The Excluded Workers Congress: Reimagining the Right to Organize

Even before the recent assault on the collective bargaining rights of public sector workers in Wisconsin and across the Midwest, millions of workers in the United States were excluded from the basic human right to organize. Whether it’s due to policy or practice, they cannot organize without facing retaliation, bargain collectively to transform their workplace conditions, or access basic labor protections. In short, millions of workers have been robbed of their dignity.

These “excluded workers” include: more than a million and a half farm workers; nearly two million domestic workers; millions of public and private sector workers in the twenty-two states that have right-to-work laws; nearly three million tipped workers in the food service industries; hundreds of thousands of guest workers and day laborers; hundreds of thousands of taxi drivers; hundreds of thousands of formerly incarcerated people; and hundreds of thousands of workfare workers.

The majority of excluded workers are workers of color, including African-Americans and immigrants from Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. These workers are concentrated in three areas: the low-wage service industries of the “global cities” across the United States (i.e., taxi drivers, restaurant workers, and domestic workers in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago); urban communities with high rates of unemployment; and in regions and industries with historically weak labor protections (i.e., public sector workers in the Southern right-to-work states and farm workers in rural areas across the country). While the underground nature of their work makes it difficult to determine the proportion of excluded workers in the broader working class, we do know that low-wage service industries are growing at a faster rate than other sectors of the labor market,¹ and the labor rights of workers in many other sectors are coming under attack.

Some of these workers are excluded through explicit policies—farm workers and domestic workers are cited as exceptions to the right to organize, while restaurant workers are defined as “tipped workers” who are excluded from minimum wage laws. Taxi drivers are classified as independent contractors. Since they’re explicitly excluded from the legal definition of “employee,” they’re also excluded from labor protections (an exclusion that also impacts workfare workers who are defined by law as “welfare recipients” and not as workers with the right to organize). The laws in the twenty-two right-to-work states (concentrated in the South and the Midwest) explicitly limit the ability of workers—particularly in the public sector—to organize and collectively bargain.

Many other workers are excluded from labor rights and protections by practice—either because existing laws are not enforced or because these workers’ precarious economic and legal status makes it dangerous for them to claim even their guaranteed rights. Workers in other sectors—i.e., those who were once incarcerated—are often excluded from access to work because of discriminatory policies. Whether these exclusions are explicit or implicit, they undercut workers’ ability to organize. This leads to exploitative and degrading working conditions, including poverty-level wages, frequent wage theft, long hours without the benefit of overtime pay, racial discrimination and sexual harassment on the job, and unsafe workplaces, in turn, lowering the floor for all workers.

Contemporary exclusions developed as a result of two converged social dynamics: the legacy of racial exclusions in U.S. labor law (i.e., the exclusion of farm workers and domestic workers from the National Labor Relations Act as a concession to 1930s segregationist Southern senators); and the impact of globalization, which has rendered much of current labor law structurally ineffectual in addressing the changed dynamics of workplaces worldwide. Fundamental political and economic power shifts have transformed working conditions in the United States and around the world. These shifts—the decline of the U.S. manufacturing economy, the development of a U.S. service economy, and the rise of international migration—have created new and challenging conditions for workers.

While the traditional labor movement has long reflected on the severe limitations of collective bargaining rights—as expressed in the National Labor...