This article is part of our series The Alt-Labor Chronicles: America’s Worker Centers.
The Plague Year
Not locusts. Not just Trump and COVID. It was the fire, this time.
On September 7, 2020, Reyna Lopez, the executive director of Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (PCUN) in Woodburn, Oregon, looked out at a landscape shrouded in smoke. Adding to the plagues of Trump 45 and COVID-19, the wildfires would ultimately consume a million acres and 4,000 homes, heaping yet another challenge onto the immigrant communities of Oregon. “Red skies, gray air, nobody could breathe,” Lopez recalls. “We weren’t expecting to do pandemic and wildfires all at the same time.”
But PCUN, a service and union organizing hybrid, which got its start among Chicano and Latino agricultural workers in 1985, would emerge as a frontline hero. Early in the year, the organization had pivoted to meet the pandemic crisis with a massive emergency assistance program for undocumented immigrant workers, so it had a structure in place to tackle this new disaster as well. “Our staff became like frontline workers,” said Lopez, “scrounging for protective masks, air purifiers, locating emergency housing. We were getting folks in need from all over, long lines down the street. It was mutual aid, collective care. That was the name of the game.”
By year’s end, the PCUN network of organizations had distributed more than $44 million in relief funds to 26,000 immigrant workers—possibly the largest and most successful assistance program to undocumented workers in the nation.
And then there was the election.
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Most of the roughly 200 worker centers in the United States got their start organizing in immigrant communities, with a focus on providing services and advocacy. They demanded a voice and rights for marginalized, and often undocumented, workers. But over the past decade, a growing number of these worker centers, or “alt-labor” groups, were finding their way into electoral politics, reaching new and potential voters who had long been neglected by conventional political-engagement programs but could help muster a winning edge in tight elections.
I had first spoken with Reyna in 2019, when the Ford Foundation asked me to write about the changing role of worker centers in the political arena. By the end of 2020, we were in a sharply transformed political terrain. So, in addition to PCUN, I reached out to alt-labor groups in several pivotal states: the Workers Defense Project (WDP)/Workers Defense Action Fund (WDAF) in Texas; the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA)/Care in Action for their work in Georgia; and Voces de la Frontera/Voces de la Frontera Action (VDLFA) in Wisconsin. All had planned to upgrade their in-person field operations in 2020, augmented by a variety of digital voter engagement tools. And all had to hew a new course as the convergence of Trump and COVID, combined with the exposed wounds of racial and economic inequity, shifted priorities and upended the nature of voter engagement—both the medium and the message. Ultimately, 2020 would demand a new level of resilience and organizing, and animate a remix of service, advocacy, representation, culture, and politics. “It was like using every resource available to us, every and anything we had to be able to take care of each other,” Lopez says. “That was what we had to do.”
The Political On-Ramp
For many alt-labor groups, electoral politics is a fairly new endeavor. Early worker centers sought to expand economic power for low-wage workers by building membership bases and mobilizing for direct action to sway public opinion on issues like immigration policy and occupational health and safety. It soon became clear that to advance a worker-based agenda often required legislative action as well. Strategies to win policies like minimum-wage hikes and paid family leave require not just economic heft, but more robust political power. And while many worker centers had relied on union allies to provide political muscle at the local and state levels, by the 2010s, some were feeling the need to build their own political expertise, both to elevate issues that might not be so readily prioritized by traditional unions and to gain more standing in local coalitions.
However, mapping a path into electoral work involves some internal restructuring, both administrative and psychic. Initial steps are often framed in the language of tax law, focusing on two kinds of nonprofit IRS status: 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4). (Unions have their own designation as a 501(c)(5), which is functionally similar to a c4.)
In broad strokes, c3s are primarily charitable and educational organizations, whose initiatives stop short of electoral politics. By contrast, c4s and c5s are defined as membership organizations and have the ability to engage in electoral politics, although that cannot be the primary purpose of the organization. As Nayantara Mehta of the National Employment Law Project explains, “The 501(c)(3) organizations that see a need to go beyond the permitted nonpartisan election-related activities—like encouraging people to vote or educating the public and candidates on issues—and actually say who they think people should vote for or help get candidates elected have to create separate 501(c)(4) entities to do that work.”
Traditionally, worker centers had been c3s. To really do electoral politics, they found they also had to be c4s.
Workers Defense Project Executive Director Emily Timm recalls the exact moment in 2013 when she grasped the need for a more direct political role. WDP, which organizes and advocates for immigrant workers in Texas, was pursuing a campaign in Austin to improve safety standards and working conditions for building projects that received incentives from the city—a campaign they ultimately won through a successful alliance with the city’s labor unions. But in the midst of their efforts, Republicans in the Texas legislature proposed a bill to prohibit cities from requiring wage and labor standards on projects that received public funds. So Timm went to visit the bill’s legislative sponsor. “I explained that the bill was really harmful to low-wage workers and construction workers. And the representative’s office just told me, ‘Oh, well, it’s not like low-wage workers have a voice at the Capitol.’ That was the moment, like, ‘Oh, you are so wrong about that!’”
The WDP soon launched a c4, the Workers Defense Action Fund, and an accompanying political action committee (PAC), and successfully booted that legislator from office. “We were able to replace him with Victoria Neave, the daughter of immigrants, a champion for our issues. That’s why it’s so critically important for worker centers to be able to exercise political power and to be able to shape the political environment.”
Structural Realignments and Existential Questions
Many worker centers view the move into electoral politics as a sign of greater maturity and capacity. That perspective has been abetted by the necessity and opportunity to engage their progressive funders who have a growing appetite to push groups toward political engagement (see “The Funding Dilemma”). Since 2016, the desperation over Trumpism, combined with a belief that the nation’s demographic shifts warrant more resources to engage voters of color, has resulted in some seductively large donations for political work, as opposed to support for worker organizing as such.
But it’s not easy to mesh the original c3 worker center model, rooted in economic power and foundation funding, with a new c4 entity focused on political power and funded by wealthy individual donors and political action committees. That necessitates a level of organizational soul-searching and upheaval that can shift internal balances of power, reshuffle priorities, and reshape community culture. It may, for example, involve expanding a group’s membership from a single country or region to include other countries and communities. Internal shifts can also come into play as centers’ founding generations edge into retirement and give way to younger cohorts who are more likely to be U.S. citizens. Rather than advocating to influence the votes of others, the centers’ focus can shift to claiming and exercising their own members’ and peer groups’ right to vote.
For worker centers that opt for electoral politics—and not all do—organizers and allies note several conditions that enhance the likelihood of success. Adrianne Shropshire, a longtime organizer and political strategist who heads BlackPAC, suggests that organizations heading down the political path need “real benchmarks for sustainable organization. They must have back-end accounting, lawyers, compliance capacities. They need the right leadership and staff skill sets, or willingness for the staff to embrace new perspectives and learn new tasks.”
Success is also more likely when the centers are embedded in a rich combination of organizations and collaborations. “Workers Defense alone is not going to win the changes we need in Texas, it’s a very big state,” observes WDP’s Emily Timm, citing a broad panoply of progressive groups, including labor, that have come together to propel a more equitable policy agenda. “We’ve been able to build a true ecosystem in Texas,” she said. “And there’s been a coming together around electoral work that our core partners planned together.”
Plan, Pivot, Persist
Using the 2018 midterm elections to build skill and muscle, worker centers approached 2020 with big plans. They were armed with sophisticated new data on the efficacy of deeper in-person voter engagement; the potential for relational contact through digital platforms and social media; enhanced organizational capacity; and an earlier-than-usual infusion of money from anxious progressive donors. Virtually all were planning for expanded field canvass programs.
When those plans were derailed by COVID-19—then rocked by the murder of George Floyd and the elevated trauma of racial reckoning—every group was forced to throw out the existing blueprints. Navigating through this scarred landscape demanded different conversations, leading with issues of personal and communal well-being, plus alternate forms of outreach. Hand-written cards and letters, phone platforms, Zoom meetups, texting, and myriad social media programs sprouted up to fill the gaps. And despite unprecedented voter suppression and ever-changing hurdles thrown up by hostile legislators, conservative courts, and white supremacist bullies, they still needed to get folks to vote in record numbers.
For Voces de la Frontera Action, a focus on relational voter engagement proved critical. VDLFA is the c4 arm of Voces de la Frontera, an immigrant and labor advocacy organization that has been based in Milwaukee since 1998. Voces is widely considered the pre-eminent immigrant rights organization in the state. In 2004, Executive Director Christine Neumann-Ortiz helped launch VDLFA to take the fight for immigrant rights more directly into the electoral arena. “Our members kept asking us whom to vote for, and we wanted to have that conversation,” she says.
For years, VDLFA worked to elect pro-immigrant candidates at a modest scale while Voces continued its c3 advocacy and cultural programs: fighting for workers’ rights at a local pizza factory; confronting a virulently anti-immigrant sheriff in Milwaukee; and spearheading successful Day Without Immigrants actions to highlight the economic and community significance of immigrant labor.
In 2018, with digital platforms on the ascendency, especially among younger voters, progressive analysts started to test whether digital organizing and social media could be used to form relationships that boosted voter turnout, and VDLFA agreed to participate in the efforts. “It was wonderful,” says Neumann-Ortiz, “in that we were able to embrace an approach that was kind of organic to us. The shoe fit. We added a Voceros por el Voto member-to-community program to strengthen our voter outreach. We had only six weeks or so to build out the program, and we didn’t get to capture a lot of the data as we wanted, but we reached close to 6,000 additional voters from the Latinx community.” That year, their efforts helped defeat the notoriously anti-immigrant, anti-worker Gov. Scott Walker and elect Democrat Tony Evers to take his place.
That foray proved a godsend in 2020. Learning from 2018, the group fleshed out its staff structure and tightened its data collection systems. “Our goal was to register at least 1,500 new voters, but we got more than 5,000,” reported VDLFA Political Director Fabi Maldonado, “and we confirmed over 20,000 votes in wards with high Latino populations.” Toward the end of the cycle, the group added some caravan canvasses, going into Latinx communities with music and voter information. “The youth really stepped up because they were able and healthy enough to do that work. It was a huge lift, but I think we definitely made a huge mark.”
Neumann-Ortiz concurs. “One of the beauties has been the multigenerational nature of it,” she says. “We’ve been around long enough that young people coming of voting age remember when their parents took them to their first marches. Organizing is part of the culture now.”
At Workers Defense Project/Workers Defense Action Fund in Texas, 2020 re-emphasized the ties between worker issues and political efficacy. “The Texas governor intentionally designated construction workers as frontline workers, but they weren’t given essential protections,” says Timm. “Our workers were getting sick, and construction work, which is often dangerous, became even more deadly. Others were out of work and completely excluded from unemployment insurance or aid from the CARES Act, facing just dire economic consequences.” The group pivoted to winning eviction moratoriums, demanding PPE for those forced to work, and offering emergency financial relief.
But while Workers Defense had to refocus its campaigns, WDAF still kept their eye on the elections. Their 2018 political work had provided a good foundation, and by the time 2020 rolled around, they had won a paid sick leave policy in Austin, San Antonio, and Dallas. Timm cites the pre-pandemic engagement of member leaders in the electoral process and Trump’s venality as factors that kept members motivated throughout the plague year, despite the COVID fallout. WDAF and its affiliated political action committees contacted more than 370,000 people of color and unlikely voters in five Texas counties, and undertook an ambitious digital program to reach 3.2 million young Latinx voters. Their efforts helped carry a progressive slate of candidates to victory in Travis County (home of Austin)—including the election of former WDP co-director José Garza as district attorney.
Care in Action, the c4 sister organization of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, also helped elect one of their own in 2020, working as part of an unprecedented collaborative movement in Georgia. NDWA, founded in 2007 by organizer Ai-jen Poo, unites 64 groups of private housekeepers, nannies, and caregivers around the country. Many of the original groups were based in immigrant communities, but, in the aftermath of 2016, NDWA established a chapter in Atlanta as part of an initiative to engage more African American women doing in-home caregiving and cleaning. In 2018, inspired by Stacey Abrams’s run for governor, Care in Action chose Georgia for its first electoral field program. “Electoral work wasn’t the norm for domestic workers in Georgia,” noted then–Georgia state Sen. Nikema Williams, who led the effort. “And canvassing, knocking on strangers’ doors, was not really part of their culture.” But the candidacy of Stacey Abrams enabled them “to see someone that looks like them, that had their lived experience” lead a powerful political movement.
Although Abrams would ultimately be denied the governorship, Care in Action helped secure electoral victories for a number of women of color by reaching out with a multiracial/multilingual canvass and focusing on diverse communities in smaller cities like Macon and Savannah, which were often given short shrift by larger political operations. That strategy evolved into a key component of the wins achieved in 2020. As Leslie Small, head of the Georgia Engaged c4 coalition, put it, “While the larger institutional players can take on big geographic and densely populated districts, organizations like Care in Action can be more like a scalpel, targeting multiple constituencies in areas with minimum canvass density from one racial demographic.”
In 2020, Care in Action hoped to build on that experience with a big field presence in several key states, including Georgia, but had to quickly recalibrate to meet the pandemic head-on. “We began with calls to check in on how people were doing,” Poo relates. “Only later did we turn those into calls about voting.” Of the candidates Care in Action endorsed in Georgia, 13 out of 19 won—including deputy director Nikema Williams, who was sworn in as congresswoman for the seat once held by John Lewis. The group then pivoted to the Senate runoff election, focusing on turning out women of color. Driven by the urgency to win, they returned to the doors. “It was amazing,” laughs Ai-jen Poo. “I would get these daily updates from our team in Georgia, like ‘We knocked 30,000 doors today.’ Getting those reports, it was literally what allowed me to sleep at night.” But above all, Poo credits the Georgia success to an unprecedented communal effort. “Just the fact that a whole army of organizers and organizations really dove in and worked together to figure it out is incredibly impressive. One of the things to really take away is the power of organizing that has been seeded over many years, and the leadership of so many, especially Black women, who created a kind of ecosystem where everyone was able to be more than the sum of our parts.”
A Virtuous Circle of Engagement
Service. Advocacy. Representation. Culture. Politics. Most of what worker centers do falls into these overlapping spheres, as they organize to build relationships and power. Many of the early worker centers started out with a mission that was mostly service or advocacy. A few started out with workplace organizing. But over time, those that endure are challenged to rethink how much of their time and energy belongs to each endeavor, and those decisions redefine the nature of the organization as a whole.
Like other alt-labor organizations, Oregon’s PCUN had a plan teed up for 2020, forging ahead with its anti-pesticide campaign, census work, and advancing its leadership programs for women and youth. Its affiliated c4, Accion Politica PCUNista, was preparing for a busy political season.
“We had this beautiful setup with all these computers and new technological infrastructure for our census project,” Executive Director Reyna Lopez recalls. “And then by March we knew things were going to be different. When we started getting calls from community members telling us that their elders were passing away because of COVID, it quickly dawned that we were also not going to be able to just work from home. People needed help, they needed cash. I started going into our general funds. We were giving these small amounts to families but realized that it needed to be something bigger.”
Over a frenetic weekend, Lopez and her co-workers wrote a proposal to the state for $10 million for a worker relief fund to help workers who were both falling through the cracks of the unemployment system and, as undocumented immigrants, weren’t going to get a federal stimulus check. “I’m pretty sure we took some years off our lives that week; we needed $2 million in seed money just to set up the system. But somehow we did it. In a month, we were up and running.”
How was PCUN able to marshal sufficient organization and funding to meet the moment? First, over more than three decades, it had created and spun off a web of eight sister organizations under the umbrella of Alianza Poder—not just its longstanding c4, but also a leadership training and cultural institute, an immigrant rights organization, women’s and youth programs, a radio station, and a thriving housing development corporation, which ultimately provided the structure and capacity to receive the government grants and administer the funds.
Second, the organizations’ prior political work, both on policy issues and in elections, meant they had developed political relationships and ties to governing agencies. When Lopez called to discuss the need for farmworker assistance, the governor picked up the phone. The organizations and their leaders were respected enough to be entrusted with significant funds and a difficult task.
Beyond that, PCUN and its affiliated organizations were an integral part of the state’s progressive coalitions and infrastructure, thus able to muster support from multiple partners.
Getting it all done, though, required difficult choices, and some programs were relegated to the back burner. “But it was essential to continue the electoral work,” Lopez told me. “Even if it was at a bit smaller scale and without the ability to do what we do best, which is knock on doors, Accion PCUNista was still able to mobilize to reach Latinx voters. We still had 120 volunteers. And although we lost some races, we also sent three new Latinx folks to the state legislature.”
“Some of the staff became depressed,” Lopez says, “wondering, ‘Why are we doing census work and electoral work when we have people dying in our communities?’ It felt like an existential crisis. But we were able to put average payments of about $1,700 into the hands of 26,000 undocumented workers—and you don’t get that kind of money without showing political muscle and accountability. That’s a direct effect of our electoral work, building governing power through our electoral power.”
Therein lies a critical lesson of the 2020 election cycle: For worker centers, there’s no mutual exclusivity between being a service organization and a political organization. To the contrary, everything is connected. The didactic ideological lines that, for decades, had disparaged service and care as incompatible with “real” organizing blurred, as women expanded their movement leadership, and different spheres collided in real time, in real people’s lives.
Groups also had an opportunity to address some of the pressures of generational transition. In one organization after another, with elders more endangered and sidelined by COVID, younger members stepped up to help older members navigate new technological skills and to take on in-person political work.
The convergence of calamities also recalibrated some of the tensions between worker organizing and political organizing. Because worker center constituents tended to be either endangered frontline workers or among the first to be fired from their jobs, the classic worker issues of occupational health and safety and demands for economic equity became focal points for organizing. “I think a silver lining out of the whole pandemic was that it really brought us back to our roots in worker rights,” says Christine Neumann-Ortiz from Voces. “We had immigrant workers in the meatpacking industry in Green Bay who were not getting any protection during the pandemic; they and their families were getting sick, and that was true for construction and service as well. We stepped in and built an Essential Workers Rights Network, where people could report dangers and we could help address them. It had a big impact.”
That kind of response, in turn, helps build the relationships that lead to meaningful politics. “A really important lane that worker centers and community organizations fill in around electoral work is that we’re always leading with our issues,” says Emily Timm of WDP. “We’re not just here to talk to you about this one election or candidate; we’re fighting on these issues side by side with your family. I think that’s often different from the traditional Democratic Party approach. It’s really a longer view about building infrastructure, to create pipelines of leadership and opportunities for voter engagement and voter mobilization year-round.”
Moreover, the stark horrors of Trumpism threw the necessity for political action into sharp relief. Different activity centers within a given organization, and different partners within coalitions, were more often motivated to operate from each according to ability, to each according to need. Rather than demanding that everyone do things one way or scorning those who attended to one priority over another, partners and allies worked hard to do what they do best, and to fill in gaps for each other. It may emerge that most worker centers are not ideally suited to large-scale retail forms of political outreach, which might best be left to political parties and larger institutions. But as Leslie Small in Georgia noted, alt-labor provides the perfect scalpel to identify, register, and engage new and potential voters in underrepresented and oft-neglected communities and constituencies. That extra focus—and the ability to nurture relationships over time—can provide a winning edge in close races and, just as important, grow an electorate educated for progressive change. But to fully realize that potential requires consistent, year-round support.
We should not consider this a kumbaya moment—the cross-pressures within organizations and the tensions among coalition members remain. But living through 2020 affirmed that dealing with the multiple crises of health, economics, white supremacy, and democracy-denial required service, advocacy, representation, culture, and politics. All interconnected, all indispensable.
But Reyna Lopez had already sensed that. “At the center of it all is our relationship to each other, to our families and community,” she told me. “And that relationship is intergenerational, and says a lot about us and our history … It’s the cultural connection. It’s the ability to organize and take action. It’s also a place where people feel like they have some influence in the decisions that are made and that their participation makes a difference. And it’s still all about organizing, and then organizing some more. Whether it’s in our grassroots community, or in the electoral realm, it’s an essential piece of everything we do.”
This series was made possible by a grant from the Ford Foundation.
