Working for Justice: The L.A. Model of Organizing and Advocacy (review)

Over the past two decades, no city has produced a more fruitful interchange among unions, workers’ centres, and other worker advocacy projects than Los Angeles. This useful volume pulls together the first scholarly fruits of reflection on the rich variety of contemporary workers’ movements based in California’s sprawling metropolis. The eleven case studies included in this volume, the product of a two-year collaboration among academics and activists, point the way toward the workers’ movement of the future, while simultaneously illuminating a number of the obstacles that movement will need to overcome.

The 19 contributors to this volume bring a diversity of experiences to bear. Almost half of them were doctoral candidates at the time they submitted their essays. Some of these young scholars have had careers in activism working in organizations whose campaigns they are now studying. Most of those were members of the Public Sociologists Working Group, affiliated with the ucla Sociology Department, where they have been influenced by the work of Ruth Milkman, who co-edited this volume and whose book, L.A. Story: Immigrant Workers and the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement (Russell Sage Foundation 2006) provides the scholarly foundation for a number of the studies undertaken here. An array of lawyers, worker center organizers, and urban planners round out the list of contributors to this volume, among whom Victor Narro, project director of the ucla Downtown Labor Center, stands out.

The volume is organized in three parts. Part I treats immigrant worker advocacy efforts undertaken within ethnic communities. Jong Bum Kwon examines the struggles of the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance (kiwa) to improve the lot of market workers through agitation, a union organizing campaign, and a class action lawsuit. Nazgol Ghandoosh recounts the efforts of the Pilipino Workers’ Center on behalf of parking lot attendants, home care workers, and Filipino immigrants who sought less exploitative ways of sending remittances to the Philippines. An essay by Caitlin C. Patler offers a 20-year history of the Coalition for Human Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles. And Cinyere Osuji analyzes the Multiethnic Immigrant Workers Organizing Network, which led the annual May 1 immigrant rights marches that culminated in the turnout of 600,000 demonstrators in 2006.

Part II of the volume consists of four case studies of occupational or industry-focused organizing campaigns. Jacqueline Leavitt and Gary Blasi study the Los Angeles Taxi Workers Alliance. Susan Garea and Sasha Alexandra Stern look at the LA Car Wash Worker Campaign. The National Day Laborer Organizing Network is the subject of a study by Marie Dziembowska. And a quintet of researchers, Nicole A. Archer, Ana Luz Gonzalez, Kimi Lee, Simmi Gandhi, and Delia Herrera analyze the history of a campaign taken on by the Garment Workers Center.

The collection’s final section contains three essays on the efforts of unions to organize low-income workers. Joshua Bloom’s contribution tells a story of cooperation between the Service Employees International Union (seiu) and black community leaders during the union’s effort to organize the largely black workforce of private building security guards. Forrest Stuart recounts the largely successful campaign of unite here to organize the hotels adjacent to Los Angeles International Airport. And Karina Muñiz writes about the Maintenance Cooperation Trust Fund, a joint project of seiu and unionized janitorial employers that monitors practices in California’s building maintenance industry and presses for enforcement of fair labor standards regulations.

Several points stand out in this collection of essays. The most striking is the amazing diversity of campaigns and organizations that have proliferated in Los Angeles over the past two decades. Readers of this volume are likely to have difficulty keeping straight the blizzard of organizational acronyms that fill these pages. This problem testifies to the vitality of organizing in this multicultural city and to the many initiatives that have erupted from the immigrant neighbourhoods of greater Los Angeles. Some of these efforts have emerged...