Scratching Out a Living by Angela Stuesse

Author:Angela Stuesse
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520287204
Publisher: University of California Press

PARTNERING WITH THE WORKERS’ CENTER

Just a decade ago, labor scholar Janice Fine broke ground when she documented the rise of workers’ centers across the United States.14 She and others characterized this as a new movement in response to a growing immigrant workforce, an increasingly informal and service-oriented economy, and a deterioration of wages and working conditions brought about by neoliberal globalization.15 Fine catalogued 137 centers around the country working with and on behalf of low-wage and immigrant workers in recognition of these groups’ heightened vulnerability to exploitation and discrimination and limited institutional support.

Workers’ centers do a wide range of work, from providing social and legal services to education, advocacy, and organizing functions in order to help workers respond to abuses, improve opportunities, and organize to challenge structural barriers.16 This variety makes them difficult to categorize, as they represent a unique hybrid that blends the work of social service agencies, labor market intermediaries, and social movement organizations.17

Unlike most unions, workers’ centers are “profoundly local organizations, arising in response to specific conditions in particular locations,” and tend to be independent from larger institutional affiliations.18 On one hand, this gives them the potential to be more directly accountable and responsive to their members. On the other, it means they are typically underfunded, understaffed, and undernetworked and often constrained by the funds and programming priorities of private foundations.19 Ten years ago only a small portion of workers’ centers belonged to formal networks encouraging the sharing of knowledge and resources, though Héctor Cordero-Guzmán and colleagues suggest the number may be growing.20 The Mississippi Poultry Workers’ Center joined the Interfaith Worker Justice workers’ center network when the latter was established, which aided the center in securing financial and human resources, opened spaces for sharing best practices with other centers, and served as an institutional anchor during periods of organizational restructuring.

While most workers’ centers recognize the importance of identity, scaffolding their work explicitly on members’ ethnic, racial, gender, and linguistic solidarities, they also often focus their efforts on a particular industrial sector.21 They have grown especially in industries historically overlooked by unions, such as restaurant work, domestic work, and day labor, and in locations where workers have grown frustrated with their unions and are looking for alternatives.22 Fewer work in close collaboration with unions, and some even arose through explicit critique of existing union efforts.

Despite, or perhaps in response to this criticism, as the workers’ center movement was building, the more traditional labor movement was also realizing the need to expand its base to better incorporate a growing immigrant workforce. In this climate, while some workers’ centers emerged where unions had failed or in industries that unions had largely ignored, others were founded in partnership with organized labor.23 In Mississippi, due to its genesis in dialogue with unions (along with other actors), as well as its focus on an industry with an established—if beleaguered—history of union presence, the workers’ center set out to collaborate with existing unions to multiply the labor movement’s potential for growing poultry worker power.

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