Reflection Paper #2

Scholars have given considerable attention to the story of the Los Angeles labor movement, focusing in particular on its recent successes in both union organizing and political endeavors. Academics and journalists alike have specifically investigated the ties between unions and low wages, and often but not exclusively, latino immigrant workers and texts have increasingly begun to allude to something of a “Los Angeles model” of worker advocacy. Working for Justice: The L.A. Model of Organizing and Advocacy, edited by Ruth Milkman, Joshua bloom, and Victor Narro, serves both to refine and expand our knowledge of employee representation in Los Angeles through a collection of chapters related to union and worker center led efforts on behalf of low-wage earning individuals. On the one hand, this book offers a nuanced study of specific instances in which unions and advocacy groups have sought to organize low-wage workers, describing the tremendous challenges, successes, and sometimes failures associated with these efforts. On the other hand, the collection takes us beyond the well trodden ground of union advocacy in Los Angeles, introducing readers to the importance of worker centers within the region, the vast majority of which have received very little scholarly attention until now. In so doing, the authors cover tremendously varied terrain while concurrently interweaving numerous threads of commonalities across the campaigns and organizing efforts to create a portrait of the intricate links between union and nonunion worker groups, a picture that most fully emerges in the excellent afterword.
The book is divided into three sections, the first of which introduces the reader to the role played by worker centers in Los Angeles, focusing on the ties between advocacy groups and immi- grants. Many readers may be aware that immigrants are considered a key component of the Los Angeles organizing environment, which is discussed at length in the literature. However, in the first chapters, we are presented with a view of immigrant workers not through the lens of formal representation channels, but rather through the lens of less traditionally entrenched worker centers, with influences from organized labor delicately woven into many of the narratives. These first chapters are particularly interesting for their deep exploration of the complications of class and ethnic tensions as they relate to both workers and those who advocate on their behalf. Jong Bum Kwon, in his work on the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance (KIWA), details the “thin but entangled line between ethnic solidarity and class antagonism” and the challenges the organization has faced in treading this line (p. 31). Kwon does well to highlight KIWA’s struggles to find a place within its own ethnic enclave, a difficulty that might be attributed to the group’s militant and often high profile campaigns, which serve as a marked contrast to the entrepreneurial and relatively conservative ideologies of many of Koreatown’s elites. Nazgol Ghandnoosh’s chapter on the Pilipino Workers’ Center shares some commonalities with the discussion of KIWA, particularly in its analysis of the political and cultural tensions between the organizers and the community at large. The latter chapter distinguishes itself by introducing the notion of ethnic worker centers as legal advocates, and focuses on the rather less confrontational, and in some ways smaller scale, tactics of the PWC (p. 49-51).
Although the book and each of the constituent chapters exhibit numerous strengths, the work as a whole is not without some issues that warrant discussion. In the chapters about KIWA and the PWC, I would like to have seen a comparative element introduced at some stage. In the chapter on PWC, specific reference is made to the organization’s having used KIWA as a blueprint, and in a later chapter we learn that KIWA embraced particular concepts developed by PWC as well. It would be interesting to know the extent to which the strategic facets of low-wage worker organizing might be applied beyond the narrow scope of a single group. Were there practices that worked for KIWA but not PWC, or vice versa? Why might some practices prove successful in certain instances but not in others?
This first criticism leads to a second: although the opening chapter does well to set the stage for the remainder of the narrative, the book as a whole would have benefitted from the introduction and lengthy discussion of an explicit critical framework. I was left wondering whether the authors believe that these organizations have developed best practices that might be applied to worker centers in other regions. The cases presented here would have been strengthened if they were bound within a clear theory regarding the Los Angeles work setting - is the Los Angeles model of worker center and union collaboration exceptional or is there an element of universality to it?
The third criticism is methodological in nature. Though the accounts presented in this book are well crafted and wonderfully detailed, I wonder that they may suffer from a lack of analytical robustness. Though the qualitative approach is appropriate, it becomes an issue when the same individuals are both establishing and corroborating the events described in the text. I would have liked for the authors to attempt some level of triangulation, so that multiple objective sources might have been used to support the narratives presented in each chapter.
In all, the book is extremely relevant and richly detailed to shed new light on the efforts to provide voice for low-wage workers in Los Angeles. The text should be of immense benefit both to scholars interested in aspects of the Los Angeles labor setting not yet discussed in great detail, and to anyone harboring a general level of interest in reading about low-wage employee advocacy.