Worker Centers: Past, Present, and Future

This article is part of our series The Alt-Labor Chronicles: America’s Worker Centers.

Workers have faced two immense crises over the last 18 months: the COVID-19 global health pandemic, and the economic downturn that followed in its wake. Together, they have laid bare the legacy of decades of growing inequality that have exacted a heavy toll on the poor, people of color, women, immigrants, people with disabilities, and others who were marginalized long before the pandemic exposed the cracks in the economic and social protection systems of our country. Though essential workers suddenly became visible to both the media and the public, and were celebrated for the risks they took and the services they performed for the greater good, large swaths of the low-wage, frontline workforce nevertheless were left unprotected and excluded from emergency relief and early recovery policies.

This was not a new story; it fit a recurrent pattern of excluding Black and brown workers, immigrants, and other low-wage workers from the most fundamental rights and safeguards. For many workers, the lines between racial and economic justice intersected as the country experienced growing racial discord—lifting up issues like the Black jobs crisis, racial profiling, police violence, mass incarceration, and immigrant families being torn apart. These issues have been powerfully framed as matters of economic justice.

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Over the last two decades, a sustained anti-union offensive undermined the very labor organizations that once might have empowered and protected these workers. However, this is not the end of the story. During this time, workers who had been excluded from core labor protections set about building power through worker centers—and thereby renewing the labor movement.

Worker centers have played a critical role in winning rights and raising standards in low-wage industries. They’ve been instrumental in raising the minimum wage, enforcing wage theft ordinances, winning domestic-worker bills of rights and paid leave policies, and securing protections for immigrant workers. They have been able to leverage the lessons from these victories to inform and shape federal policies, including COVID relief packages and recent legislation from the Biden-Harris administration. They have advised on President Biden’s executive actions and other efforts, taking advantage of the political openings created by the strongest pro-worker administration in decades. The worker center movement has been a key player in designing new inclusive labor and social policies that will benefit all workers.

Worker centers have played a critical role in winning rights and raising standards in low-wage industries.

None of this happened overnight. Both of us entered the field of worker centers, labor rights, and economic justice as organizers and advocates more than two decades ago during a time of seismic changes in the global economy. Neoliberal policies of free trade and structural adjustment increased outsourcing and the fissuring of work. The growing concentration of power in the hands of multinational corporations and financial actors enabled them to rewrite the rules of the economy and claim the lion’s share of its benefits for themselves.

As a consequence, working communities across the country experienced increasing economic insecurity, exacerbating historic forms of racial and gender-based discrimination and inequality. The absence of livable wages and the decimation of sustainable livelihoods, coupled with increasing violence and political instability in Mexico and throughout Latin America, Africa, and Asia, drove the continued growth of economic migration to the U.S. At the same time, labor law and enforcement failed to keep pace with the changing nature of work and the changing composition of the workforce. To make matters worse, the traditional strategies and approaches of the labor movement were less and less able to represent the diverse needs of working people, particularly those excluded from collective bargaining.

It was in this context, at the front lines and in the fault lines of the global economy, that the worker center movement first emerged. Worker centers such as Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance (KIWA), Chinese Progressive Association, and the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA, for its name in Spanish) were established in Los Angeles and San Francisco in the 1990s, and in the early 2000s in New York City, Chicago, Boston, and other major cities on the East and West Coasts. Drawing inspiration from the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the Chicano movement, immigrants’ rights struggles, and movements of the global South (particularly El Salvador and the Philippines), from which many workers had emigrated, worker centers focused on grassroots organizing to build worker power, necessarily outside the purview of traditional collective bargaining. In the process, worker centers addressed fundamental disparities in the U.S. economy—and beyond.

Over the course of these last two decades, and particularly from 2010 to 2020, the field grew tremendously in scope, scale, sophistication, and ambition. What was originally a movement focused largely on the rights of immigrant workers in major coastal cities deepened its reach and context-specific orientation to make gains in the South, Southwest, and Midwest, as well as in suburban and rural areas. Worker leaders and funders who’d supported the rise of urban immigrant worker centers expanded their investments to support new Black-led worker organizations, including the creation of local Black Worker Centers across the country and their aggregation into the National Black Worker Center Network. As early innovators of an intersectional approach to organizing, the worker center field positioned economic justice as fundamentally linked to racial and gender justice.

In the past decade, worker centers have forged and strengthened partnerships with unions, some of which had previously viewed the centers skeptically.

Worker center leaders, often supported by academic partners, developed sophisticated sector-specific strategies based on research and deep industry knowledge. Both organically and intentionally, they focused their organizing on sectors of the economy that were growing, where large numbers of women, immigrants, and workers of color were employed, and where the traditional frameworks and approaches to organizing either weren’t working or weren’t a focus of labor unions. Initially, worker centers arose, in a parallel but not generally connected manner, among day laborers; taxi drivers; and garment, residential construction, and domestic workers. Later, in the 2000s, worker centers emerged in the growing service-sector economy, including restaurants and retail, while others addressed the rise of temporary workers in warehouses and logistics. National networks such as the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC), and United for Respect (UFR) were established to aggregate the strategies and influence of local affiliates and, more recently, individuals who affiliate directly with the national organization.

The centers performed a multitude of functions. They combined workforce development and service provision with leadership development, policy advocacy, corporate campaigning, and high-road business engagement. They evolved their strategies over the last decade to better reflect their heightened understanding of the role of Wall Street and other financial actors, seeking new tools and approaches to contest corporate power.

In the past decade, worker centers have forged and strengthened partnerships with unions, some of which had previously viewed the centers skeptically or even antagonistically. Together, worker centers and unions have waged joint organizing and policy campaigns. Some examples of these partnered campaigns include:

• LIUNA (the Laborers union) and NDLON affiliates in New York and New Jersey organizing workers in the residential construction industry;

• the Chicago Workers’ Collaborative partnering with BCTGM (the Bakery Workers union) to organize immigrant workers employed at local bakeries through temporary staffing agencies;

• the L.A. Black Worker Center and IBEW (the Electrical Workers union) partnering to increase Black worker representation on public-sector infrastructure projects;

• Warehouse Workers for Justice and the UE (United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America) organizing in the warehouse sector in Illinois;

• the Workers Defense Project and the Texas AFL-CIO state federation partnering to win passage of workplace protections for construction workers;

• the NDWA affiliates in California (the Pilipino Workers Center and Mujeres Unidas y Activas) working with AFSCME to increase funding for direct-care workers and to create pathways to unionization; and

• the Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en la Lucha (CTUL) and SEIU in Minnesota organizing janitors at Target.

Such partnerships play a key role in cities and states across the country where new labor policies and standards (such as domestic workers’ bills of rights and higher minimum wages) are being enacted, and new models of bargaining and membership are being born. This is the result of very intentional decisions among committed leaders within the broader labor movement. These partnerships are not limited to joint organizing and policy campaigns, but also include affiliation models, like the National Taxi Workers Alliance joining the national Executive Council of the AFL-CIO. There are also several local worker centers affiliated with local AFL-CIO central labor councils.

Philanthropy increasingly is supporting the renewal of the labor movement and these types of partnerships at the local and sectoral levels. The Labor Innovations for the 21st Century (LIFT) Fund was established in 2012 as a partnership among the AFL-CIO and its affiliates, foundations investing in workers’ rights, labor researchers, and the worker center field. It has served as a table where these groups have come together to strengthen alignment and jointly invest in innovative strategies for organizing and collaboration between worker centers and unions, and to scale the insights and strategies from that innovation.

Working alongside organizations at the local, state, and national levels, the centers also connected issues of workers’ rights to gender equity, immigration, racial justice, and democracy. Some of these efforts include campaigns like that of the ROC United and One Fair Wage that has addressed the racist and sexist legacies that created the tipped wage; Families Belong Together, which focused on immigration policies that are tearing families apart; Always Essential, which is advancing inclusive labor and social policies to replace historic racial and gender exclusions; Respect the Bump, which won pregnancy accommodations and paid time off for Walmart associates; the Athena coalition, which has brought together groups to challenge the growing concentration of corporate power, safeguard communities from surveillance, and expand our democracy; and Working While Black, which is an initiative focused on changing the narrative about the causes of the Black job crisis and the solutions to this crisis.

Over the years, worker centers and their supporters came to understand that there was a need not only to contest economic power through policy and organizing, but that in order to win, political and cultural power is critical. To do this, worker centers needed to expand their base, and in recent years they have applied online-to-offline approaches to organizing and membership engagement that integrate technology and data in new ways, often drawing from electoral organizing. Groups like Coworker.org, United for Respect, and, most recently, Unemployed Workers United have spearheaded efforts that serve as models that are spreading across the worker center field. Worker centers, which until recent years mainly engaged in 501(c)(3) activities (non-lobbying activities), have created sister 501(c)(4) organizations to expand their capacity to lobby on issues important to their base, as well as developing civic engagement strategies to ensure their constituency is informed and engaged in the electoral process and that elected officials are correspondingly accountable to low-wage workers and communities.

Local and state-based worker center organizations like Make the Road, CASA, and the Workers Defense Project have led in the development of these types of capacities. National worker center networks have developed sister organizations in more recent years to carry out this work. The NDWA, for instance, developed a sister 501(c)(4) organization, Care in Action, which endorsed 73 women of color pro-worker candidates in 2020 and ran one of the largest voter contact programs in Georgia during the U.S. Senate runoffs in 2021. Worker centers have also deployed an array of strategic communications, storytelling, and narrative-change approaches to shape the broader debate and win over hearts and minds.

The centers have also begun to develop transnational and global strategies to build power for workers along migration corridors and across global supply chains.

True to its roots as a movement driven by the fallout of global systems and their impacts on workers, and inspired by the leadership and courage of migrant workers from the global South, the centers have also begun to develop transnational and global strategies to build power for workers along migration corridors, across global supply chains, and in key sectors. Together, these efforts aim to raise standards and hold multinational corporate and government actors accountable for the rights of workers. One early example of this kind of multinational campaign was that waged by the National Guestworker Alliance, originally a project of the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice, which, in tandem with worker organizations in India, exposed forced labor along the Gulf Coast, winning $14 million in damages for Indian welders and pipe fitters working with H-2B visas, and securing important reforms of the U.S. guest worker program. Another example is the NDWA’s leadership in creating the International Domestic Workers Federation, which was critical to establishing new global standards at the International Labour Organization that expand labor and social protections for domestic and other women workers in the informal economy. Most recently, NDLON, in partnership with Global Labor Justice and Mexican and Central American–based labor and migrant worker organizations, created the Corredores por la Justicia (Corridors for Justice) network of worker organizations to develop a regional strategy to promote labor rights and decent work as a means of addressing root causes of poverty-induced migration in the region.

The worker center movement has also mobilized and expanded the resources going into worker organizing at a scale that should be recognized. Leaders have educated, organized, and partnered with funders to secure seed investments at the local and national levels for new organizations and strategies. While the authors of this article represent two of the largest foundations in the U.S., which are the largest foundation funders of worker organizing at this moment, it was our colleagues at smaller social-justice foundations who seeded the worker center field some 20 years ago. They were willing to support efforts to build worker power and bolster immigrant, women, and Black-led organizing at a time when larger foundations were not nearly as open to grassroots organizing or to organized labor. Some of these foundations included New World, Discount, Solidago, Veatch, General Service, Needmor, and Hill-Snowdon, as well as local foundations like Liberty Hill, North Star, and New York Foundation.

There are contradictions and tensions within private philanthropy’s support for worker organizing. Worker centers have been criticized for their reliance on foundations and a relative lack of independent, membership-based revenue—conditions that are chiefly consequences of their members’ low incomes and the absence of the automatic dues payments established by collective-bargaining agreements. This question of revenue—which is really the question of the future sustainability of the movement—continues to be at the heart of what we need to collectively grapple with if we are to build an inclusive, vibrant, and relevant labor movement for the 21st century. It is a fundamental challenge, not only for worker centers but for unions and the entire economic-justice movement.

What was considered impossible just a decade ago for the most vulnerable workers is now at the center of the national political agenda.

While philanthropy perhaps should not be the largest source of funds, it likely must be part—and we need to be smart about how to best catalyze and complement a variety of revenue sources from the public sector, small and large donors, earned income, institutional partners, membership dues, and benefits and services. We need to be more strategic about how these diverse funds can most effectively align and complement the various activities of the movement. This requires intentional coordination across the movement, which involves targeting the ways in which labor unions invest their resources in building for the future. Labor unions need to decide if they are going to scale their investments and deepen their engagement in the type of joint organizing efforts described in this article, or raise more resources from the broader labor movement that can in turn leverage larger amounts of money from donors and other sources to support the growth and sustainability of this field of worker organizations.

What was considered impossible just a decade ago for the most vulnerable workers is now at the center of the national political agenda—from raising the minimum wage, to recognizing the importance of the care economy, to securing protections for “essential workers.” Along the way, worker centers have withstood a series of attacks by those opposed to worker organizing and the expansion of workers’ rights. That the movement is thriving today, and continues to grow and evolve, is a testament to the courage and hard work of countless leaders and members.

Until now, there has been no central repository of the strategies and campaigns that worker centers have devised, and their successes and failures. The lessons from these endeavors can help guide future campaigns and shape future strategies. All too frequently, however, these lessons go unshared.

Now, that repository has come into being. A newly established online Worker Center Research Library housed at the University of Illinois Chicago’s Center for Urban Economic Development will both document and commemorate the gains of the field, of which there are many. It will also provide resources and spaces to reflect on where we have been and where we need to be a decade from now. Certainly, the context will be different. But the road maps are now available for all to see and study.

This series was made possible by a grant from the Ford Foundation.

About the Authors

In the 1990s, Laine Romero-Alston worked as an organizer with low-income youth and women workers in Mexico City and in the maquiladoras of the northern state of Coahuila struggling with the lack of economic opportunity in the wake of the implementation of NAFTA. In the following decade, she went on to support the emergent worker center field in New York City, focusing on the immediate needs of immigrant and other workers, and building long-term structural change in the growing sectors of restaurants and hospitality, domestic and care work, transportation, and day labor construction. As Laine moved into philanthropy in 2008, first at the Solidago Foundation and later leading the largest portfolio supporting worker centers at the Ford Foundation, the leadership and membership base of those New York organizations she worked with would build a robust ecosystem of national sectoral worker center organizations as well as broader networks and campaigns for workers more broadly. They developed strategic collaborations for worker organizing with labor unions at the local, national, and sectoral levels, which were strengthened and scaled by the Labor Innovations for the 21st Century (LIFT) Fund, which Laine co-founded and chaired. In 2018, she came to Open Society Foundations to strengthen growing transnational and global strategies and frameworks for worker organizing and collective bargaining. Her work has particularly focused on supporting a decent work agenda across the Central America-Mexico-U.S. corridor that promotes a labor rights agenda for all workers as core to addressing the root causes of poverty, migration, and economic exploitation. She has also worked to shape a new focus on worker power and multiracial class solidarity for Open Society-U.S.

Sarita Gupta has a long history of working at the intersections of labor unions, workers centers, community and faith-based organizations, and student groups. She spent over 20 years at Jobs with Justice (JWJ), a national network committed to advancing workers’ rights and building worker power. As a local JWJ organizer in Chicago, she co-founded the first day labor worker center in the city, which was her initial foray into navigating the relationships between labor unions and worker centers. She carried lessons from that experience into her work at National JWJ, where she continued to partner closely with local worker centers and then eventually with national worker center networks that advanced organizing and policy campaigns to boost wages and working conditions for all workers, improve labor and civil rights protections for immigrant workers, and expand bargaining rights. She played a key role in seeding numerous efforts like the Asia Floor Wage Alliance, which is a global coalition of trade unions, workers’ rights, and human rights organizations that is innovating regional initiatives for higher wages in the global garment industry; the United Workers Congress, which brings together worker centers and organizations focused on raising labor standards and protections for low-wage workers across industries; and Caring Across Generations, a national movement of families, caregivers, people with disabilities, and aging Americans working to shape the care economy so that all families and care workers can age with dignity and live well. Sarita joined the Ford Foundation in late 2019 to lead the Future of Work(ers) program.