In the meantime, we struggle with seemingly mundane questions like what constitutes evidence in a wage and hour complaint or in a grievance, what is and isn’t just cause for discipline at work, and how do you know if piece rate pay is being done correctly or not. The questions may seem tedious, but the answers to them can make qualitative differences in worker’s lives. And from how these questions are understood and dealt with come more questions about how workers organize and fight for our rights and what form these fights take and where they might lead. Our challenge is to politicize what seems mundane. The strongest and most experienced advocates for co-partnering between unions and union-supportive organizations fighting for workers’ rights at the conference put forward a few case studies and preliminary responses to how these types of questions can be taken up. Most of these were success stories of one kind or another. All of them raised many questions in my mind.
The Pilipino Workers Center in Los Angeles is engaged in organizing some homecare workers and using legal enforcement mechanisms and co-enforcement and partnerships with other organizations to win gains with these workers. Their work was described as an attempt to “build a whole new kind of brain trust” and it sounded to me as if they are a kind of hybrid non-profit and union. Here in Oregon, we have Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (PCUN) doing a service center that refers workers to the Northwest Workers Justice Project (NWJP) and state agencies. The NWJP has also partnered with the Carpenters union and BOLI and other state agencies to pursue claims against carpentry contractors working in the underground economy and this work has been particularly successful. The Carpenters union, PCUN, NWJP and the state agencies that are working together deal with language barriers, worker’s fears of retaliation and deportation, and worker pessimism as well as weak laws and employer opposition.
There are hopes that cooperation will develop between the worker organizations, more state agencies, and federal agencies and that targeted enforcement and an inter-agency task force model will develop. There are also hopes that penalties against bad employers will be increased, that enforcement will go deeper and be more effective, and that employers will be forced to pay for trainings by worker advocates that will then lead to deeper labor organizing. Some portion of public funds dedicated to infrastructure could be used to facilitate these changes, and local, state, and federal bodies should not be contracting with companies and their contractors who violate labor laws. These violators should lose their business licenses and registrations and should be shut down. Companies should be held responsible for the behavior of the contractors that they do business with.
State’s attorneys general could be given the power to enforce wage and hour law, as is done in Massachusetts, and union representatives could be deputized, as happens in the construction industry in Multnomah County and the Los Angeles school district. Legal cases brought forward by pro-worker non-profits could be expedited. Companies could be forced to disclose all their locations, contractors and sub-contractors and unions and allied organizations could use this information to map and chart industries and carry organizing forward. Wage theft ordinances might be won, and these might contain liability clauses that go up the chain from the sub-contractors to the responsible employer. Protections for reporting violations can be strengthened and reporters can be anonymous and still have their complaints acted upon. Perhaps one of the most radical hopes or proposals is that there be an established presumption that wage claims and other complaints signal a widespread problem in an industry and that these complaints should lead to selective industrial investigations and co-enforcement tactics and strategies.
Opposition to this comes from several quarters. Employers will claim that they should not be targeted for investigation because certain competitors are bad actors. Employers are making California the center of their efforts to oppose partnerships between government agencies, unions, and worker advocacy organizations. Among their strongest allies are city attorneys and local mayors who won’t take on bad employers and who want exceptions made where and when certain violations occur. The employers and certain government agencies also often resist recognizing the non-profit worker organizations with the claim that they need to protect the confidentiality of workers making complaints (there are legal ways around this) or employers may take a demand by a pro-worker non-profit as a legal demand for union recognition and argue for a union election before the National Labor Relations Board knowing that the workers will not vote for a union. There are continuing fights over the rights and protections that should be accessible to whistleblowers.
Small companies and companies owned by employers of color cannot afford the trainings that corporations have access to. Oregon’s safe staffing law (HB 2697) is already being violated and tested by employers. BOLI wants changes in laws, rules and enforcement that will benefit workers while our Department of Justice is resisting that, making our Attorney General a key decider. Some unions agree not to disclose or be publicly critical of employers after violations have been settled, and some unions will protect industries and employers where strong bargaining relationships prevail and where apprenticeship programs, joint trusts, project labor agreements and arbitration boards protect union-employer mutual interests.
There is a push for increasing workers’ rights and there is pushback from those in power and this process is the fabric of class struggle, but in the daily grind of things there are gray areas and moments when there are moments went separate interests coincide and conflict. It was mentioned at the conference that some workplace organizations have shifted to becoming 501(c)(3) organizations, enabling them to accept money from foundations. Perhaps this gives or will give labor-friendly non-profits and unions the same or similar immediate goals but different long-term interests. Few of us in the labor movement doubt that intensive union organizing that reaches millions of workers and wins working-class battles is needed, but there are different levels of commitment to this within labor, disagreements over if and how this can be done, and different visions over what should follow successful organizing campaigns. If unions come to depend more on allied non-profits to do some of the heavy lifting and help build union density, these will have to be membership-based non-profits, and some kinds of understandings about resource- and power-sharing will have to be agreed to. Labor and pro-worker and social movement-based non-profits will have to restructure and reorient themselves if they’re going to partner with one another and with government agencies to guide union organizing and if the emphasis is going to shift from collective bargaining to extending workers’ rights through law.
The changes suggested above, most of which were advocated for by some conference participants, all require changes in how working-class organizations see themselves and how we conceive of and use political power. The state itself---government---will also have to be transformed if it is to be used to build worker power. Something deeper than the New Deal and the historic Protocols of Peace will have to be enacted, but how to do this in ways that build working-class power and provide openings for further political and economic struggles led by workers isn’t clear. Many of the strongest advocates for co-enforcement make their case by referring to the Progressives of the early 20th century and the New Deal, both cited in the first post here discussing co-enforcement, but it should be said that these programs were used in part to manage and deter labor militancy. How do we use co-enforcement to build worker power without worker militancy? Many of the speakers and those attending the conference would probably reject historic Progressivism.
It is difficult to imagine the Democratic Party as presently constituted agreeing to support and committing to win the changes needed to establish workers’ power locally and regionally, and it's impossible to believe that this could be a bipartisan project. Changing laws, making new rules, increasing enforcement of pro-worker laws, and raising up a generation of researchers, activists, inspectors, and enforcement personnel will require having a worker-friendly and anti-austerity political party in power for decades to come and still having a politically independent labor movement.
