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  • Worker CentersEntering a New Stage of Growth and Development
  • Janice Fine (bio)

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Members of the Excluded Workers Congress gather during the first International Conference on Expanding the Human Right to Organize.

Photo by Johnny Melgar

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Worker centers—community-based organizations that engage in a combination of service, advocacy, and organizing to provide support to low-wage workers—play an indispensable role in helping low-wage immigrant workers navigate the world of work. They are vehicles for collective reflection, voice, and action, and the vast majority of these centers serve predominantly or exclusively immigrant populations. However, there are a few centers that serve primarily African-American populations or bring immigrants together with African-Americans. In the largely nonunion service economy—lowend construction, meatpacking, light industry, and what’s left of the garment trade—worker centers are calling attention to exploitative industry practices and pioneering creative strategies, especially in the context of widespread subcontracting. Hyper-competitive labor market conditions—once thought to be confined to industries like agriculture—are characteristic of many other sectors, thus the strategies worker centers are using to target sub-contractors, joint employers, and independent contracting arrangements have much broader application.

In their monitoring and enforcement of federal and state labor standards regulations, worker centers attempt to fill the void created by an ineffectual and disengaged state. Their labor market interventions—through direct economic action and public policy reform—are pioneering new strategies for protecting lowwage workers. Their local advocacy builds bridges between immigrant workers and the larger communities in which immigrants live and work, often effectively reframing the way these workers are perceived and transforming hostility and fear into empathy. Worker centers have also been building organizations, developing leaders, and launching campaigns in the “too-difficult-to-organize” sectors unions gave up on long ago.

Along with their considerable strengths, I have argued in previous work that worker centers possessed certain limitations. Most had small membership bases, or in many cases, no formal membership structures at all. Many resisted charging dues because they feared workers could not afford to pay and they did not view dues as an important way for workers to demonstrate organizational commitment. Even many of those who did believe in the [End Page 45] importance of formal membership had not made it a day to day priority.

Worker centers are almost entirely reliant upon foundation funding. I have argued that the unpredictability of the foundations’ backing and the lack of funding-source diversification made these centers financially vulnerable and unstable. Until fairly recently, immigrant worker centers were also under-networked. At the local, state, and regional levels, organizations might have come together on specific campaigns, but they were not working together on an ongoing basis. The limited networking was problematic because centers were unable to coordinate strategy and project a national presence. Coordination also matters for fundraising purposes—many national funders hesitate to fund at the local level, preferring to go through regional or national intermediaries.

As labor market institutions, many centers were not engaged in detailed industrial or labor market research and analysis. Finally, despite mounting some extremely innovative campaigns to intervene in labor markets through direct economic action against employers, most centers have had a limited impact this way. Worker centers have made their greatest impact on labor markets and industries by catalyzing government action and initiating local and state public policy initiatives. Today, worker centers and their national organizations are overcoming some of these limitations I posited while others, such as the extensive foundation funding, may (with the benefit of hindsight) have actually been strengths.

Some of worker centers’ strategic shortcomings are indicative of a broader challenge faced by all worker organizations, including unions, as they confront twenty-first-century global capitalism. But, in the past five years, worker centers and their networks have significantly evolved and matured, institutionalizing themselves and substantially expanding their strategic capacities.


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Table 1.

Percentage of Employed Workers Who Are Covered by a Collective Bargaining Agreement

Targeting the State

Despite a 1995 AFL-CIO leadership change—that presaged a renewed focus on organizing—and the federation’s 2005...

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