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Poor Workers' Unions | Excerpt
Organizing in the Margins
San Francisco, 1964: Fifteen hundred civil rights activists clog the elegant lobby of the Sheraton Palace Hotel around the clock, picketing by day and sleeping on the floor by night. The ritzy hotel hires few workers of color, and those who are on payroll work at the “back of the house” as maids and janitors. This multiracial group of protesters, most in their early 20s, has amassed to confront employment discrimination using militant tactics of civil disobedience learned in the civil rights movement. In just two days, protesters emerge victorious with an agreement for fair hiring at the Sheraton and 33 other hotels. Other industry-wide hiring agreements follow, as civil rights organizations become de facto bargaining agents for job access and equity for communities of color.
Detroit, 1980: Amid deteriorating buildings and trash-strewn streets, a picket line of teenagers, mostly African American, marches. The target is a Burger King fast food outlet in the Greyhound bus station. Holding signs that read, “Union rights are human rights,” they chant, “No more threats, no more lies, we want the right to organize.” Although many are still in high school, they know that low-skilled service work might be their only legal option in the fast-declining, inner city, industrial economy. Despite a high level of unionization in the city’s auto plants, a wave of plant closings has already thrown many of their family members out of work, and those who remain are faced with diminished job protections. Recognizing the need to fight for their own future, these teenagers organize the independent Detroit Fast Food Workers’ Union at two of the largest corporations in the United States—McDonald’s and Burger King—with the help of antipoverty activists turned union organizers.
Long Island, New York, 1997: A group of Latino day laborers treks to the state capitol in Albany and convinces legislators to support the Unpaid Wages Prohibition Act, which they drafted themselves. Day laborers perform “casual” work, such as landscaping, construction, and housecleaning, getting paid by the day with no job security and few legal protections. The act dramatically increases penalties against employers who intentionally violate wage and hour laws by paying day laborers poverty wages or forcing them to work overtime without compensation. Though most of the day laborers do not speak English and are undocumented immigrants with no right to vote, they convince several conservative Republican senators to sponsor the bill. They are members of the Workplace Project, a workers’ center that supports them in their battle for fairer employment.
These scenes of independent labor organizing among poor workers show a side of the labor movement we rarely see. Rooted in struggles for racial, ethnic, and gender justice, and existing largely outside the gates of conventional trade unions, poor workers’ unions offer a different vision of what the labor movement can be: activist based, inventive, adventurous, and infused with ideals of social justice and equality. Taking different forms—economic justice organizing, community-based unions and workers’ centers, and workfare unions—this movement is committed to racial and ethnic diversity, gender equality, participatory democracy, and community-based organizing strategies.
Although it emerged as early as the 1930s, poor workers’ unionism started to take on its present shape in the movements of the ’60s, spread nationally in the ’70s and ’80s, and by the end of the century had led to successful union organizing campaigns among tens of thousands of poor workers. Faced with the disinterest of most AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations) trade unions in organizing low-wage workers in the ’60s and early ’70s, as well as with entrenched racism, sexism, and bureaucracy in existing unions, poor people invented their own organizations and pushed ahead with campaigns on a broad range of workers’ issues. Organizing experiments emerging from that era’s social movements included civil rights–based job campaigns, domestic workers’ unions, feminist labor groups, and welfare rights organizations. By the late ’70s, community-based workers’ centers had taken up the fight for economic justice, an organizing concept that spread rapidly to cities across the nation over the next two and a half decades. Community organizing, also booming during that period, became another vehicle for poor workers’ activism on a host of economic justice questions. Just like trade unions, these independent community-based groups won pay raises, improved conditions, and secured dignity for their members.
People of color and women constitute most of both the membership and leadership of these poor workers’ unions, which became the voice for a wide variety of workers—including low-wage service sector employees (such as food service and home health care workers) and those with multiple places of employment (such as day laborers and domestic workers). Even “no-wage” workers, such as those receiving welfare benefits in exchange for work, have organized for their rights. From members of civil rights–era “freedom unions” who struck over poverty wages to contemporary immigrant day laborers who organize for better conditions, the struggle has been for dignity, social equality, and a living wage. Working independently of AFL-CIO trade unions, as part of a larger labor movement fighting for workers’ rights and social justice, poor workers’ unions illustrate a way of organizing that values the direct action, flexibility, collaboration, and rank-and-file control common in social justice movements over the bureaucratic and legalistic methods on which traditional unions have often relied. While smaller in scale than traditional trade unions, they stand out because of their unusual approaches to organizing and their commitment to workers’ empowerment—valuable lessons for today’s labor movement, as it struggles to survive in the face of shifting economic sands.
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