Despite a booming U.S. economy and historically low unemployment, the exploitation and abuse of workers remains rampant in low-wage industries where unionization is difficult and regulation is lax.
Consider the problem of wage theft. Although 30 states have raised their minimum wages above the federal rate of $7.25, increasing pay for millions of workers, roughly 5 million workers are nevertheless paid below their state’s minimum wage each year. On average, these wage theft victims lose 20% of their income, causing many to fall under the poverty line.
Though illegal, racial discrimination in hiring persists as well, reducing many low-wage workers’ job opportunities. Instances of sexual harassment and gender-based violence continue to occur at intolerable rates.
Unsafe and unhealthy working conditions are also pervasive in low-wage sectors; in 2022 a worker died from a work-related injury every 96 minutes.
Unionized workers are significantly less likely to suffer these forms of exploitation at work. Labor unions play a key role in helping workers to understand their rights against unfair, unsafe, and illegal practices by employers. Unions also empower workers to take action together when those rights are violated.
But despite strong public support for labor unions, antiquated rules and procedures governing unionization and vigorous “union avoidance” campaigns by employers make it exceedingly difficult for most workers to unionize. In 2023, only 4% of low-wage, private-sector workers were members of unions.
Nonunionized low-wage workers and their advocates, however, have not sat idly by as the conditions of work have declined. As I describe in my new book, Alt-Labor and the New Politics of Workers’ Rights, many have formed “alt-labor” groups (non-union, non-profit worker justice organizations) to organize and support primarily low-wage immigrant workers and workers of color in their fight for their rights.
Photo from the Russell Sage Foundation.
These groups have grown fast -- from only a handful in the 1990s to well over 250 today. They include a heterogeneous array of groups: community-based worker centers like Workers Defense Project in Texas; regional groups like Raise the Floor Alliance in Chicago; national networks like the National Domestic Workers Alliance; social welfare organizations like LUCHA in Arizona; and amalgams like Somos Un Pueblo Unido in New Mexico and Make the Road New York.
Traditionally, these groups have focused primarily on service provision, community organizing, and helping workers to contest their exploitation in the workplace. But as alt-labor groups have grown frustrated by the limited reach and impact of their traditional strategies, many have looked for new ways to help their members. Increasingly, they have turned to public policy and political engagement. A growing number of groups now undertake concerted efforts to shape the agenda, influence policy outcomes, build civic power, and hold elected officials accountable.
On the policy front, alt-labor groups have played prominent roles in state and local campaigns to raise the minimum wage, enact paid sick leave, and create “fair workweek” laws. They have also helped to enact dozens of laws to combat wage theft, improve workplace health and safety rules, fight discrimination, deter retaliation, ensure whistleblower protections, create a right to rest breaks, and establish local labor standards enforcement agencies. Alt-labor groups also led campaigns on behalf of ground-breaking Domestic Workers’ Bills of Rights and Temp Workers’ Bills of Rights laws. They have also fought for myriad policies to defend immigrants’ rights and pursue racial justice.
These laws are far from perfect – they offer only the most minimal standards, feature severe inequalities of access, and often lack vigorous enforcement. But for workers who are either excluded from the organizing and collective bargaining rights afforded to most workers under the National Labor Relations Act (like farmworkers, domestic workers, and gig workers) or who find it exceedingly difficult to unionize given the structure of their industry and workplace (such as restaurant workers and temp workers), these laws represent an important step forward in the fight for workers’ rights while demonstrating the possibilities of collective action.
Photo from Pixabay.
These policy successes also raise a puzzle. Given how small, under-resourced, and over-burdened most alt-labor groups are, how have these organizations managed to punch above their weight?
In my book, I describe how alt-labor groups are building sources of power they can draw upon to intervene in and shape policymaking and political processes.
Community-based worker centers, for example, have long focused on deep (“transformational”) organizing. They seek to build individual-level power (power within) by helping their members reject oppressive structures and expressions of power, develop their own sense of agency and political capacity, acquire leadership skills, build community and collective consciousness among low-wage workers, and formulate issue agendas that link workers’ experiences of exploitation and oppression to a positive program of action.
Alt-labor groups are also building group-level power (power with) by leveraging their unique position in the labor movement and in the broader ecosystem of progressive groups to forge coalitions with other groups and expand the scope of the conflict beyond their local community and its confines.
Many groups are developing new organizational capacities to expand their reach and magnify their influence (building power to). They are experimenting with new forms including regional and national networks of base-building organizations, online-to-offline models of engagement, and 501(c)(4) “social welfare” groups that facilitate deeper engagement in electoral politics.
Through deep organizing, coalition-building, and organizational innovation, these locally rooted groups are compensating for their weaknesses by augmenting and leveraging their strengths. By tapping into, developing, and harnessing these strengths, alt-labor groups are building sources of power they can draw upon to ratchet up their political engagement.
Although each group prioritizes different activities depending on its political environment, proximate goals, and level of resources, some general patterns can be observed among the groups that have become more politically engaged.
In addition to their turn toward public policy (both to pass new policies and to ensure the enforcement of existing policies), I find that a growing number of groups are working to alter the contours of their political environments.
Fastidious about staying well within the legal restrictions on nonprofit political activities, even 501(c)(3) alt-labor groups have found that they can still undertake a wide range of permissible civic engagement activities that can alter political dynamics in their localities. These groups endeavor to change politics by cultivating more active and engaged citizenries, altering policymakers’ incentives, and creating conditions conducive to further policy changes—all efforts aimed at incrementally shifting the balance of power and giving low-wage workers greater influence over the decisions that shape their lives.
Although institutionalized racism, xenophobia, and sexism have made collective action more difficult – and while race-class subjugated communities are sites of oppression -- shared experiences of discrimination and exploitation in the workplace have been instrumental in helping low-wage workers build solidarity. By providing spaces for workers to come together, foster community, formulate collective agendas, and leverage their distinctive organizational strengths, alt-labor groups are bridging racial and ethnic divisions and mobilizing diverse communities in collective action.
In the predominant scholarly view, the concentration of disadvantage in race-class subjugated communities leaves minoritized groups geographically isolated and politically disempowered. But as several scholars have recently argued, by emphasizing the multiple sources of disadvantage that affect these communities, scholars have overlooked the democratic possibilities of such communities and obscured the ways in which their members can be “resourceful, creative, and deliberate political actors.” The efforts of alt-labor groups support this more hopeful take, demonstrating several “wellsprings of political agency, resistance, and solidarity that emerge in response” to workers’ marginalization—even in an otherwise inhospitable American political economy.
Photo from Pixabay.
That said, alt-labor groups face serious questions about the long-term viability of their organizational model and their evolving role in the politics of workers’ rights. In particular, their size and resource challenges have become mutually reinforcing. Due to their small, poor membership base, the groups have turned to philanthropic foundations for organizational sustenance, which has reduced the pressure to build a mass base from which to collect dues and trapped the groups in a vicious cycle of external financial dependence. Their heavy reliance on philanthropic funding is both inherently precarious and it raises questions of accountability and responsiveness (to members versus funders).
Further, alt-labor’s theory of change rests on their ability to build “people power,” but resource-intensive organizing – for base-building as well as engagement in policy and politics – faces inherent problems of scale. And by increasingly embracing the role of political intermediary, alt-labor groups raise questions of both legitimacy and capacity.
As they have grown and changed, alt-labor groups have created new complications and tensions that have not yet been resolved. This complexity defines the new politics of workers’ rights.
Looking Ahead
One of the primary objectives of alt-labor groups is simply to persevere and grow. Their goal is not to win every battle—it is to stay in the fight.
Part of this determination stems from the groups’ recognition that their future prospects are likely to hinge on events that are almost entirely outside their control. They are, to a significant degree, dependent on variable external forces—be they structural changes in the economy, technological advances that shape the nature of low-wage work, shifts in the philanthropic landscape, changes in the rules governing nonprofits, or significant labor law reform (which could alter alt-labor’s raison d’être). Alt-labor groups exist in relation to these variables.
That is why so many groups emphasize perseverance: they have internalized the instability of the broader environment in which they exist and recognize the critical importance of their own organizational resilience to sustaining the broader movement of which they are a part.
Perseverance is also necessitated by the ephemeral and dynamic nature of power, which as Marcela Diaz of Somos Un Pueblo Unido explains, requires continuous attention to the ebb and flow of power relations:
The number-one job of the organizer is to help our members, in any given moment, assess our power at that moment. That’s it. Because it changes every day, depending on a whole host of issues that sometimes has nothing to do with us…The goal is to continue to build as much power as we can—and it’s going to look different at different moments—so that we can continue to be able to alter the relations of power and be able to change things fundamentally over time, knowing that that’s a never-ending job, and also knowing that we can pass these really great policies that we worked hard for—and they can disappear!—if we don’t actually have the power to sustain them.
Of course, what works in one context may not work in another. Organizing and power-building are inherently local processes, and different groups have different capacities and face different challenges. Many open questions remain. How ought differently situated groups build strategic capacity? How do the micro-dynamics of power-building differ in different contexts? Are certain decision-making processes more effective than others in helping groups resolve their membership/funding dilemma?
How economically and racially marginalized workers can best develop political capacities in oppressive settings remains an urgent question, both for those who wish to replicate the successes of others and for the prospect of democratic renewal more broadly.
Alt-Labor and the New Politics of Workers’ Rights is available for purchase via the Russell Sage Foundation.
