What’s a worker center? Understanding the union-alternative and strategizing for our post-workplace future
Saturday, July 29, 2017, 4-6PM
Description
Even AFL-CIO union leaders say that unions have to be re-imagined for workers to have meaningful power in our evolving and uncertain future (e.g. gig economy, contingent workforce, automation) (another example is SEIU funding the Fight for 15 even though it does not entirely correlate with the needs of its constituents). We are also suspicious of and dissatisfied with the parameters the NLRB has set for worker organizing. The goal of this session is to understand more of the legal framework of collective bargaining, to digest how various modes of organization address different needs, and imagine which new organizing alternatives could be realized most immediately.
Readings
Mainstream media
- The Workers Defense Project, a Union in Spirit (NYT 2014)
- 6 Groups That Are Reinventing Organized Labor (ThinkProgress 2014)
- Are ‘worker centers’ the future of labor organizing? (Washington Examiner 2013)
- OPTION FOR AUDIO The Future Of The Workers’ Movement (NPR 2013)
Art & Alternative
- Worker Centers: Labs of Organizational Innovation (The Century Foundation 2016)
- Tereza Stejskalová, Barbora Kleinhamplová and members of the Precarious Workers Brigade, 2014. Not to defer our politicis to somewhere else - Precarious Workers Brigade on precarity. (precariousworkersbrigade.tumblr.com 2014)
- Tools for Collective Action—Precarity: The People’s Tribunal (Dismagazine)
Case studies
Academic - Optional
- If you’ve read or are reading Srinicek’s Inventing the Future , revisit Chapter 6: Building Power: Organisational Ecology (page 163-174)
- Worker centers Organizing communities at the edge of the dream (Economic Policy Institute 2005) Suggest reading pages 1-5 of PDF
- BUILDING A MOVEMENT TOGETHER: WORKERS CENTERS AND LABOR UNION AFFILIATIONS (UCLA Labor Center 2015) Suggest reading pages 1-2 of PDF