to hand out checks, do that kind of relief work. But in my mind, this was an opportunity to organize. So we started the relief center but were thrown into organizing more quickly than we’d anticipated because the owner of Windows on the World [David Emil] opened up a new restaurant in Times Square and refused to hire the workers from Windows because he was afraid they’d form a union in his new restaurant. And so, we organized the workers from Windows to protest outside of his restaurant on opening night and he ended up hiring everyone who wanted to work there.
Damian Dovargane/AP Photo
The closed doors of the Pasadena Community Job Center, May 2020
Neidi Dominguez, executive director, Unemployed Workers United: I grew up in Pasadena, California; my grandmother had been living there since the eighties. My mom, sister and I landed in Pasadena three years after we migrated here. In 2000, the Pasadena Job Center opened. I was a kid at that point, I was 14. But my mom was one of the organizers of that effort, and she was organizing mostly domestic workers, many of whom were undocumented, like we all were.
I decided to start a youth program within called Youth in Action. A lot of the work we did with Youth in Action was informing and organizing day laborers and domestic workers and the other worker centers on census issues, since it was 2000. A lot of nonprofits that had worker centers and other programs got resources to help with the census to get more people to sign up. And back then our youth program was part of that census push in worker centers. We would go to the worker centers and the corners and walk the streets to find folks to sign them up to for the census.
Tanya Wallace-Gobern, executive director, National Black Worker Center Project: You can’t talk about the National Black Workers Center without starting with the local and regional Black workers centers. The first Black worker center in this country was formed in 1981 in Rocky Mountain, North Carolina and its name is the Black Workers for Justice. That worker center started as a result of business moving from the North to the South, looking for a work force that they could exploit, a non-union work force, looking for that race to the bottom, if you will. And they thought that they would do that with Black workers in the South.
They organized the first Black workers center, and since then, the early 80s, other worker centers have been created. So right now, we’re a network of eight worker centers, in Mississippi, North Carolina, New Orleans, Chicago, Baltimore, Washington DC, L.A., and Oakland. We’re also incubating six other new worker centers.
BUILDING COMMUNITY
Saru Jayaraman: I went to meet the workers from Windows on the World, and I was blown away by the diversity of the group. There’s a beautiful thing about the restaurant industry. There are lots of other spaces where we, as organizers, try to bring people together across races to build solidarity but while restaurants are segregated racially, everybody works in the restaurant industry. White, people of color, immigrants, I mean, just everybody.
We [on the ROC team] had to do very little. The workers were looking to be with each other. They were looking for community; our office was flooded daily with more people than we could handle. They just wanted to be there.
Victor Narro: Soccer was a way to organize day laborers. We had soccer exchanges with day laborers in San Francisco. We needed to figure out a way to start a movement to connect them all together, and if they could play soccer together, they could come together. Next was political education and political consciousness classes. Pablo was an organizer in El Salvador during the 1980s. He was there during the civil war and knew the struggle. We wanted to create a school where every Thursday we brought day laborers from different corners, engaged in political consciousness and political leadership development. We needed to create that working class consciousness with the laborers. We brought them together on issues like working conditions, immigration, and dealing with law enforcement.
Neidi Dominguez: When we think about worker organizing as only possible within the workplace, you're just talking to whoever is allowed to be in there. So there's been a huge evolution within the worker centers movement to think beyond the workplace. What does community organizing look like? And how do we take on industries and sectors as a whole, not just one workplace or one employer. It must come back to where… Black workers are, if we're going to organize them. We need to sit with the question of why they are not getting jobs even when they're fully capable of the same jobs other workers get.
Tanya Wallace-Gobern: We were doing listening tours and having conversations in all of the cities where we have Black workers centers. And there were a couple of surprising things that came out of those listening tours. One, we were taken aback at how embarrassed people were regarding the racist experiences that they were having in their workplaces. They didn’t want to talk about it, they personalized it, kind of thought it was something that was just happening to them and that something must be wrong with them as an individual, but not necessarily connecting it to race or racism. Younger workers in particular, couldn’t even call it, didn’t even know that it was racism. But Black Lives Matter and certainly the cell phones capturing police violence has exposed everyone to what is happening. For Black and Brown workers, it helps them realize, “It’s not just me. I’m not the only one who’s going through this. This is a bigger problem than my boss is an asshole. This is a bigger problem.”
That’s part of the beauty of workers centers. When we create those spaces, people recognize that they’re not alone. And as soon as they have that recognition, they make the decision nine times out of ten that something has to be done.
Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
Celebrating International Women’s Day rally last month
Neidi Dominguez: The workers that we organized were undocumented workers, so there was no separating the issues. I truly believe that in the workers center movement, immigration becomes an integral issue because of the people we’re organizing. It’s literally that simple and maybe that profound at the same time.
In the worker center movement from the very beginning, leaders understood that we cannot organize workers just around class issues. This was post 9/11. They were all immigrants, many undocumented, and talking about their wages, conditions or schedules always led to a question about immigration and their status. They’d ask organizers, “Do you want me to go and fight to increase my wage? But I might get deported.” Or, “What are we gonna do when they come and raid the corner?”
It was the workers themselves who were really pushing these institutions to have it together on the intersection of both labor and immigration. In the 2000s and early 2010s worker centers also leaned into the intersection of race and gender for our movements.
A HISTORY OF OPPRESSION
Saru Jayaraman: We started studying the [restaurant] industry and once we did, it became very clear why we were being so overwhelmed with demand. We learned that the industry has been one of the largest and fastest growing industries in the U.S., but it’s been the lowest paying employer for decades. And it’s been largely due to the power of the National Restaurant Association, which has chiefly represented the chains. They have fought since their inception in 1919 to keep wages as low as possible. But the low-wage history goes back further than that. At emancipation, restaurant owners wanted to be able to hire Black people and continue to not pay them. So they modified this idea of tipping from being an extra bonus on top of the wage to becoming the wage itself.
Tanya Wallace-Gobern: Two years ago, in Wake County, North Carolina, we did these surveys to identify what were the economic priorities of the Black community. At first, we were frustrated because the things that we considered economic priorities, people just weren’t talking about. They kept wanting to talk about the police and transportation. And we finally had to say, “Listen.” It was like an a-ha moment.
We’d been so focused on economic priorities and how we were defining them. But the priorities we were hearing from the community are economic priorities. The transportation issue was connected to gentrification: if I have to move out of my community where there’s adequate public transportation, further out of an urban area for example, I now have an issue getting to my job. It takes me longer to get to my job. One of the things that came up were the bus routes are insufficient; they stop running earlier than people got off of work, which meant that there were people who had to walk for hours after the last bus to get to their homes. And [then] they had more interactions with the police. We were able to connect the dots. But initially, we thought that’s not an economic issue. It’s totally an economic issue.
Saru Jayaraman: In our 20-year span at ROC, we’ve exposed all the various issues: the low wages, the racial segregation, the discrimination, the sexual harassment. A lot of what we were working on in those years was organizing against specific restaurant companies all over the country that were stealing their workers’ wages or discriminating against workers or sexually harassing workers. The Fireman Hospitality Group is a company that owns seven or eight fine dining restaurants around Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in New York City. Some people used to call Shelly Fireman, the owner, the ‘mayor of 57th Street.’ He was a terrible employer; they had a practice of allowing the managers to take a cut of workers tips as a way of not paying the managers, as well as severe racial discrimination, non-payment of wages, sexual harassment. So we had a campaign with 250 workers who were seeking $4 million in back wages.
WORKER CENTERS AND UNIONS
Victor Narro: We were fighting against the unions back then because construction trade unions labeled undocumented workers as a threat to their membership. The unions were not with us.
In 1996 we tried to open up a day labor worker center in Pasadena, and the pipe fitters and ironworkers and some other construction trade unions got an injunction to prevent it from happening. But that same year, the labor movement was beginning its own transition in Los Angeles, when Miguel Contreras became the first person of color to lead the L.A. labor movement. Before then, the labor movement felt like a white movement. There was not even a connection between immigrant rights and labor. But it was a time period when things began to align in favor of connecting the labor movement with what we were trying to do with day laborers and domestic workers.
Neidi Dominguez: I didn't really know about unions or the larger labor movement. My mom was not a union member. Nobody in my family were part of unions. I didn't really understand, the labor movement; I knew the workers center movement. I knew the immigrant rights movement. But the Clean Carwash campaign was a hybrid of both unions and community organizations, doing a campaign to improve, at a sectoral level, the conditions of workers in an industry.
Victor Narro: In 2000, there was a big strike by the Justice for Janitors union in L.A., all over the city; it got national attention. The building managers and the commercial developers were going to go to the day laborer program to hire workers to replace the workers on strike. We did presentations to all the laborers and worker centers to support the unions by not going to work in these commercial buildings where the workers were on strike. You're asking the laborers who work day-by-day to give up a job for the day. That was a big deal, they were turning away employment opportunities from these commercial developers because they chose to support the workers on strike.
Damian Dovarganes/AP Photo
At the Pasadena Community Job Center
Eddie Acosta: In 2006 the AFL CIO had come to a partnership with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. I was asked if I was interested in coordinating the work between worker centers and the labor movement at large. They needed someone who came from labor but had the sensitivities and the understanding of the immigrant community. I was sort of in the middle. I accepted the job as the Federation’s national worker center coordinator. We had to make it up as we went along.
It was one thing to be an organizer with the immigrant community and immigrant workers. It's another to be working at this, particularly where some unions didn't know what worker centers were. They heard that they were taking their jobs. Then there were people within the worker center world who felt rejected by the labor movement. My job was to be in the middle and to hear out where the labor movement was, where the labor leaders were coming from and keep a poker face. Sometimes things were said and done that were not okay.
Neidi Dominguez: It was a huge learning curve to learn about the AFL-CIO, which had joined our [Clean Car Wash] campaign then. After the campaign, I was invited to work for the AFL-CIO. I had never even visited D.C. and now I had to move there as the director of the AFL-CIO’s worker center program.
In 2013, the AFL-CIO convention in L.A. was huge. Rich Trumka, the president of the AFL-CIO, invited the different executive directors of national organizations doing work with worker centers. He invited Ai-Jen Poo from the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Pablo Alvarado from NDLON, and Sarita Gupta from Jobs With Justice. This was the first time that the AFL-CIO opened its door to this new movement within labor. The workers centers were acknowledged as a new kind of worker organizing that was not just like the unions.
Eddie Acosta: Some of the groups on the ground were totally pro-union, the most pro-union people in the world. But sometimes because of their [immigration] status or because they didn't have the skills, they couldn't make it into the training programs within the building trades. So, they saw the building trades as a closed group. Still, they had to work to make a living. My job was to figure out how we bring them together. I spent a lot of time introducing people to each other, moving beyond stereotypes you would see from the media about protesters and day laborers.
One of the best tactics we used was to have local labor leaders, everyone and anyone who was interested, go visit a corner or to go to a day labor center at, like, 6:30 in the morning when the workers show up and just see it for themselves. It diffused a lot of the tension bringing people together who are trying to fight for workers' rights.
Worker centers should remind union leaders that the contract isn’t the only form of power. We know of places that are unionized that have a contract, but the workers have no power because they're not really organized. But then you have folks on the corner who could raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour ten years ago because they would organize together and tell employers, ‘If you want work this corner, that's what you pay.’
VICTORIES
Victor Narro: The LAPD back then was very anti-CHIRLA. They felt like we were educating the workers against them. They labeled us as communists. They would say my affiliation was with the Communist Party and stuff like that. It freaked them out that I pushed back, but my job was to create space for Pablo and the organizers to really grow the movement. It was the same way with the county sheriff's department. I used to get arrested when meeting with the laborers; Pablo and the all the other organizers kept getting arrested too. Part of my work plan each day was figuring which one of my organizers was I going to have to bail out of jail.
In time, we were able to transform LAPD, we held sessions where LAPD officers and day laborers got to know each other little by little. Today in Los Angeles, there is no harassment against the day laborers. They respect them. The sheriff's deputies now help workers, especially with wage theft. That's a 25-year evolution; it didn't happen overnight.
Saru Jayaraman: We had a campaign against Mario Batali, at the time, against his very, very posh fine dining restaurant, and Daniel Boulud, although I have to say to his credit his company has learned from that experience years ago. Some of the companies like [those of] Mario Batali and Daniel Boulud made commitments to move towards what we call “high road practices.” We’ve had a campaign going on forever against Darden, which is the world’s largest full-service restaurant company, parent company to Olive Garden, Capitol Grill Steakhouse, Longhorn Steakhouse; we currently have a lawsuit against that company.
We started the One Fair Wage Campaign because throughout the process of growing, organizing, protesting in front of restaurants, we were conducting surveys of the workers. By 2013, we had conducted more than 10,000 surveys. And in every region where we conducted these surveys, workers always named their wages as their No. 1 priority. We realized the Restaurant Association’s greatest power over workers is their power not to pay them, their power to force consumers to pay them.
In 2010 we started to build a national association of restaurant owners who support one fair wage and increased equity and reduction in sexual harassment that comes with it. We have 800 restaurants that are part of the association and they range from high profile folks like Tom Colicchio, Danny Meyer, Rick Bayless, and José Andrés, down to small mom-and-pop restaurants around the country that are doing the right thing.
Tanya Wallace-Gobern: We don’t do traditional servicing work that some workers centers do. We don’t do wage theft or servicing for individual people. Instead, we run massive campaigns with the goal of impacting as many people as possible. Our theory of change is centered in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s definition of power, which is the ability to achieve purpose and affect change. And that’s really what our work and the work of the local Black workers centers is centered on, building collective power through organizing and creating safe spaces where we are free from racist attacks so that we can do the hard work of expanding legal protections, creating anti-racist policies and campaigns, and training people to be leaders within their work places.
Saru Jayaraman: It was a total surprise when the pandemic hit. The shutdown of restaurants was that Friday, the 13th of March, and we raced over the weekend to set up a website and ask people to start donating. I thought if we could raise a couple hundred thousand dollars that would be incredible. [Then] we could hand out cash to a couple thousand people, but people really to this day have been giving.
We started a relief fund for workers in March, and 240,000 workers in all 50 states applied for relief. So we immediately started organizing them as members of One Fair Wage and moving them up ladders of engagement. Last year, for the first time in 20 years of organizing restaurant workers, we were able to organize strikes in multiple cities because we heard from so many workers during the pandemic that they didn’t want to go back to work without One Fair Wage. It didn’t make sense. If you’re being asked to go back to work for a sub-minimum wage during the pandemic, there aren’t many diners or tips.
We’ve reached an apex moment: not only have we been able to create and organize a base of 240,000 workers and grow our employer base, too, but also after 20 years what we’ve been fighting for is now in Congress with the Raise the Wage Act. It includes a $15 wage and full elimination of a sub-minimum wage for tipped workers.
THE FUTURE
Tanya Wallace-Gobern: Workers are very concerned with being able to identify any hazards in their workplaces that may exist. We train them on how to have a conversation with their employers, or how to contact OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] and prepare a walk through. We also provide what we call legal and organizing training, where we prepare folks to recognize illegal actions that may be occurring in their workplace and how to take action around those once you have conversations—not just with their employers, but also with their co-workers—on creating a vision on what a viable workplace looks like. We talk about discrimination and racism and we started that off with a micro-aggressions training, how they may occur, that this isn’t just in your head but it’s something that’s going on. The trajectory is always starting with the individual and their awareness and their understanding, and then spreading that conversation with their coworkers to then spreading that conversation to their employers and then spreading and sharing that conversation within their community.
Eddie Acosta: One thing I thought we should have done and didn't get to was organizing temp agency workers. All of this is about organizing people who don't come under labor law, people falling through the margins. I thought this could also be a way to bring unions in because, oftentimes, when a company wants to break a strike, it’s going to a temp agency for workers. I thought it would be interesting to bring them into the labor movement.
Neidi Dominguez: In my fantasy world, by 2021 we should have been able to actually have worker centers with the vote inside local labor councils and state organizations, and that wouldn’t be a controversial thing. It shouldn’t be a question whether worker centers are part of the labor movement. Trump winning with an anti-immigrant and xenophobic agenda was an obvious obstacle. The way swaths of the country were emboldened by his racism, so too were some members within the unions.
But then I look at the worker center movement side, and we haven’t grown as much as we should have, either. There haven’t been new iterations. What's the next phase of this movement? A lot of local worker centers in the last few years had to close their doors because they didn't have enough funding. That's a huge challenge for the worker centers because we don't have a dues-paying structure like the unions. We depend mostly on philanthropic dollars, and that’s just not enough.
The majority of the work force in the U.S. are not union folks. There's so much work to be done that both the unions and the worker centers need to do.
