This article is part of our series The Alt-Labor Chronicles: America’s Worker Centers.
When José Obeth Santiz Cruz arrived in Franklin County, Vermont, to work on a dairy farm, following the journey from Chiapas that so many of his young fellow villagers had traveled before, he didn’t expect to return home so quickly. But by the time he was 20, he came back to his family in a casket, after getting sucked into a mechanized gutter scraper while he was working alone in a barn and choking to death.
Cruz’s death formed a tragic connection between local labor activists and the dairy workers, eventually giving rise to a “solidarity collective,” which began to organize the dairy workforce while educating the public on the brutal working conditions they faced—60-to-80-hour weeks in hazardous conditions, in many cases earning less than the state’s minimum wage.
“José Obeth’s death was the spark for this community of farmworkers,” said Enrique Balcazar, longtime dairy worker and Migrant Justice organizer, speaking in Spanish through an interpreter, “and for us to begin to come together and talk about the conditions that we face. And through that process of coming together, we began to talk about what needed to change so that nobody would suffer the same fate as José Obeth.”
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The group, which eventually became known as Migrant Justice, has since turned rural Vermont into a seedbed for agricultural labor struggles. Members have organized an employer accountability program with a code of conduct that guarantees—among other things—workplace protections like safety gear, safety training, and access to workers’ compensation. The code of conduct was not legislated by the state, but rather developed by the workers as a private contract involving dairy buyers and employers, establishing a binding labor standard to “secure dignified working conditions in dairy supply chains.” The group has also pushed state lawmakers to create a statewide Fair and Impartial Policing policy that restricts police from collaborating with immigration agents.
Justice for migrants, in Balcazar’s view, isn’t just about improving workers’ conditions, but giving them the knowledge and the tools to change their lives. “We focus a lot of energy on political education and creating leadership,” he adds, “for people to understand not just what’s happening in their workplace, but to situate themselves within a larger social movement.”
For decades, immigrant workers have occupied the lowest rungs of the labor force. Neoliberal economic and trade policies and exploding inequality, both within the United States and globally, have been accompanied by the growth of a shadow workforce of migrants, who often do the dirtiest, harshest, and most dangerous jobs, outside the purview of federal labor regulations. Meanwhile, private-sector unionization rates have dwindled to the single digits. In the midst of an increasingly fractionated, deregulated labor structure, one might assume that a deeply exploited and disenfranchised labor force of migrants—including millions of undocumented workers—might only further erode the power of organized labor. But the worker centers that are organizing and aiding migrant workers across the country have bucked those expectations. To the contrary, they’ve injected fresh energy and urgency into the labor movement.
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Though worker centers do not only serve immigrants, groups like Migrant Justice have flourished in the legal gray zones where loopholes in federal labor and union laws, weak regulations, chronically low wages, and immigration status form stiff barriers to traditional union organizing, and where migrants have had to create their own institutions to seek legal redress and form a collective political voice.
According to an analysis by labor scholars Janice Fine, Victor Narro, and Jacob Barnes, there are roughly 240 worker centers across the country, often organized along occupational lines or focused on particular ethnic communities. While many have staffs that manage day-to-day operations and provide legal and social support to workers, the worker-members are typically in decision-making roles, emphasizing peer-led outreach in their organizing and campaign work.
While many worker centers began by offering such services to workers as legal assistance for wage-theft cases, Fine says many of the earliest worker centers emerged in the 1980s and 1990s out of grassroots community organizations, which were rooted in social-change movements, rather than organized labor, that were tackling issues of immigrants’ rights, civil rights, and economic justice.
There are roughly 240 worker centers across the country, often organized along occupational lines or focused on particular ethnic communities.
Over the past four decades, worker centers have been changing the way many low-wage sectors of the economy function. At the state and local level, they have successfully campaigned for minimum-wage increases and worked with officials to implement anti–wage theft policies and occupational-safety rules. They have also helped establish the rights of migrant workers under existing labor laws through strategic lawsuits aimed at setting precedents for inclusive workplace standards. The Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, which organizes low-wage restaurant workers across the country, has lobbied for protections against sexual harassment in the hospitality sector and for the abolition of the two-tier wage system for tipped workers. New York City nail salon workers with the Nepali-focused worker center Adhikaar have won legislation that established safety codes for nail technicians to guard against chemical exposures. And during the pandemic, when undocumented immigrants have been largely left out of federal relief efforts, many worker centers raised money online to deliver cash relief to members and their families.
Fine pointed out that the work of worker centers and unions is often complementary. Large unions, which are invested in organizing workplaces where they can win long-term collective-bargaining agreements, tend to be “very choosy and careful” when selecting targets for organizing, Fine says, while worker centers gravitate toward marginalized and precarious sectors that unions may see as too risky to justify the time and expense of an organizing campaign.
Kate Griffith, a Cornell University law professor who has researched the legal strategies that worker centers employ, says that the centers present “a new model for responsiveness from below,” unencumbered by the bureaucratic constraints of mainstream unions, often using media and appeals to consumers to pressure corporations on labor issues.
“They’re looking at workers’ rights issues,” she says, “but they’re also really focused on racial justice. There’s a push, of course, among the more immigrant-focused worker centers to look at immigration policy … They’re worker organizations and civil rights organizations.”
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The New York City–based Worker’s Justice Project has spent more than a decade fighting for the rights of day laborers, domestic workers, and construction workers in New York City, helping them recover stolen wages from local employers. But they also provide members with leadership training and a hiring hall–type program that connects them to construction or domestic work jobs with vetted employers, to ensure decent working conditions. Last year, as the lockdown forced restaurants to rely heavily on Uber Eats and other delivery apps, the group launched Los Deliveristas Unidos to organize overworked and underpaid Central American bike delivery workers to press the city government to regulate their platforms.
Ligia Guallpa, co-executive director of Worker’s Justice Project, says worker centers see themselves as “part of a national movement across the country of community organizations that [are] specifically organizing workers who were not being organized in traditional forms.” Undocumented immigrants, she says, are especially vulnerable to “entering the workforce without knowing their rights, feeling powerless when it comes to confronting or asking for better working conditions. [There were] workers who were also in fear of being retaliated [against] for asking personal protective equipment or for asking for a day off, because of the broken immigration system.”
Several more-established worker centers have pioneered a model of labor enforcement known as Worker-Driven Social Responsibility, which puts workers in control of setting standards and monitoring compliance, in contrast to the typical corporate audits that companies commission to inspect their supply chains (a process often criticized for being an empty public relations exercise).
The Fair Food Program of the Florida-based human rights organization Coalition of Immokalee Workers has committed tomato farms, distributors, fast-food restaurants, and supermarkets to charge price premiums that get passed down to workers’ paychecks. The legally binding system also enables an independent auditing organization to monitor working conditions and field complaints about labor violations. The focus is on organizing across the supply chain, which means targeting companies beyond the workers’ direct employer, often with the aid of consumer allies who pressure the top-of-the-chain companies, like fast-food outlets. One of the Coalition’s primary campaigns, for example, is an ongoing effort to get consumers to boycott Wendy’s for refusing to sign on to the program.
Migrant Justice has created a similar program known as Milk with Dignity, which has now established its code of conduct at about 55 Vermont dairy farms, including all suppliers for Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. Pressuring brands that buy from local dairies to join the program has effectively locked in the code of conduct from the farm to the supermarket, providing a price premium that is passed down to support “dignified wages and working conditions.” In addition to the program’s requirements for decent pay and housing conditions for dairy workers, an independent monitor issues “corrective action plans” to noncompliant farms.
Balcazar noted that “because we aren’t operating as a union, we’ve had to be creative with our strategy and think beyond representation in the workplace. We have to look on a larger scale. And that led us to organizing the industry through supply chains.”
Over the past four decades, worker centers have been changing the way many low-wage sectors of the economy function.
Some worker centers organize those who aren’t even legally considered “workers” at all. The drivers with the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA) are legally categorized as independent contractors, rather than employees of the cab companies they often drive for. But historically, the largely immigrant workforce has little control over their earnings, as meter rates are set by the city, and they often toil for 12-hour shifts in what the Alliance has called a “mobile sweatshop.” NYTWA founder Bhairavi Desai recalls reaching out to cabbies in the late 1990s and encouraging them to begin agitating collectively for better pay and labor protections.
“We went to the garages, gas stations, restaurants,” Desai said. “We lived on the streets where the drivers lived and worked and we built up the membership one by one.”
The NYTWA campaigned for years to push the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission to offer a decent base pay rate as well as disability and health care benefits for drivers. And with its many South Asian and Muslim drivers, the group protested anti-Muslim bias attacks that cabbies faced after September 11, and more recently, organized a “boycott” of JFK airport rides to oppose Trump’s Muslim travel ban. The NYTWA’s current focus is pressuring the city government for financial relief for drivers who have fallen into debt traps following the collapse of the value of cab ownership—a financial crisis linked to a rash of driver suicides. Cabbie Mouhamadou Aliyu says, “This is the only organization that’s helping us. There’s nobody else … So, I believe in the movement; I believe in the fight, because this is what people before us did, in order for me to benefit … and then now, hopefully, I will get a better tomorrow.”
TODAY’S WORKER CENTERS ECHO the working-class activism of the early 20th century, when ethnic associations, mutual aid groups, and other community and civic groups were involved in labor rights struggles alongside formal unions. But the current worker center movement is an outgrowth of an influx of migration in the 1980s that intertwined issues of labor and human rights. Some of the first centers grew out of grassroots movements to aid refugees from such Central American countries as El Salvador, which at the time was embroiled in a U.S.-backed civil war.
When local governments in Southern California passed ordinances to block day laborers from congregating to solicit work on street corners and other public spaces, day laborer defense campaigns emerged to challenge the public-nuisance laws that they saw as racist and xenophobic. Years of litigation by legal aid groups and leftist advocacy organizations led to a landmark federal ruling that workers’ right to assemble was covered by the First Amendment. The movement to protect day laborers, according to legal scholar Scott Cummings, also spawned a network of grassroots organizations that ran know-your-rights trainings, established local hiring centers, and helped galvanize day laborers as both an economic and political force in their communities.
In the 1980s and 1990s, more than four dozen day laborer worker centers were founded nationwide. As their organizing and legal work grew more sophisticated, federations of worker centers, like the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), emerged to enable such groups to network across cities and regions.
Another turning point for worker centers was the spring of 2006, when Congress was weighing a “comprehensive immigration reform” proposal that would have helped regularize the status of millions of undocumented immigrants. Worker centers became a vehicle for organizing the undocumented, and helped stage massive immigrant marches in about 100 cities on May 1—International Workers’ Day—as well as a “day without immigrants” strike that was largely independent of mainstream unions.
That same year, the AFL-CIO Executive Council issued a resolution recognizing the value of worker centers, stating that they “play a critical role for all workers—immigrant and U.S.-born alike—by fighting unscrupulous employers who try to use the immigrant workforce to lower wage and other benefit standards that protect the entire workforce.”
Finding Power
Although worker centers cannot engage in direct collective bargaining with employers, as unions can, they have often channeled workers’ collective voice in the political arena.
About two decades ago, while California day laborers were campaigning for the right to stand on street corners, New York City’s domestic workers were launching a different labor battle inside the apartments where they cooked, cleaned, and cared for children. A coalition of worker centers representing low-wage immigrant women, including Domestic Workers United, Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees, and Andolan Organizing South Asian Workers, began pushing for a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. The proposed legislation codified protections such as one day of rest per week, time-and-a-half overtime pay, and protection against retaliation for workers who report labor violations. The demands were quite modest, basically addressing exemptions for domestic workers in federal labor law. The proposal also did not guarantee collective-bargaining rights—something that would be challenging to implement for workers employed by individual households. But advocates championed the bill, which the legislature enacted in 2010, as a basic civil rights remedy in response to a history of excluding domestic workers from the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, the foundation of the country’s wage and hour regulations. (Southern senators demanded that the original legislation exclude domestic workers, who were almost entirely Black, and it was only in 1974 that the minimum-wage standard was amended to include some domestic workers.)
The National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), which grew out of that Bill of Rights campaign, has since helped pass Domestic Workers Bill of Rights legislation in ten states, and is currently pushing for a national version of the Bill of Rights in Congress.
The NDWA now includes 70 affiliate groups in 30 states, many of them rooted in Asian, Caribbean, and Latin American immigrant communities. It has in recent years expanded its advocacy to home care for seniors—a low-wage sector that employs many U.S.-born Black women as well as immigrant women. The NDWA’s Caring Across Generations campaign frames care as a feminist issue for working- and middle-class women—strategically declining to emphasize the class divide between domestic workers and the people they care for, instead championing a partnership between providers and consumers of care, to demand stronger state support for the “care economy.” The NDWA is pressing the Biden administration for a comprehensive government investment in “paid care work”—both child care and senior home care services—which would simultaneously improve the quality of care and provide sustainable livelihoods.
Part of NDWA’s agenda centers on long-term culture change. Antonia Peña, a Washington, D.C.–based worker-organizer and board member of the NDWA, said (through an interpreter) that much of her work had centered on helping domestic workers to understand that they deserved rights as workers.
“Often, domestic workers that I encounter don’t want to recognize that they even have this profession, because they’re thinking, ‘I’m just doing this so I can get another job.’ It makes it really difficult to [deal with] problems that are happening in the workplace. It’s important to change [perceptions so] that domestic workers see their job as a dignified job. If they don’t [speak up], people will continue telling a different story: that this work doesn’t have any value and that we’re worthless.”
Worker centers gravitate toward marginalized and precarious sectors that unions may see as too risky to justify the time and expense of an organizing campaign.
Some worker centers that began by offering services evolved into a hub for leadership training and political empowerment. Centro de Trabajadores Unidas en la Lucha (CTUL), a worker center in the Twin Cities, began around 2007 as a project of the Workers Interfaith Network, offering legal aid to construction workers who had been stiffed on their wages. But over time, the organization shifted its focus to building power in workers’ communities.
One of CTUL’s first victories came with a massive campaign to organize janitors who worked for contractors in the Twin Cities area, cleaning major chain stores like Target. The campaign sought to pressure the retailers to compel their contractors to comply with a labor code of conduct. The campaign ultimately led to the unionization of the janitors with a Service Employees International Union local.
Silvia Martinez, who joined the group around the time it began campaigning against Target, recalls that seeing a group of cleaning workers directly confronting the executive of one of the area’s largest employers showed her that “when we have more workers coming together, we can get stuff done, and we change things. It made me feel like I’m one small part of something bigger.”
As a board member of CTUL, Martinez has overseen a reorientation of the organization’s strategy away from tackling individual workplace issues and toward challenging the local economic power structure. While CTUL still organizes demonstrations, now it also negotiates with the city’s most powerful officials and business leaders through the Workplace Advisory Committee of the city of Minneapolis, which brings together representatives of worker centers, unions, and businesses to discuss labor policy—including the creation of a Downtown Workers Council that will voice workers’ concerns and recommendations as the city begins to reopen and lift pandemic restrictions.
“Normally, when you’re fighting on the municipal level and you’re fighting for something like a $15 minimum wage, the fight focuses on the elected officials,” says Merle Payne, a co-founder of CTUL. “And behind the scenes, the real power brokers of the economy are negotiating what’s really going to happen.” Today, through its role representing the area’s workers to the government, CTUL can leverage its political clout more directly, in order to give workers a say in the revival of the local economy.
While CTUL originally represented mostly Central American and Mexican workers, in recent years it has helped build a multiracial working-class coalition in the deeply segregated Twin Cities region. Under the banner of the Fight for $15 movement, the group has campaigned alongside Black Lives Matter to demand decent wages for fast-food and other workers, and the group served as a local hub for organizing Black Lives Matter protests following George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis.
“We made a decision,” Payne says, “to have a much more intentional fight, not just about workplace conditions and looking at it from a class perspective, but also fighting around racial justice and gender justice, really looking at the three prongs of exploitation, from capitalism to patriarchy to racism.”
The Work Ahead
The growing political and social power of the worker center movement should be celebrated, Fine says, but it might encounter growing pains in the coming years as well. As the educational and charitable services provided by worker centers grow more expansive, some centers increasingly behave like other established nonprofits: They have professional staff who do not come from their membership base (though some have a worker-led board of directors), and rely heavily on foundations and other private donors, rather than dues paid by the members they recruit. (Some worker centers do collect membership dues for a fraction of their budget but are still mostly dependent on grants and outside donations.) That could pose risks both for worker centers’ long-term financial sustainability and their accountability to their base, Fine argues. “Organizations that place recruitment at the very center of what they do every day,” she says, and rely on funding from members, “require constantly talking to members and potential members. [Such groups create] a different type of culture and capacity than those that fundraise entirely or just about entirely from external sources.”
The worker center movement is also facing a shift in the political landscape. Under Trump, worker centers helped lead resistance to deportation drives and discrimination. They protested Trump’s border and detention policies, defended members from deportation, and filed lawsuits to block anti-immigrant state and federal policies.
Though the Biden administration has vowed to roll back many of Trump’s immigration restrictions, deportations and detentions continue. The current influx of asylum seekers at the border mirrors the humanitarian crisis that fueled the emergence of the worker center movement decades ago; workers are still fleeing violence and poverty in Central America to join an ever-expanding, increasingly restive shadow workforce.
Migrant Justice won’t be letting its guard down under the new president. Balcazar—who was one of several worker-organizers arrested and detained for several days in 2017, in what the group believes was a targeted sweep aimed at silencing labor activists—says the inequality embedded in the immigration system still fuels the exploitation that his group was founded to combat. “Working people are fighting for our rights as workers while at the same time fighting against the separation of families, fighting against deportation,” he says. “It’s all the same work for us, because we see that immigration status is used as a way to heighten exploitation. You have bosses who are using that status to force workers to accept conditions that are unjust and that they otherwise wouldn’t accept. So those practices work hand in hand.”
This series was made possible by a grant from the Ford Foundation.
