"How can movement actors navigate the tensions between allyship, representation, and power while striving for transformative change? This question serves as the cornerstone of Worker Centered, which provides an ethnographic study of a worker center campaign run at a primarily low-wage, immigrant workplace. Alongside an innovative strategic model, the organization drew on deeply held commitments to the leadership of workers. These values lie at the root of the conflict the book explores, where a group of labor allies-activists and staffers who have devoted their lives to the importance of worker leadership-run a campaign that is decidedly not led by workers and yet is continually framed as such. In following the campaign from an insider perspective, Worker Centered explores the complexities of member-led movement work and illustrates the challenges that the staff faced in their work-both internal tensions of strategy and analysis as well as external hurdles of employer resistance and the strength of pro-employer narratives among workers. Though using an approach grounded in strategic thinking about power based in their political values of worker leadership, the campaign staff ultimately failed to reach its goals. The question is why. The answer is not about a lack of commitment among staffers and allies nor about a fervent counter campaign. Instead, we will see a much more ambiguous story, one characterized by an ambitious strategy with limited capacity and a workforce with only, at best, muted enthusiasmfor the campaign. In this context we will see how the narrative of worker leadership continually defined how staff and allies made sense of the campaign and acted in its name. In following the tenacious work of staff and allies to win the campaign, this book emphasizes the transformative nature of movement work, where our aim is not to unveil some natural predisposition to collective action or justice but to fundamentally alter how someone sees the world and acts within it. This story takes us inside a unique case of movement work to offer insights about allyship, power, and representation in the fight for a more just world"--
Progressive political organizing faces a chicken-and-egg predicament. On the one hand, those who are most impacted by a circumstance should be the ones identifying problems and developing solutions. On the other hand, simply being a worker does not make one a unionist or anti-capitalist. When activists are moved to address the perceived injustices that other groups experience, they can get caught in a strong tension between their professed ethic of bottom-up leadership and their desire to change the status quo.
Worker Centered is a close-to-the-ground, ethnographic narrative of a workplace organizing campaign at a company whose workforce was primarily low wage and immigrant. The book details the overall strategy of the campaign and its ultimate failure to win its core demands. The organization used an innovative strategic model and insisted on the importance of worker leadership. And yet allies and staff participated in a campaign that, although continually framed as such, was decidedly not led by workers. In crucial ways, the mere idea of a worker-led union acted as the interpretive frame that stitched the entire enterprise together. Ultimately, Worker Centered challenges conventional notions of political representation, inviting reflection on the complexities of organizing the marginalized and speaking on their behalf.
Worker Centered is a close-to-the-ground, ethnographic narrative of a workplace organizing campaign at a company whose workforce was primarily low wage and immigrant. The book details the overall strategy of the campaign and its ultimate failure to win its core demands. The organization used an innovative strategic model and insisted on the importance of worker leadership. And yet allies and staff participated in a campaign that, although continually framed as such, was decidedly not led by workers. Ultimately, Worker Centered challenges conventional notions of political representation, inviting reflection on the complexities of organizing the marginalized and speaking on their behalf.
