Worker centers are non-profit community-based mediating organizations that organize and provide support to communities of low wage workers who are not already members of a collective bargaining organization (such as a trade union) or have been legally excluded from coverage by U.S. labor laws. Many worker centers in the United States focus on immigrant and low-wage workers in sectors such as restaurant, construction, day labor and agriculture.
Purpose
Worker centers are non-profit institutions based in the community and led by their worker-members, which deliver support to low earning workers. In order to best assist in improving working conditions and necessary wages, many centers include services such as English language instruction, help with unpaid wage claims, access to health care, leadership development, educational activities, advocacy and organization. Many centers also take the role as defender of rights for immigrants in their communities.
Effects
Day Laborer Worker Centers—Worker centers support employment of day laborers in three primary ways. First, they provide a minimum wage rate. Second, they supply a distribution process for job opportunities, and third, they maintain wage standards through their support to workers victimized through wage withholding from employers.
Other Worker Centers—Worker centers that are not specific to a type of worker such as a day laborer can perform support their worker members in a wide variety of ways. Many centers offer workers rights & immigrant rights trainings. They will also address specific workplace grievances of their worker members and use the legal system, community pressure and workplace organizing to change conditions.
Origins of worker centers
According to Janice Fine's study, worker centers developed in three stages.
The first worker centers emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s, founded by black worker activists in North Carolina and South Carolina, immigrant activists in New York City’s Chinatown, the Texas–Mexico Border in El Paso, in San Francisco among Chinese immigrants. They grew out of a response to neoliberal policies that resulted in declining working conditions in manufacturing, factory closings and an increase in low wage service sector jobs. Worker centers were also created in reaction to “disparities of pay and treatment between African American and white workers as well as exploitation within ethnic economic enclaves and in the broader economic (including informal sector) were also major catalysts”.
From the late 1980s to early 1990s, the second wave of worker centers appeared as large groups of new Latino immigrants, some fleeing civil wars in Central America, arrived in suburban and urban regions, as well as Southeast Asians immigrants, all searching for economic opportunities. These worker centers were established by numerous individuals and institutions such as "churches and other faith-based organizations, social service and legal aid agencies, immigrant nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and unions."
The last wave of worker centers began in 2000 to the present. Many worker centers are expanding not only in the city, but into the suburbs, rural regions, and southern states where there is a large concentration of Mexican and Central immigrants working in the poultry, service, agriculture, and meat-packing sectors. Not only that, more worker centers are emerging among Korean, Filipino, South Asian and African immigrants, and they have a higher connection to faith-based organizations and unions.
Features of worker centers
What is unique about worker centers, and makes them unlike unions, is that they operate outside of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and therefore do not have to have a specific organizational model, strategy or structure. They emerge as “community-based mediating institutions that provide support to and organize among communities of low wage workers”. As such, they use diverse strategies, tactics and approaches to serve the needs of their individual communities.
Worker's centers are not considered labor organizations, and therefore are not restricted by the same laws under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and Labor Management and Reporting Disclosure acts that govern traditional unions. The NLRA restricts primary picketing activity, bans any type of secondary activity, including pickets or boycotts, of business connected to the primary target. Worker centers, on the other hand, are allowed to picket businesses, can participate in secondary boycotts and interact with press in a way that makes them uniquely threatening to business interests.