The Hot and Crusty Workers: An Image From the Future of Labor

For today’s minimum wage workers, the material conditions of life are similar to the conditions of the working class in the early 20th century. Hours are long, workers underpaid, and there's little benefits. Because of low pay and a standing reserve of unemployed workers in the market, there’s generally little leverage for low-paid workers. Organizing necessarily entails the threat of intimidation and downright termination. All in all, for the country’s lowest paid and often hardest working workers, there is little hope. 

Or is there? Late last week in an unprecedented victory, the workers at the 63rd street location of Hot and Crusty in New York voted to certify an independent union. The victory came after an extensive campaign, following an even longer period which included extensive labor violations:

A 4 month-long public campaign to bring attention to injustices in the workplace . . . [including] widespread labor violations spanning 6 years, including overtime and minimum wage violations, non-compliance with health and safety codes, and sexual harassment and verbal abuse of female employees . . . [The campaign] began after [the workers approached] . . . grassroots community organization Laundry Workers Center United to assist them in their efforts ("Workers Win Election").

An important note to make in the effort was the role of the Laundry Workers' Center. The rise of independent worker and advocacy associations with strong support from community organizations is an increasingly successful model of organizing. Some big examples of this include the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, and now the Laundry Workers Center; all of these organizations have achieved significant victories. These independent associations are able to act as a resource station for worker attempts to organize a campaign against a workplace, or even in an entire industry.

In the case of the Hot and Crusty workers, the Laundry Workers Center could serve a collection of purposes, such as resource collection from the community, outreach, and interacting with the media about issues affecting the campaign. All of these are a necessary aspect of organizing, but are difficult to accomplish in the transitory state preceding a union vote. Concurrently, a third party organization can externalize many of the risks of organizing away from workers by acting as representation for their efforts and thereby allowing the anonymity of certain employees to remain intact. 

This organizing strategy is an image from the future of labor. Even Joe Burns, in the popular labor-based book Reviving the Strike: How Working People Can Regain Power and Transform America, argues for the widespread erection of independent worker organizations. This growing form of labor organizing may hold the key for the millions of workers who lack representation and are re-living the severe working conditions that workers dealt with a century ago. 

Interestingly, in the increase of independent workers associations and workers’ centers, one might see the spectres of industrial unionism reemerging. That is to say, industrial unionism tends to be built around the essential belief that workers should organize not in specific trades or specific workplaces, but across  different industries and even communities. In other words, both industrial unionism and workers' centers are similar in that both strategies draw from all available infrastructure; instead of having an isolated workforce trying to organize a single local, workers can organize first in associations that are isolated away from the territory of the employer. Interesting, indeed, especially because the last time industrial unionism and its methodology was as relevant as it may soon become was in the early 1900s, the last time economic inequality was as severe as it is now. 

But that's just food for thought, of course.

Tyler Crawford, 2012

Source

Eidelson, John. “American Workers: Shackled to Labor Law.” www.inthesetimes.com 23 May. 28 May. 2012. <http://inthesetimes.com/article/13181/american_workers_shackled_to_labor_law/>

Sunkara, Bhaskar. “Can Labor Strike Back?” www.inthesetimes.com 10 May. 28 May 2012. <http://inthesetimes.com/article/13194/can_labor_strike_back1/>

Workers Win Historic Election. Press Release. 25 May. 2012. 28 May. 2012. <http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002725003>