No One Size Fits All: Worker Organization, Policy, and Movement in a New Economic Age

Workers and their organizations are facing enormous obstacles today. Corporations wield immense power, not only in the marketplace but also in politics, which has, for many years, effectively blocked the updating of antiquated laws governing labor relations. Instead, unions have been subjected to a steady onslaught of attacks at the state level and growing hostility from the US Supreme Court. They have all but lost basic protections that the legal system once provided—making organizing, bargaining, and striking increasingly difficult. Black workers continue to face a decades-long job crisis characterized by disproportionate unemployment (compared with White workers) and poor job quality. Immigrant workers of all statuses feel the threat of exclusionary immigration policies and heightened xenophobic rhetoric coming from the top echelons of the US government.

Similar to worker organizing in the United States before the New Deal contract, organizations in the late 20th and early 21st centuries have been scrambling to find leverage within an increasingly hostile economic, political, and legal environment. Despite formidable obstacles, this volume shows that vibrant, creative experimentation has never ceased. In lieu of new federal regulation, public and private sector national unions and local affiliates have been actively trying out new approaches that pair organizing with mechanisms that support bargaining. They have doubled down on electoral politics and creative policy fights to raise standards and facilitate organizing, with an unprecedented focus on low-wage workers. They have forged closer, more equal partnerships with community organizations than ever before. Still much more work needs to be done.

New organizational models are also emergent. These experiments, which include worker centers and what some refer to as "alt labor" groups, diverge from traditional labor unions in a number of ways. They aim to represent workers and their workplace interests but do not typically work within the New Deal collective bargaining construct regulated by the government.

About the Contributors: Cathy Albisa is Executive Director of the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative (NESRI). She is a constitutional and human rights lawyer and cofounded NESRI in order to build legitimacy for human rights in general, and economic and social rights in particular, in the United States. She is committed to a community-centered and participatory human rights approach that is locally anchored but universal and global in its vision. She clerked for the Honorable Mitchell Cohen in the District of New Jersey. She received a B.A. from the University of Miami and a J.D. from Columbia Law School. Greg Asbed, a 2017 MacArthur Fellow, is a co-founder of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, the Fair Food Program (FFP), and the Worker-Driven Social Responsibility model, a breakthrough approach to verifiable corporate accountability recognized by observers from the United Nations to the White House for its unique effectiveness in combatting forced labor, sexual violence, and other gross human rights violations in agriculture. He spearheads the development of the FFP's market-based enforcement mechanisms, rights standards, and worker education processes. He has a B.S. from Brown University and an M.A. from Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies. Xóchitl Bada is Associate Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research interests include migrant access to political and social rights, migrant organizing strategies, and transnational labor advocacy mobilization in North America. Her recent research has appeared in the journals Population, Space, and Place and Forced Migration Review. Her book, Mexican Hometown Associations in Chicagoacán, demonstrates how and why emergent forms of citizen participation practiced by Mexican hometown associations engage simultaneously with political elites in Mexico and the United States. Jacob Barnes is a doctoral student in the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations. His research interests include precarious work, employee misclassification, and nontraditional labor organizations. Before that, he was a research specialist at the Worker Institute at Cornell University, studying such topics as the New York State Arts & Entertainment Workforce, growing alliances between labor unions and nontraditional labor organizations, and nascent unionization efforts in the video game production industry. He holds a bachelor's degree from the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations, with minors in business and inequality studies. Joseph C. Bazler is a Ph.D. candidate in international and comparative labor at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR). His research focuses on questions of community unionism and care work, with a particular focus on teachers' unions in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He earned an M.S. from the ILR School, an M.A. from the University of Chicago, and a B.A. from Bellarmine University. Linda Burnham is Senior Advisor at the National Domestic Workers Alliance and co-author of Home Economics. She has worked for decades as an activist, writer, and strategist focused on women's rights and racial justice. She co-founded the Women of Color Resource Center, where she served as executive director for 18 years. Burnham has published numerous articles on African American women, African American politics, and feminist theory in a wide range of periodicals and anthologies. "Gender and the Black Jobs Crisis" appeared in the June 2016 issue of the journal Souls. Austin Case earned a juris doctor degree from the University of California Davis School of Law and a master's in industrial and labor relations from Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations in 2017. Before attending law school, he was a research analyst for UNITE HERE Local 5 in Honolulu. Els de Graauw is Associate Professor of political science at Baruch College, the City University of New York. Her research centers on the nexus of immigration and immigrant integration, civil society organizations, urban and suburban politics, and public policy. She is the author of Making Immigrant Rights Real. She earned her Ph.D. in political science from the University of California Berkeley. Janice Fine is Associate Professor of Labor Studies and Employment Relations at the School of Management and Labor Relations, Rutgers University as well as Director of Research and Strategy at the Center for Innovation in Worker Organization (CIWO). At CIWO, she works with labor and community organizations and state and local government agencies across the country on strategies for strengthening labor standards enforcement. She also supports learning communities on membership recruitment and distributed leadership strategies. Fine teaches and writes about forms of collective action among low-wage workers in the U.S including innovative union and community organizing strategies, historical and contemporary debates within labor movements regarding immigration policy, labor standards enforcement and co-enforcement and government oversight. She is the author of the book Worker Centers published by Cornell University Press and the Economic Policy Institute and together with her colleague, the sociologist Hana Shepherd, is working on a book about the emergence of local labor standards enforcement agencies in the US. Leslie C. Gates is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at Binghamton University's Department of Sociology. She recently served as Chair of the American Sociological Association's Section on Political Economy of the World-System (PEWS). Her work and teaching employ both quantitative and qualitative techniques to analyze empirical evidence. Her interests include worker advocacy efforts and the relationship between corporate power and politics. She is the author of the book Electing Chávez. Shannon Gleeson earned her PhD in sociology and demography from the University of California Berkeley in 2008. She joined the faculty of the Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations in 2014, after six years on the faculty of the Latin American and Latino Studies Department at the University of California Santa Cruz. Her books include Precarious Claims and Conflicting Commitments. Kati L. Griffith is Associate Professor of labor and employment law and Chair of the Labor Relations, Law, and History Department at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations. She is a research fellow affiliated with New York University's Center for Labor and Employment Law and Cornell University's Institute for the Social Sciences. She is a co-author (along with Michael Harper and Samuel Estreicher) of the textbook Labor Law. Her research and teaching focus on labor and employment law, immigration policy, and legal issues affecting low-wage workforces. Hahrie Han is the Anton Vonk Professor of Political Science at the University of California Santa Barbara. She specializes in the study of civic and political participation, collective action, organizing, and social change, particularly as it pertains to social policy, environmental issues, and democratic revitalization. She has published three books: How Organizations Develop Activists, Groundbreakers, and Moved to Actions. Her award-winning work has been published in the American Political Science Review, American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, and numerous other outlets. Ken Jacobs is the Chair of the UC Berkeley Labor Center, where he has worked since 2002. His areas of research include low-wage work, labor standards policies, and health care coverage. Recent work includes economic impact studies of proposed minimum wage laws for the cities of Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Jose and analyses of the public cost of low-wage work. Jacobs was a co-editor of When Mandates Work, an edited volume on the impacts of labor standards policies in San Francisco. Andrea Cristina Mercado is the daughter of immigrants from South America, and she has been organizing in immigrant communities and communities of color for over a decade. She is one of the co-founders of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and led the California Domestic Worker Coalition, a statewide effort to include domestic workers in labor laws. Mercado served as director of campaigns for the National Domestic Workers Alliance for five years, where she led nationally recognized campaigns for immigrant and worker rights such as We Belong Together, and the 100 women/100-mile pilgrimage for migrant dignity. She is now the executive director of New Florida Majority and the New Florida Majority Education Fund, an organization building the independent political power of marginalized communities for racial, economic, and climate justice. Minsun Ji is Director of the Center for New Directions in Politics and Public Policy in the Political Science Department at the University of Colorado Denver. She was the founder and long-time Executive Director of a worker center in Denver, El Centro Humanitario para los Trabajadores (Humanitarian Center for Workers), organizing immigrant day laborers and domestic workers. She was also a labor activist in her native country, South Korea. She received her PhD from the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. Her special interests in research include international political economy, worker cooperatives, social movements, labor politics of different countries, and solidarity economy. Jonathan L. Kim graduated from Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations in 2017, minoring in law and society. He worked for the Worker Institute at Cornell as an undergraduate research fellow, conducting research on worker center funding sources. He presented his research at Harvard's Engaged Scholarship and Undergraduate Research Conference and SUNY's Undergraduate Research Conference. After graduation, he joined Capital One as a business analyst. Jane McAlevey is an organizer, author, and scholar. Her first book, Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell), was named Most Valuable Book of 2012 by The Nation magazine. Her second book, No Shortcuts, was released late in 2016. She is a regular commentator on radio and television. She continues to work as an organizer on union campaigns, lead contract negotiations, and train and develop organizers. She spent the past two years as a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard Law School, and she is presently writing her third book—Striking Back—about organizing, power, and strategy. Joseph A. McCartin is Executive Director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor and a Professor of history at Georgetown University, where he teaches courses on US labor, social, and political history. Among his books are Labor's Great War, Collision Course, and Labor in America, co-authored with Melvyn Dubofsky. Zane Mokhiber is a research assistant at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) in Washington, D.C. He supports the research of EPI's economists on topics such as wages, labor markets, inequality, trade and manufacturing, and economic growth. Prior to joining EPI, Mokhiber worked for the Worker Institute at Cornell University as an undergraduate research fellow and was supported by the Rawlings Cornell Presidential Research Scholars program. Victor Narro is a nationally known expert on the workplace rights of immigrant workers. He is Project Director for the UCLA Labor Center. He is a core faculty member of the UCLA Department of Labor and Workplace Studies. He is also Lecturer in law at the UCLA School of Law. In addition to writing many law review and journal articles, Narro is co-author of Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers, and Wage Theft and Workplace Violations in Los Angeles and co-editor of Working for Justice. He is also author of Living Peace. Steven C. Pitts came to the UC Berkeley Labor Center in August 2001. He received his PhD in economics with an emphasis on urban economics from the University of Houston in 1994. At the Labor Center, Pitts focuses on issues of job quality and black workers. In this arena, he has published reports on employment issues in the black community, initiated a black union leadership school, and shaped projects designed to build solidarity between black and Latino immigrant workers. He co-founded the National Black Worker Center Project. He is currently developing a new project focused on the intersection of mass incarceration, work, and unions. Ai-jen Poo is Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Codirector of the Caring Across Generations campaign. She has been organizing immigrant women workers for over two decades, forging pathways to sustainable, quality jobs for the caregiving workforce and ensuring access to affordable childcare and eldercare for all working families. She is a 2014 MacArthur Fellow and was named one of Fortune magazine's World's 50 Greatest Leaders for 2015. She is the author of The Age of Dignity. Chris Rhomberg is Associate Professor of sociology at Fordham University. His research has focused on historical and contemporary issues of labor, race, urban development, and politics in the United States. He is the author of The Broken Table and No There There. He is past Chair of the American Sociological Association's Section on Labor and Labor Movements, and he is a member of the National Writers Union/UAW 1981. Sean Sellers is Director of strategic partnerships at the Worker-Driven Social Responsibility Network. Since 2003, he has supported the Coalition of Immokalee Workers' efforts to improve farm labor conditions in several capacities, first as National Co-Coordinator of the Student/Farmworker Alliance and then as a W.K. Kellogg Foundation Food & Society Fellow. In 2011, his work pivoted to implementation of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers' Fair Food Program across the US East Coast tomato industry as a founding staff member of the Fair Food Standards Council. He has a BS and an MA from the University of Texas at Austin. Palak Shah is the Social Innovations Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) and the Founding Director of Fair Care Labs, the innovation arm of the domestic worker movement. Shah leads NDWA's national strategy on raising market norms and standards, partnering with the private sector and building scalable and sustainable business ventures. NDWA is the nation's leading organization working for power, respect, and fair labor standards for the 2.5 million nannies, housekeepers, and eldercare givers in the United States. Erica Smiley is Co-Executive Director of Jobs With Justice. Before that, she performed many roles at Jobs With Justice, including Organizing Director, Campaign Director, and Senior Field Organizer for the southern region. She has authored several articles highlighting some of the organization's most exciting developments in the New Labor Forum, Dissent, Class, Race and Corporate Power, and other publications. She serves on the board of the Highlander Research and Education Center based in Tennessee and is on the leadership council of the Workers Defense Project in Texas. In the past, Smiley has organized with community groups and unions such as the Tenants and Workers Support Committee (now Tenants and Workers United) in Virginia and SEIU Local 500 in Baltimore. She was National Field Director of Choice USA (now United for Reproductive and Gender Equity—URGE), where she received the Young Women of Achievement Award in 2004, before joining the staff of Jobs With Justice in 2005. Marilyn Sneiderman directs the Center for Innovation in Worker Organization at Rutgers' School of Management and Labor Relations. She has 30 years of experience in labor, community, faith-based, immigrant, and racial justice organizing, as well as extensive experience in managing large staffs and managing intensive organizational change work. For ten years, Sneiderman directed the national AFL-CIO's Department of Field Mobilization, where she helped launch the national Union Cities initiative. The campaign focused on increasing the capacity to support and win organizing, political, and policy campaigns throughout the United States. Working with the AFL-CIO's international unions, state federations, and central labor councils, the program was designed to unite community, union, religious, and civil/immigrant rights groups in building local movements to fight for social and economic justice. Aaron C. Sparks joined Elon University as Assistant Professor of political science in the fall of 2018. He earned a BS in biology from Westmont College, a master's in public administration from Penn State Harrisburg, and an MA and PhD in political science from the University of California Santa Barbara. His research interests center around the politics of environmental policy, and he is particularly interested in understanding how people form their beliefs and attitudes on environmental issues and how those attitudes shape their behavior. Nik Theodore is Professor of urban planning and policy and Associate Dean for faculty affairs and research in the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs, University of Illinois at Chicago. His current research focuses on urban informal economies, low-wage labor markets, and worker organizing in the United States and South Africa. He is author (with Jamie Peck) of Fast Policy. Kyoung-Hee Yu focuses her research on how work and employment experiences are impacted by and can motivate institutional and organizational change. Her recent research has examined the influence of commitments to social causes—such as social and environmental justice—on the employment relationship. Her research also addresses the impact of international migration on individual migrants and collective action, as well as implications for diversity and inclusion in organizations. Yu is the recipient of a US–Korea Fulbright Fellowship. She served as Book Review Editor and editorial board member of the journal Organization Studies and is currently on the advisory board of the Journal of Industrial Relations. Her papers have been recognized by the American Sociological Association (Best Student Paper, Labor and Labor Movements Section), the Labor and Employment Relations Association (Best Dissertation Award Runner-Up), the Academy of Management (Best Paper Runner-Up, Careers Division), and the Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management (Best Paper, Critical Management Studies Division).