What is a Worker Center?

Worker Centers are the product of prolonged struggle in this country: of working people to protect their rights and secure their earnings. Worker Centers are often founded to support particularly marginalized and exploited workers, who haven’t been able to easily tap into union structures.(1) Unionizing workplaces is a foundation of the labor movement, but is extremely challenging for workers in certain industries (like gig workers, day laborers, restaurant workers), as well as workers with other kinds of social marginalization, like immigrant workers.(2) Worker centers allow workers in all sectors to have a place in the labor movement, regardless of whether their workplace is unionized.

Worker Centers are critical to a labor movement that represents all workers: and they’re growing. In 1990 there were only 10 worker centers across the country, but by 2015 there were almost 250.(3) Worker centers provide some amount of education around workers’ rights (also offer translation services, or referrals for legal services in cases of labor violations), advocacy, and organizing to protect those rights. Because of their focus on increasing access for more vulnerable workers, worker centers also tend to partner with other kinds of community organizations beyond the labor movement, allowing for coordination and coalitional work.

With new attacks on worker rights, Worker Centers can play a critical role in strategizing, coordinating action, and building power for all workers.

  1. Jenkins, Steve. “Organizing, Advocacy, and Member Power”. WorkingUSA, 6: 56-89, 2004. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1743-4580.2002.00003.x-i1.

  2. Fine, Janice. “Why Labor Needs a Plan B: Alternatives to Conventional Trade Unionism.” New Labor Forum, vol. 16, no. 2, 2007, pp. 34–44. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40342930.

  3. Bobo, Kim, and Marien Casillas Pabellon. The Worker Center Handbook : A Practical Guide to Starting and Building the New Labor Movement. 1st ed., Cornell University Press, 2016. https://ecommons.cornell.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/58987687-a9bb-4aae-917c-5c8b0b3d6a90/content.