Alt-Labor Politics

• In Event: Making Workers’ Rights Real: Labor Policy, Power, and Politics

Abstract

Subnational employment laws have seen dramatic growth over the years, but they are woefully under-enforced, poorly publicized, and feature high barriers to access (Galvin 2019). Many workers are unaware of their rights (Hertel-Fernandez 2020), afraid to complain, lack the resources to litigate, or blocked by mandatory arbitration agreements from having their day in court (Staszak 2015, 2020). Low-road employers, as a result, are often undeterred from exploiting their workers. The most severe consequences of this rights deficit fall along predictable lines: racial minorities, women, low-wage workers, and immigrants—already at higher risk of discrimination—disproportionately suffer wage theft, sexual harassment, unhealthy and unsafe working conditions, uncompensated injuries, and more.

With workers’ rights at a low ebb and private sector labor unions struggling to survive, new forms of worker organization, sometimes called “alt-labor,” have emerged to fill some of the vacuum. As Janice Fine has shown in her pioneering work, worker centers—the organizational core of alt-labor—have grown from only a handful in the 1990s to over 230 today (2005, 2006, 2011, and Fine et al 2018). Building on Fine’s many findings and insights, this study examines alt-labor’s growing use of public policy as an alternate route to advancing workers’ rights. Taking this “policy path,” I argue, has led alt-labor groups to become increasingly political and to develop sophisticated strategies of building power. The purpose of this paper is to document and explain this development and draw out its implications for workers’ rights and the asymmetry of power in the workplace. Among its findings:

-While workers’ rights organizations do hope to achieve certain direct policy effects, that is only one of their objectives; policy campaigns are also viewed as being instrumentally useful for advancing broader movement-building purposes. They serve as rallying points for generating collective action; help to unite in common purpose workers who would otherwise remain separated by industry, workplace, or racially divided; and provide workers with opportunities to have a voice and share their stories, which can be empowering.

-Alt-labor groups strategically select government venues that offer the most favorable political conditions for policy success, but they do not take existing political conditions as given, or view them as fixed. Although they are pragmatic and practice “the art of the possible,” they also take the long view and endeavor to change their political contexts through strategic action and aggressive political mobilization.

-Alt-labor groups face two major challenges in doing this political work. First, most of the groups are small, poor, and weak. Their funding streams are unstable and inadequate, they typically lack a mass membership base, and their workers lack economic/structural power. In short, their ambitions far outstrip their capacities. Second, the field is already occupied by the opposition. Powerful, well-heeled, entrenched business interests have long had great success controlling the agenda, selecting the decision-makers, and defining the poles of the policy debate. Alt-labor thus encounters a political system that is heavily stacked against them.

Their twofold task, therefore, is: (1) to somehow “punch above their weight” and exercise more political influence than their limited resources would seem to allow; and (2) to somehow break through employers’ agenda-setting power and advance an alternative. Which is to say, their task involves both power-building and power-breaking.

-Building power is, of course, a never-ending task: the opposition will adapt, unexpected challenges will arise, and members’ priorities may change. Alt-labor groups thus aim to be nimble, scrappy, and versatile. The paper examines their various power-building efforts in detail.

-Ultimately, alt-labor seeks to raise the floor on employment standards sufficiently to recreate some semblance of a collective bargaining agreement (in this case enforced by the state, inferior though it may be), deter exploitation, and insure that high-quality jobs are created from the start. Some of these efforts have begun to bear fruit.

Alt-labor has found that the imbalance of power in the workplace can only be addressed by moving the conflict out of the shadows of “private government” (Anderson 2017) and into the open, public, political arena – where workers stand a fighting chance of influencing outcomes. If the conflict remains private, small in scale, and quiet, workers will always lose. That is why, Schattschneider writes, “it is the loser who calls for outside help…it is the weak who want to socialize conflict” (1960, 16, 40). Alt-labor has become increasingly political, in other words, by necessity; and in politics, they have discovered an alternative route to building worker power.

Author

• Daniel Galvin, Northwestern University