8. The Garment Worker Center and the “Forever 21” Campaign

Archer, Nicole; González, Ana Luz; Lee, Kimi; Gandhi, Simmi; Herrera, Delia; Milkman, Ruth; Bloom, Joshua; Narro, Victor

doi:10.7591/9780801459054-011

Cited by 2 publications

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“…Nazgol () found that the PWC assisted in unifying U.S. born with foreign‐born Filipinos to launch collective action campaigns over work place grievances and community‐based issues such as low‐cost housing. The GWC has launched several campaigns supporting immigrant garment workers, especially over low pay and health and safety conditions in plants, and forced large clothing retailers into settlements, such as Forever 21 (Archer, Gonzales, Lee, Gandhi, & Herrera, ). Milkman and Terriquez () show how unions in the greater Los Angeles region, such as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), organized immigrant workers and engaged in collective action opposing anti‐immigrant initiatives such as Proposition 187 and HR 4437.…”

Section: Emergencementioning

confidence: 99%

Immigrant rights and social movements

et al. 2018

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The disciplinary fields of immigration and social movements have largely developed as two distinct subareas of sociology. Scholars contend that immigrant rights, compared to other movements, have been given less attention in social movement research. Studies of immigrant-based movements in recent decades have reached a stage whereby we can now assess how immigrant movement scholarship informs the general social movement literature in several areas. In this article, we show the contributions of empirical studies of immigrant movements in four primary arenas of social movement scholarship: (a) emergence; (b) participation; (c) framing; and (d) outcomes. Contemporary immigrant struggles offer social movement scholarship opportunities to incorporate these campaigns and enhance current theories and concepts as earlier protest waves advanced studies of collective action.

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Section: Emergencementioning

confidence: 99%

Immigrant rights and social movements

et al. 2018

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“…For each of the basic actions from which community–labor organizing is built—meetings, workplace campaigns, protest actions, visits with elected officials, media events—migrant civil society organizations help in event organization and in delivering participants (Cordero‐Guzmán et al ., ). They also legitimize the claims of marginal populations in the broader political sphere (Milkman, ), provide targeted political pressure (Archer et al ., ; Goldberg, ) and, more broadly, create a formal politics of immigration and work (Peck and Theodore, )—an essential precondition for advocacy in local political contexts historically focused on neither issue. This orientation towards formal politics itself generates subsequent interorganizational connections and network‐wide momentum, as organizing actions and campaigns place activists and their organizations in touch with ‘other movements, organizations and campaigns, who often become de facto supporters of community–labor reforms' (DeFilippis et al ., ).…”

Section: Migrant Civil Society: Pre‐organizing the Low‐wage Workforcementioning

confidence: 99%

Organizing The Ordinary City: How Labor Reform Strategies Travel to the US Heartland

Doussard

2016

Int J Urban Regional Res

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In New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, formal alliances between labor unions and community organizations have spurred successful workplace and policy organizing cam paigns. As a result, the institutional form of the community-labor coalition is travelling to smaller, less unionized and more politically conservative cities, where the replication of established organizing strategies must contend with political, economic and institutional differences that often go unnoted. Comparing community-labor alliances in Indianapolis, St. Louis and Chicago, this article identifies heretofore unobserved conditions of possibility for successful urban labor organizing in the US. Compared to smaller cities, Chicago and the large urban areas from which ideal practices are abstracted feature higher levels of union membership, significantly more funding of basic social and neighborhood services, and larger immigrant communities. Operating with minimal human services and limited recourse to the social and institutional networks of immigrant workers, labor coalitions in St. Louis and Indianapolis face recurrent barriers to identifying workplace problems, mobilizing lowwage workers and sustaining citywide reform campaigns. This indicates geographical limits to the current organizing model and highlights the limitations of urban scholarship derived from large cities unrepresentative of urbanity as a whole.The minimum wage will soon reach $15 in Los Angeles, Seattle and San Fran cisco. In response to pressure from organizers, onetime labor antagonist Mayor Rahm Emanuel signed legislation empowering the city of Chicago to confiscate the business license of any firm found to deliberately steal pay from workers. And a growing number of cities, once again including San Francisco and Seattle, have passed sicktime and paid leave measures that confer on workers basic rights state and federal law do not. Individually striking, these developments cumulatively signal the unlikely arrival of the municipal scale as a site of reform for the deep workplace inequalities that characterize the US.These political victories rest on the organizing and mobilization efforts of community-labor coalitions--occasionally ad hoc, but increasingly formal alliances between community organizations and local labor unions seeking workplacelevel collective bargaining and public policy reforms favorable to workers. As organizing and policy victories mount in large cities, activists and scholars have begun to codify and formalize community-labor organizing techniques, with lessons learned in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles fueling the diffusion of organizing tactics and repertoires to cities typically left off the map of urban studies. The most recent round of US 'Fight for 15' fast food strikes covered more than 200 cities, with names ranging from Memphis to Columbia and Peoria. Placebased worker centers, which combine service delivery with labor organizing, can currently be found in Brewer, Maine and Marion, North Carolina. The many and varied dissimilarities between t...

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8. The Garment Worker Center and the “Forever 21” Campaign

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Immigrant rights and social movements

Immigrant rights and social movements

Organizing The Ordinary City: How Labor Reform Strategies Travel to the US Heartland

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