Janice Fine

Book Review: "Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream"

By Janice Fine

Review by James Generic

Edited by Yoni Kroll and Chris Mullen



Today, unions in the US are in a weak state. More than 90% of all working people are not in unions. Does this mean that unions have become obsolete? No! The power of a worker in a union is much higher than someone without a union in terms of job security, wages, benefits, and the ability to solve grievances like harassment or discrimination. However, there have been many changes in American labor of late, such as anti-union laws, aggressive international anti-labor companies like Walmart, globalization where former union jobs are sent overseas, immigration laws aimed at keeping immigrant workers vulnerable, and the retailization of the US economy where many jobs have shifted from factories to retail and low-wage service jobs - like domestic workers, security guards, restaurant workers, agriculture, or day laborers. Most of the tactics of the labor movement have been slow to follow this shift. In addition, US unions tend to be on the conservative side (politically conservative like many building trades or craft unions, or just conservative in tactics and cautious in the case of industrial-based unions.) This huge void in the labor movement hasn't gone unfilled. A host of alternative labor organizing strategies and organizations have risen to fill this void, and one of the biggest trends of low-wage workers organizations is towards workers' centers.



In "Workers Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream", Janice Fine does a very thorough study of workers centers across the US, visiting 137 in a two year span. She lays out what a worker center is, an organization that offers at least four features to workers, which outside of unions that other groups do not: 1- Services, examples being English as a Second Language, legal aid, job placement, placement to need-based service orgs, cash checking, peer counseling, and getting back wages 2- Popular Education, which would be know-your-rights classes, basic economic and globalization classes, critical skills development 3- Organizing, such as collective action for betterment of constituents, engaging in campaigns around issues, getting better conditions for their membership or constituents, bringing in alliances of groups to help, leadership development and 4) Advocacy, which is getting the message out and bringing light to low-wage communities.

The majority of workers' centers are immigrant worker based, with many Latino and Asian centered groups and some African-American majority workers' centers, making race one of the key factors that these groups organize around. Often, the staff and volunteers of the workers centers come from the communities the centers work in, as well as the main point being to develop leadership within those communities. One of their big advantages over traditional unions is that workers centers are bottom up organizations based around local conditions, as opposed to numbers-based groups who target large bodies of people to organize instead of the "hot-shop" places. . In many ways, workers' centers are much like "pre-unions", doing the collective organizing that unions can't or won't do at this time but may someday be able to. The way that workers' centers think of members is also different than unions, in that in unions you are a member if you simply pay dues, but in the workers' centers it is more something you must earn and put in time for. Fine points out, however, that they could do better with fund-raising by establishing more firm membership. A general weakness of progressive organizations on the left - except unions - is the drift towards reliance on foundation money.

There are many examples of workers' centers across the United States. The Chicago Interfaith Workers Rights Center organizes heavily around churches. The Carolina Alliance for Fair Employment (CAFÉ) works with day laborers, recruiting heavily in immigrant soccer leagues. Restaurant Opportunities Center - New York (ROC NY) organizes around the food industry, trying to make many connections from farm to table as well as fighting for the huge but often not organized restaurant industry. Koreatown Immigrant Workers Advocates (KIWA) fights for Korean and Latino workers across the immigrant-heavy Koreatown in Los Angeles. Omaha Together One Community (OTOC) goes after mostly meatpackers, even getting a very conservative governor to give in to their demands and post workers bill of rights in every workplace. The New York Taxi Workers Alliance more or less functions as a union without the legal recognition. The Tenants and Workers Support Committee (TWSC) organizes all sorts of workers in Northern Virginia, but especially taxi drivers and domestic workers. Domestic Workers United in New York City unites a heavily fragmented workforce spread from house to house made up mainly of Caribbean immigrant women. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers fights for tomato pickers across Florida and have won big gains from fast food giants like McDonald's, Burger King, and Taco Bell. CASA Maryland works mainly with day laborers. The Vermont Workers' Center provides a place for alliance amongst organizations and individuals. The Miami Workers Center works internationally with Columbian labor groups. Mississippi Workers' Center for Human Rights places a human rights framework around workers rights. The New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice builds worker power and racial justice in the post-Katrina environment. These are the ones that stand out in Fine's book, though many more have arisen since it was published in 2006.

The worker center model put forth by Fine has many strengths and weaknesses. In general, they are good grassroots organizations that value building up their members and placing action and results above all else. They serve as a way for low-income workers to be able to organize for a better place in society when there is no help coming from outsiders. They also address the immediate needs that have to be filled and combine that with pushing for collective action and power from the bottom-up, thus the service, popular education, organizing and advocacy aspects of workers centers. Often, the staff and volunteers of the workers' centers come from the communities the centers work in, which is important from a leadership perspective.

One of the main weaknesses is that worker centers tend to not have a firm membership base. Their direct membership is often small in comparison to unions, though that is often because they have many informal members through the networks that they build and the communities they serve. Because of that, their funds tend to be low and they tend to have to rely economically on grants because they generally haven't, or don't want to, built ways of raising money due to the fact that many of the communities they organize with are poor. Workers' centers could also do better as far as networking goes, as there are only two major national workers' center networks right now: the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) with 30 workers' centers; and Interfaith Worker Justice (IWJ) which connects 14 workers' center through strong religious ties. In general, their relationship with mainstream labor like the AFL-CIO has been somewhat rocky because unions often regard the centers as not being disciplined enough and not strategic and the centers see the unions as being too rigid tactically and top-down. However, labor has been moving to endorse workers' centers as a legitimate part of the labor movement. An example of this is the NDLON partnering with the AFL-CIO in 2006.

When I went to the Jobs With Justice (JWJ) 2008 national conference in Providence, Rhode Island, Terence Courtney of Atlanta JWJ remarked that in the last three years, JWJ and the labor movement in general seemed to have gotten more radical in embracing alternative forms of organizing with people directly effected by today's poor economy. Unions and groups like workers' centers have reached a more equal footing in the last three years, according to Courtney. I agreed with him, as low-wage worker organizations seemed to have a key role amongst the workshops and speakers that day, as opposed to mostly unions and their direct allies as it was back in 2005. It appears that JWJ has taken a major step forward in recognizing that because of the bad position American unions currently find themselves in, there's a big void that can and should be filled by workers' groups. That is especially true here in Philadelphia, where there is a big need for a group that would combine organizing with service and advocacy. A workers' center would fill that need perfectly.… (mais)