Harvest of Empire: Immigrant Workers' Struggles in the USA

Abstract

Worker centers differ from other community-based organizations in that they focus mainly, though not exclusively, on workplace issues. The worker center phenomenon in the United States grows out of many of the changes in work itself that have taken place in the last thirty or so years. Subcontracting, sweatshops, the fast-expanding food service and hospitality industries, relocated/de-unionized industries, new retailers giant and small, and the growth of 'off-the-books' work in the informal economy. All of these sources of employment have in common low wages, poor benefits, and workers of colour. Increasingly the latter are also immigrants. By 2005 there were by one count 137 workers centers, 122 of which dealt specifically with immigrant workers. In terms of the regions of origin of those immigrant workers who participate in worker centers about 40 per cent come from Mexico and Central America, another 18 per cent from South America, 15 per cent each from East Asia and the Caribbean, 8 per cent from Africa, 3 per cent from Europe, and 1 per cent from the rest of Asia. it is important that the worker centers be understood in the context of a broader labour movement of which they are one piece. Like unions trying new ways to organize and still not making huge breakthroughs, they need to be seen for their potential as much as for their current achievements and limitations. They are a potential training ground for groups of workers who are finding their own leaders and voicing their own demands and concerns. One measure of their potential is their survival rate as organizations. In a political atmosphere where most of the mass social movements have faded, unions have lost members and power, and politics has largely been unfavourable to working-class people in general and immigrants in particular, even the oldest of the worker centers have survived and thrived, while new ones have arisen to challenge this atmosphere.