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

Abstract

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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