Social Movements, Stakeholders and Non-Market Strategy by Briscoe Forrest;King Brayden;Leitzinger Jocelyn;

Author:Briscoe, Forrest;King, Brayden;Leitzinger, Jocelyn;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
Published: 2018-07-13T00:00:00+00:00

Mobilizing Cultures: Emphasis on Popular Education and Their Social and Political Rights

In the early 20th century, the first labor colleges were formed with a strong left-wing, political orientation and with the aim of building a working-class consciousness among the workers. Because of their political agenda, they were regarded as too radical by the AFL leadership and after World War II these educational programs focused much more on union-specific issues rather than broader politics. While during the 1970s and 1980s there was a continual decline in workers’ education, at the same time, antiwar, civil rights, and women’s rights activists entered the labor movement, many whom had experiences with popular education in Latin America. Since the 1990s, there have been various initiatives in workers’ education with some unions considering education as a service to members, while others using it as a strategic lever to build the future of a movement (Tarlau, 2011).

The CLEAN carwash campaign is not only important as an innovative model for organizing labor but also because it incorporates the worker centers’ emphasis on immigrant workers’ social and political necessities. While organizing to achieve economic rights, carwash workers claim rights as immigrant workers, and in doing so challenge various forms of exploitation (Roca-Servat, 2011, p. 2). There are many ways this campaign mobilizes cultural elements to produce solidarity and spur collective action.

One of such elements are discursive frames of action stemming from the immigrant rights movement. The carwash worker movement acts as a site of resistance to cultural and social constructions of social and political inequalities. Inside the social inequality spectrum, carwash workers challenge racial, gender, as well as class oppression. With general slogans like “Join the movement for racial equity and social justice in Los Angeles” and more specific ones like “Equal pay for all” and “Stop employment discrimination” carwash workers draw connections between racism, sexism, and classicism. On the side of political inequality, with messages like “No one is illegal! Amnesty Now!,” “International Workers say 2 million too many. Stop the deportations,” and “Workers coming out of the shadows. Sin Papeles, Sin Miedo,” they confront the political membership status defined by national citizenship. One key difference was thus the adoption of a social justice discursive framing to mobilize the carwash workers rather than focusing solely on economic justice (Roca-Servat, 2011, p. 12).

Another cultural dimension of the campaign has to do with its emphasis on popular pedagogy (Freire, 1970). As such, they worked around the idea of forming community leaders and liberating the “oppressed.” Oppression was understood in a holistic sense to include cultural, social, and political oppression in addition to economic oppression (Roca-Servat, 2011, p. 12). With the help of the Instituto de Educacion Popular del Sur de California (IDEPSCA), campaign organizers used popular education methods to empower immigrant day laborers. In this regard, the use of and emphasis on critical pedagogy as an organizing tool clearly differed from a traditional union organizing campaign.

A broader understanding of oppression opened the discursive framing under which the struggle of carwash workers was constructed.

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