Worker Centers

Worker centers are community-based mediating institutions that provide support to communities of largely immigrant low-wage workers. Centers pursue their missions through a combination of approaches:

• Service delivery, including legal representation to recover unpaid wages, English classes, worker rights education, and matchmaking—introducing workers to services available through other agencies such as health care, housing, and immigration assistance
• Advocacy, including researching and releasing exposés about conditions in low-wage industries, lobbying for new laws and changes in existing ones, working with government agencies to improve labor standards enforcement and complaint processes, and bringing suits against employers
• Organizing, building ongoing organizations, and engaging in leadership development among workers to take action on their own behalf for economic and political change

In 1992, there were five worker centers nationwide, by 2003 there were 137, and there are estimated to be between 160 and 200 worker centers in the United States today. Centers organize among a broad range of occupations, including day laborers, temporary agency workers, taxi drivers, and domestic, construction, hotel, landscaping, janitorial, manufacturing, meatpacking, and restaurant workers.

Often, workers come into a center because they live or work in the center's geographic area of focus, not because they work in a specific industry or occupation. Although they often target particular employers as well as industries within local labor markets, most worker centers are not worksite based. Most centers have not focused on organizing through conventional union models or with the goal of achieving collective bargaining agreements, in part because some workers are excluded from coverage under the National Labor Relations Act, dominant models do not lend themselves to organizing in small workplaces, and employer opposition has made union drives prohibitively expensive in many cases.