Mobilizing Worker Rights: The Challenges of Claims-Driven Processes for Re-Regulating the Labor Market

Low-wage workers continue to face high levels of exploitation in the workplace. The regulatory frameworks that exist to protect workers and provide avenues for redress for violations of workers’ rights rely on individual or collective claims-making by workers. Worker centers have developed creative mobilization strategies to support worker claims and build worker power in the low-wage labor market. This paper leverages qualitative case study data to better understand the process of worker claims-making and the psychosocial toll it can take on workers. Based on these case studies, this paper argues that worker centers and other alt-labor groups need to take into account the costs and challenges for workers endemic to the claims-making process under current regulatory regimes.

Wage Theft and Work Safety: Immigrant Day Labor Jobs and the Potential for Worker Rights Training at Worker Centers

Immigrant day laborers routinely experience exploitative behaviors as part of their employment. These experiences are understood in the context of their immigration histories and in the context of their long-term goals for less precarious labor and living situations. Using mixed methods, over three data collection periods in 2016, 2019, and 2020, we analyze the work experiences of immigrant day labors in Houston and Austin, Texas. We report how workers judge precarious jobs and respond to labor exploitation in an informal labor market. We also discuss data pertaining to a worker rights training intervention conducted through a city-sponsored worker center. We discuss the potential for worker centers to be a convening and remediation space for workers and employers. Worker centers where immigrant day labors meet employers offer the potential for informal intervention into wage theft and work safety violations, by formalizing the context where laborers are hired.

Movement-oriented labor organizations in an authoritarian regime: The case of China

How do labor organizations with a movement orientation arise in an authoritarian regime? How do they organize workers collectively in a repressive society? What movement roles do they play? What challenges do they face? To answer these questions, I use synthesized social movement theories to examine movement-oriented labor non-governmental organizations in China. Based on qualitative data collected through triangulated sources, I find that movement-oriented labor non-governmental organizations use political opportunities to promote one type of modular collective labor action, which consists of three tactics, namely the election of worker representatives, collective negotiation, and protest. They guide workers to build mobilizing and connective structures, formulate collective action frames, and amass movement resources. However, the movement roles of this type of labor non-governmental organization have weakened, owing to diminishing political opportunities caused by changes in government administration. This research contributes to our understanding of social movement theories, labor organizations in China, labor non-governmental organizations and worker centers generally, and state–society relations in non-democracies.

How Worker Centers Organize Low-Wage Workers: An Exploration of Targets and Strategies

In response to the growing absence of unions from the private sector, community-based organizations known as worker centers have emerged as a new front in protecting and organizing workers. Scholars generally argue that worker centers have converged on a model of combining service provision with organizing and advocacy, supported primarily by funding from foundations and government agencies. I draw on interviews conducted with worker center staff, a dataset compiled from their public materials, and secondary research to add to the existing literature and to argue that a clear categorization of worker centers can be derived by attention to their primary workplace strategies. First, worker centers can be meaningfully distinguished by whether they attempt to raise standards in specific industries versus responding to problems in individual workplaces. But they can also be distinguished based on the extent to which they view public policy or winning agreements with employers as the primary route to systemic improvements. These divergences in strategy echo Progressive-era debates about the role for the state in redressing workplace ills. Similar to that era, strategic differences among today’s worker centers are driven less by ideology and more by the distinct structural challenges facing workers in particular political and economic contexts.

The Dark Side of Immigrant Integration Policies: Day Laborers in the United States

This article uses the case of immigrant day laborers to examine how municipalities develop policies to integrate immigrants. In the 1990s and 2000s, local elected officials adopted integration policies to address the issues raised by the presence of day laborers in their jurisdictions. While first drawing on cases from around the country, the study then homes in on the case of Pasadena, California, to examine the implementation of integration in a moderately liberal city. The results reveal that many officials embraced both disciplinary and punitive tactics, making use of worker centers, aggressive ticketing, and solicitation bans for the purposes of controlling and governing an illegalized population. Some policies institutionalized the subordination of the population and heightened its deportability. The paper complicates the presumed binary between restrictive and integrative policies.

The Social Structures of Accumulation and the Labor Movement: A Brief History and a Modest Proposal

The economic and political crisis of the 1970s undermined the postwar social structures of accumulation (SSA) and gave rise to the current globalized, neoliberal, financialized (GNF) SSA. Under GNF, we have witnessed the explosion of the precariat and the reemergence of simpler forms of labor control characteristic of earlier SSAs. This article discusses the response of the labor movement, broadly defined, to these changes, including the rise of worker centers, worker ownership, campaigns for increased state regulation, and cross-border organizing. Finally, it raises the question of whether the current national labor federation can act as an incubator for the experimentation and structural changes necessary for the labor movement to meet the challenges of the GNF-SSA.

Visions of Community at Worker Centers

Two thematic strands characterize day laborers’ conceptions of their worker center communities. Many workers stress the need for order and efficiency backed by strong authority aimed at distinguishing worthy participants from the unworthy, providing security to migrants with a stout work ethic, and ensuring members’ unity as a disciplined workforce. Many others highlight convivial and mutualist practices through which day laborers assist suffering compañeros, govern centers autonomously and democratically, and mobilize politically. Day laborers thus manifest modes of democratic action grounded in mundane habits of reciprocity, enlivened through intercorporeal resonances, and catalyzing politicization within precaritized conditions. Workers’ community-making activities further shed light on the temporalities of transformative practices conceptualized by Raymond Rocco, Romand Coles, and Anna Lowenhaupt-Tsing, whose writings in turn illuminate the political significance of worker center cultures. Day laborers also rearticulate racial-ethnic identity according to temporalities that counter neoliberal permutations of the Latino unity ideal criticized by Cristina Beltrán.