Janice Fine

Community Unions and the Revival of the American Labor Movement

Today’s low-wage workforce is mostly ignored by the national political parties and largely untouched by organized labor. Over the last twenty years, “community unions” have emerged to try to fill the void. They are modest-sized community-based organizations of low-wage workers that, through a combination of service, advocacy, and organizing, focus on issues of work and wages. Community unions have so far had greater success at raising wages and improving working conditions via public policy rather than direct labor market intervention. This is because low-wage workers in America today have greater political than economic power.

Strengthening Labor Standards Enforcement through Partnerships with Workers’ Organizations

Structures of employment in low-wage industries, a diminished wage and hour inspectorate, and an unworkable immigration regime have combined to create an environment where violations of basic workplace laws are everyday occurrences. This article identifies four “logics” of detection and enforcement, arguing that there is a mismatch between the enforcement strategies of most federal and state labor inspectorates and the industries in which noncompliance continues to be a problem. In response, the authors propose augmenting labor inspectorates by giving public interest groups like unions and worker centers a formal, ongoing role in enforcement in low-wage sectors. In three case studies, the authors present evidence of an emergent system—one that harkens back to a logic proposed by the drafters of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) but never implemented—of empowering those closest to the action to work in partnership with government.

A Marriage Made in Heaven? Mismatches and Misunderstandings between Worker Centres and Unions

Worker centres, community-based mediating institutions that provide support to low-wage workers in the United States, have grown from five in 1992 to 160 in 2007. With unions increasingly targeting low-wage immigrant workers employed in non-footloose industries for organizing drives, it would seem that worker centres and unions are a match made in heaven. On the ground, however, it has been more of a mismatch. This article examines the underlying sources of the mismatch embodied in the structures, ideologies and cultures of worker centres and unions.

Immigration and the Transformation of American Unionism

Does immigration hamper union organizing in the United States? The prevailing literature strongly suggests that it does and for two reasons: first, immigrants increase the labor pool and diminish union influence over the labor market. And second, immigrants may be harder to organize than native workers. In this dominant view, unions are well served to restrict immigration and have always done so. But how, then, to explain the fact that American labor has long been deeply divided over the response to immigration? Drawing on new archival research and interviews, this paper uncovers a neglected side of American labor history in which many union leaders have extended solidarity to immigrants and sought to organize them. Moreover, analysis of time series data on immigration and union density corroborates the implicit theory of this alternate account of labor history: immigration has, in fact, no statistically significant effect – either positive or negative – on union density over time. Depending on specific conditions and strategies, unions can and have been successful in organizing during periods of high immigration.

Enforcing Labor Standards in Partnership with Civil Society: Can Co-enforcement Succeed Where the State Alone Has Failed?:

Over the last decade, cities, counties, and states across the United States have enacted higher minimum wages, paid sick leave and family leave, domestic worker protections, wage theft laws, “Ban the Box” removal of questions about conviction history from job applications, and fair scheduling laws. Nevertheless, vulnerable workers still do not trust government to come forward and report labor law violations. The article argues that while increasing the size of the labor inspectorate and engaging in strategic enforcement are necessary, they are not sufficient. It argues that co-enforcement, in which government partners with organizations that have industry expertise and relationships with vulnerable workers, has the potential to manage the shifting and decentralized structures of twenty-first-century production, which were explicitly designed to evade twentieth-century laws and enforcement capabilities. The article aims to contribute to a broader understanding of the role of organizations in enforcement and the circumstances in which their effectiveness can be maximized. It sets forth a set of scope conditions and mechanisms and examines empirical cases of co-enforcement in Austin, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The main findings are that co-enforcement is most enduring when (1) government agencies and worker organizations recognize each other’s unique capacities, rather than attempt to substitute for one another (2); the effort focuses on a specific industry; and (3) the collaboration receives strong political support. Sustaining the impacts of co-enforcement is found to require greater formalization of the partnership and funding streams.

When the Rubber Hits the High Road: Labor and Community Complexities in the Greening of the Garden State

This article is an exploration of challenges faced by building and construction trade unions as they seek to enter the green jobs sector through the lens of the Eastern Region of the Laborers Union. This article is also motivated by an interest in extending the literature on community unionism by asking how and in what ways specifically coalition participation impacts labor’s ability to organize and in this case enter the green jobs sector successfully. Although this work is not a full matched pair analysis, the author contrasts the Laborers’ strategy to the efforts of Community Labor United in Massachusetts. While organizations in both states were responding to a similar set of conditions, they ended up choosing divergent paths. The author concludes that much of the failure of the Laborers strategy in New Jersey is due to the union’s decision to go it alone in their efforts to organize the residential weatherization sector.

Segmentation and the Role of Labor Standards Enforcement in Immigration Reform

Despite the fact that many low-wage, violation-ridden industries are disproportionately occupied by immigrants, labor standards and immigration reform have largely been treated as separate pieces of an otherwise interrelated puzzle. Not only is this view misguided, but this paper argues that strengthening labor standards enforcement would ensure that standards are upheld for all workers, immigrant and others. In addition, labor standards enforcement is instrumental to the erosion of sub-standard conditions in certain sectors, often referred to as the “secondary” labor market, that are associated with advanced market economies. Ensuring labor standards are upheld diminishes the incentive for employers to undercut wages by exploiting vulnerable workers, many of whom are immigrants. As this paper argues, strengthening enforcement must include not only “vertical” mechanisms, including strategic enforcement and penalizing and criminalizing egregious and repeated labor violators, but also “lateral” mechanisms, such as co-enforcement by workers and through worker and community organizations. The article illustrates the role of co-enforcement in labor standards through two case studies.

Celebrating the Enduring Contribution of Birds of Passage: Migrant Labor and Industrial Societies:

-----------------------------Written in 1979, Birds of Passage: Migrant Labor and Industrial societies offered a powerful and fresh way of understanding labor migration and the role of immigrant workers in the u.S. labor market that dramatically broke with traditional neoclassical thinking. dominant theory up to that point had focused on push factors, arguing that labor migration stemmed simply from geographic differences in the supply and demand of labor and placed agency in the hands of migrants who made the decision individually to maximize their utility by moving from low wage to high wage countries. in stark contrast, Birds of Passage focused on pull factors, utilizing dual labor market theory to argue that migration was fundamentally demand driven. by Piore’s reckoning, labor migration was the consequence of the chronic and unavoidable need of advanced industrial societies for workers who were willing to labor for low wages with great instability, little chance for advancement, and often under difficult conditions. These insights and the conceptual framework Piore offered in the book are still relevant for understanding and analyzing labor migration and the policy dilemmas it poses today.

Solidarities and Restrictions: Labor and Immigration Policy in the United States

In American labor’s response to immigration over time, one can observe “a movement wrestling” between restrictionist and solidaristic positions. A crucial transformation of American labor’s response to immigration occurred from the 1930s to the 1960s which is attributed to four factors: changes in the structure and composition of the labor market, shifts in immigration flows, shifts in the attitudes of the labor movement toward immigrants, and the changing disposition of the American state toward unions. In this article we look at the policy choices and dilemmas that have faced the American labor movement since the 1940’s, putting forth a conceptual framework for understanding labor’s shifting positions over time and identifying critical moments in American political development. Having laid this foundation, we move on to a consideration of labor’s most recent positions concerning contemporary policy debates.

Contracting, performance management, and accountability: Political symbolism versus good governance

As state governments expand the use of private contractors to provide public services, they create challenges to performance management and accountability. Using the framework of accountability as a social relationship, we evaluate New Jersey’s oversight practices. We combine data from interviews and observation with a comprehensive analysis of the institutional framework. We raise two key questions. First, what causes New Jersey to neglect its performance management responsibilities? Second, how can New Jersey and other states strengthen their performance management and accountability practices? We posit that the state must retain some level of internal monitoring capacity as a core element of government. Effective oversight requires rebuilding administrative capacity and implementing ongoing, flexible, relational contract management that involves key stakeholders and does not put the entire burden of performance measurement on direct service providers. In this way, performance management and accountability can be linked together as tools for reflection and learning.