Worker Centers: Another Resource

 

Another avenue for alliance in your community may be a worker center. Dr. Janice Fine has recently completed a study for the Economic Policy Institute on the growth of immigrant worker centers in the U.S. She defines worker centers as “community-based institutions that provide support to low-wage immigrants, using a combination of service delivery, advocacy and organizing.They are part settlement house, part local civil rights organization, and part union.” The numbers of such centers have increased tremendously in the last decade – from fewer than 5 in 1992 to 133 in 2004 in more than 80 cities, towns and even rural areas.


Fine notes that the term “worker center” does not properly reflect the breadth of the work these organizations are pursuing. “These organizations have much broader agendas,” she comments. “They are really building a local immigrant civil rights movement.”

 

Among the projects worker centers tackle are: pressuring individual employers to change practices through coordinated local and national actions and boycotts; organizing to raise wages across an industry; targeting industries to raise wages or provide health benefits through passage of public policy; and creating worker-owned cooperatives...

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