In this article, we examine strategic approaches by the Restaurant Opportunities Center and the Fight for 15 campaign to organizing low-wage workers in the US restaurant industry. Existing industrial relations literature explains that traditional trade unions have had little success in organizing these workers – a growing number of whom identify as racial minorities, women, and immigrant workers – due in part to structural challenges to unionization. However, despite existing institutional and legal obstacles, in recent years two ‘supra-union’ cases of low-wage worker organizing have spread across the nation, resulting in unanticipated economic, legal, and political gains for this diverse group of workers. To better understand the recent success of these alternative forms of worker organizing, we bring the literature on intersectionality, under-utilized in the examination of labor movement organizing, into the industrial relations context. We argue that the Restaurant Opportunities Center and Fight for 15 campaign’s success is due in part to strategic approaches to organizing that have intentionally focused on workers’ interests not solely as a class, but as workers holding multiple identities in an increasingly diverse workforce. More broadly, this article has implications for the future of worker representation and cross-movement solidarity building in the United States.
Despite the salience of racism and other “isms” woven into the fabric of US society, there is a dearth of industrial relations (IR) scholarship that engages critical race and intersectional theory (CRT/I) to deeply understand how structural racism and other social identity-based systems of oppression govern labor and employment systems. The authors call for the incorporation of CRT/I into IR to address the erasure of vital counter-narratives and to expand our empirical cases for labor and employment research. Focusing on leading scholarship on worker organizing, the authors confront white dominance in our research questions, methodologies, and analyses to illustrate how traditional “color-blind” and meritocracy-based IR theories lead to the exclusion of relevant knowledge. In an era of heightened public discourse and worker uprisings in response to deep-rooted systemic inequities, critical industrial relations research is vital to the field’s relevance and its expertise in explaining the nature and consequences of contemporary labor contestations and their impact on the future of the labor movement.
IR scholars reference intersectionality in relation to organizing, but the field lacks a theoretical construct. Based on 2 years of intimate data access, we examine the 2017 U.S. Women's March as a critical case of “intersectional organizing.” We ground this empirical case study in Critical Race and Intersectionality Theory to show how the intersectional organizing model employed by the Women's March handles identity‐based fragmentation, with lessons for building a more inclusive labor movement.
The 2011-2013 assault on public sector collective bargaining rights is unprecedented in its breadth and depth. Legislative proposals that would roll back bargaining, limit unions' ability to negotiate security arrangements, stop payroll deduction of union dues, and constrain labor's political activity have been introduced in a majority of states. This coordinated attack from the Republican right has spurred an aggressive, unified response from a broad cross section of unions. Through labor unity tables at the national and state levels, unions are demonstrating a rare level of solidarity in the fight back. This ongoing experiment in movement building is encouraging, but challenges remain.
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