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Daniel Galvin is the author of the RSF book Alt-Labor and the New Politics of Workers’ Rights. In Alt-Labor and the Politics of Workers’ Rights, Galvin details why alt-labor groups—small, under-resourced, nonprofit groups that have emerged across the U.S. to organize and support marginalized workers—have turned to policy and politics, provides compelling insights into the dilemmas the groups face, and illuminates how their efforts have both invigorated and complicated the American labor movement. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. What motivated you to write Alt-Labor and the New Politics of Workers’ Rights?
Political scientists have been pretty intensively studying economic and political inequality for the last decade or so. But most attention has been paid to the most powerful actors, like the super wealthy, the corporations, and organized interests and how they exercise political influence. There's been surprisingly little attention given to political dynamics at the bottom of the income distribution. This seemed like a missed opportunity to me, in part because, as the Fight for $15 movement had shown, low-wage workers were quite capable of becoming politically engaged and using their collective power in the public sphere to improve their terms and conditions at work. It seemed to me, that if we wanted to understand the consequences of economic inequality in the U.S., especially in the context of union decline since the 1970s, we needed to pay more attention to what the poorest workers were doing to fight back against their exploitation and what challenges they faced.
I became particularly interested in the phenomenon of wage theft whereby workers are not paid what they're owed for the work that they've done. I started using survey data to study minimum wage violations. I wanted to quantitatively measure its extent and understand whether anti-wage theft policies that were being passed at the state level helped to deter wage theft from occurring. And in the course of that research, I discovered that, in many states and localities, some of the most innovative anti-wage theft and pro-worker policies were being pushed by these small nonprofit organizations, sometimes called worker centers, that brought together low-wage workers to fight for their rights. By conventional metrics, these groups were not powerful and would not have been expected to win anything. And yet, they were proving to be remarkably successful. They played a central role in raising the minimum wage, passing anti-wage theft laws, establishing paid sick leave, enacting stronger safety and health regulations, creating anti-retaliation laws, strengthening anti-discrimination policies, and a lot more in cities and states around the country.
These nonprofit groups had very little money, relatively small membership bases, and not much visibility. Most of their members were low-wage workers of color and immigrants, including many undocumented immigrants, who worked at some of the least desirable jobs. So, these are exactly the kinds of groups that political scientists would expect to be weak and largely ineffective in the political arena. Relative to large, well-funded labor unions, in particular, these groups looked kind of puny. And yet, they seemed to be punching well above their weight. They were managing, and are still managing, to use the policy making process to establish some limits on employer power, create new rights and protections from exploitation, and claw back a modicum of dignity in the workplace. And so how were they able to do this? That was the puzzle that motivated the book project. So, I started looking into the question of why alt-labor groups were turning increasingly to politics and policy making. How did they do it? How did that turn to politics and policy impact the other work that they do? And what are the biggest challenges that they were facing?
Q. What are alt-labor groups? How are they different from unions? What makes them unique?
Alt-labor groups are fascinating and important to study, I think, in part because they play a really unique role in the labor movement and on the progressive left, and in part because of the broad array of functions that they play for low-wage workers. In the labor movement, these are really the only groups that are organizing and supporting low-wage immigrant workers and people of color who are not unionized and are not likely to be unionized anytime soon. Within the broader progressive movement, these are the only non-union groups that emphasize, first and foremost, workplace justice issues, workers’ rights issues, and that have any kind of presence in low-wage worker communities. As organizations, they're peculiar because they don't fit neatly into any preexisting, clearly defined category. They're not unions. They're not your typical nonprofits that primarily provide social services on behalf of government, and they're not social movements, per se. As Janice Fine wrote about in her seminal book on worker centers twenty years ago, many of these groups occupy a kind of unique liminal space between these categories.
One of the things that makes alt-labor groups unique is that they do a lot of organizing, person-to-person relationship building, and leadership training and empowerment workshops. They build community solidarity, networks of mutual support, and they try to organize entire communities. In many cases, they're building social capital in ways that have become increasingly rare in the 21st century. After the 2024 election, in particular, many people have argued that this lack of deep organizing at the local level is at the heart of the problem on the political left. The fact that alt-labor groups have increasingly moved into the political arena and undertaken functions formally thought to be only under the purview of political parties and interest groups makes them all the more curious and important to understand, I think, if we want to fully grapple with the changing organizational landscape of American politics.
The term “alt-labor” was coined by labor reporter Josh Eidelson back in 2013. Technically, alt-labor groups are registered as 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) nonprofit groups under the IRS, but they come in all shapes and sizes. The term alt-labor includes community-based worker centers, grassroots groups that don't identify as worker centers—some even explicitly reject the label “worker center,” but they pursue these same core priorities of workers’ rights. It includes groups that organize and operate at a regional level or at a national scale, and it includes amalgam groups, like Make the Road New York, that tackle a wide range of issues but are also focused on workers’ rights and economic justice. In addition to very local organizations, like Adelante Alabama, which organizes and supports day laborers and domestic workers and other low-wage workers in the Birmingham, Alabama area, there are groups with wider purviews, like Somos Un Pueblo Unido in New Mexico, which fights for both immigrant rights and workplace justice. And then you've got umbrella groups like Raise the Floor Alliance in Chicago, Restaurant Opportunity Center, and National Domestic Workers Alliance, all of which unite multiple local groups in a common structure.
Finally, I'd note that there's a bit of a misconception that alt-labor groups exclusively organize and represent workers who lack collective bargaining rights because they work in jobs that are excluded from coverage under the National Labor Relations Act. That isn't exactly right. Although many members of alt-labor groups are indeed excluded from coverage, like farm workers, domestic workers, and day laborers who do lack collective bargaining rights, many members can legally organize. They just find that it's virtually impossible to do so in the decentralized, hyper competitive industries in which they work. And few unions are interested in supporting their efforts to do it when they try. Here I'm talking about workers like residential construction workers in Texas, meat packers in Nebraska, restaurant workers in California and all over the country, food manufacturing workers, service sector workers all over the country, and many more.
Q. Many alt-labor groups have shifted their focus from direct services and worker justice campaigns to public policy. Why is that? Have alt-labor groups been successful in the public policy area? What are some limitations of the public policy work alt-labor groups do?
Since they first started emerging in greater numbers in the 1990s and early 2000s, the bread and butter of worker centers has been service provision and direct action, also known as workplace justice campaigns. When we talk about services, we're talking about providing assistance to workers in understanding and asserting their rights, helping them document their grievances, file formal complaints, interact with regulatory agencies and sue unscrupulous employers. Depending on the group, they also offer a range of other services, like language and skills training, help with accessing bank accounts, insurance, and government services, and they provide referrals to legal clinics and health clinics and other nonprofits. When we talk about direct action or workplace justice campaigns, we're talking about when groups of workers organize these disruptive, confrontational actions and use protests and public shaming strategies to expose abusive employer practices and pressure employers to redress the wrongs they've committed against workers. These workplace justice campaigns are, and have long been, the signature strategy of the alt-labor movement.
But as strategies to advance workers’ rights, both service provision and direct actions have serious limitations. For one thing, they're always putting the groups and the workers behind the ball, as it were. The exploitation or the abuse or the illegal behavior has already occurred, and these are reactions, or reactive fixes, rather than proactive deterrence. And they impose significant opportunity costs on these underfunded organizations. The work never ends. Several organizers I spoke to likened direct action to the game of whack a mole, where workplace exploitation just keeps popping up no matter what the groups do. And this, of course, is because exploitation is a feature, not a bug, of many low-wage industries, and in this economic system—the fissured workplace, the informal economy.
These frustrations have led many organizers to step back and ask the question of, “How can we get in front of these abuses and stop them before they occur?” And public policy was appealing, in part, because it offered a way to combat workplace exploitation and strengthen workers’ rights at a larger scale. So, whereas services and direct actions could potentially improve conditions for a small number of workers, stronger public policies could help hundreds of thousands or even millions of workers in one fell swoop by establishing new rules that would shape the behavior of all employers in a city or county or state or across an entire industry. So, public policies offered these groups a way to scale up their work in a serious way.
Their attraction to public policy can also be understood as a rational response to alt-labor’s many weaknesses. When the groups push for stronger public policies, they effectively ask the state, through laws and regulations, to intervene in the employment relationship and put a thumb on the scales in favor of workers, bringing the power of public authority into what would otherwise remain a private and highly unequal relationship between employer and employee. Many organizers describe the accumulation of state and local employment laws as an effort to recreate a kind of collective bargaining agreement that's backed up by the state for workers who don't have unions to represent them.
There are other attractions to policy campaigns as well. One of the most important is that by engaging their members in these campaigns, the groups can tackle a much broader range of issues that touch their members lives and shape their communities. They've pushed for policies around immigrants’ rights, criminal justice reform, housing discrimination, and many more specific local issues, depending on the time and the context. The uniting theme here is that focusing on public policy helps alt-labor groups address the many, often intersecting and mutually reinforcing, challenges that their members face.
But it's important to note that there are many downsides to public policy as well. For example, local politics is not always such a welcoming place for low-wage workers. Certainly, some city councils, county boards, and state legislatures are concerned about the conditions of low-wage work, but most are not really, and that can be very frustrating. In addition, legislative compromise invariably leaves some people unhappy. Enforcement is generally not good, and oftentimes it doesn't happen at all.
Nevertheless, the groups have been surprisingly successful in the policymaking arena. To take just one imperfect but informative measure of alt-labor’s involvement in local policy campaigns, I looked pretty comprehensively through local newspaper coverage of every successful minimum wage, paid sick leave, and fair work week law enacted in 102 cities and counties between 2003 and 2019. And I tracked instances in which alt-labor groups were cited as leading advocates in the policy campaigns. I found that alt-labor groups were cited as integral players in 72 percent of all those campaigns, which was second only to traditional labor unions, who were cited in 73 percent of all campaigns. But that measure really only scratches the surface. And, as I said, it's an imperfect and biased measure. In the book, I look at specific alt-labor groups in greater detail and show how their many varied policy campaigns have evolved over the years, becoming bolder and broader in scope.
Q. Can you talk briefly about alt-labor groups’ power and capacity building efforts?
The main type of power alt-labor groups are trying to build is a little different from the conventional understanding of power. We typically think of power as power over others, or influence. The ability to achieve what you want. The groups want that too, for sure. But they recognize that the first step is to build generative or productive power. The power to; the capacity to act. And their power building strategies are diverse. No two groups do exactly the same things. But as a general matter, we can conceptualize their work as operating on two levels, at the level of the individual and at the level of the organization.
At the level of the individual, alt-labor makes concerted efforts to empower their members, help them develop skills, build community and solidarity with others—which might be conceptualized as building power with—and formulate collective issue agendas and strategies to act on those agendas. At the organizational level, they work to build coalitions with allies, including with labor unions and sometimes even employer groups, and many other groups that are in the broader progressive movement with them, to develop organizational innovations. They leverage the fact that they have really flexible organizational forms that allow them to try lots of different things that expand the group's reach and magnify their influence. Both types of power building—at the individual and the organizational level—look to compensate for alt-labors’ weaknesses by augmenting and leveraging its strengths. So, for example, they leverage the group's deep roots in local communities, they tap into the racial and ethnic bonds that unite their members, they leverage their expertise and community organizing, and they capitalize on their unique position within the labor movement and within the broader ecosystem of progressive minded groups. And, as I said, they take advantage of the flexibility of their organizational forms. So, by tapping into, developing, and harnessing these strengths, alt-labor groups are building sources of power that they can then draw upon to ratchet up their political engagement.
Q. What motivates alt-labor groups to move from waging policy campaigns to becoming more politically engaged and working to alter their political environment? What does that engagement look like? Have alt-labor groups been successful politically?
The limitation of the policy-focused strategy is that you can only get what the powers that be will allow. The policy changes that groups can get are limited to those that the existing power holders deem to be acceptable. And this is a problem because alt-labor groups aren't content with the status quo. So, to change the status quo, the groups recognize that they have to find ways to alter the political landscape in some more fundamental ways. And that's what has led many of them to become more politically engaged. But just to be clear, political is not a synonym for partisan. I want to make sure to say that these are not partisan groups. These are nonpartisan groups that are extremely fastidious and take great care to stay well within the parameters of what types of political activities are allowed based on their nonprofit status.
The book goes into this in much greater detail, but in brief, what the groups try to do is to create incentives for government officials to be more responsive to their members’ concerns. They do this in part by building and mobilizing new electorates, they try to influence who is sitting at the table making decisions by intervening in candidate selection processes, they try to shape the terms of the debate by organizing their issues onto the policy agenda, and then they try to hold elected officials accountable to their members. In other words, their political efforts are aimed, as you said, at altering the political environment in which policy decisions are made by reshaping of the contours of the political terrain and laying the groundwork for more favorable outcomes over the long term.
And although these efforts have largely flown under the radar, many groups have made important inroads in their local political contexts. So just a brief example, in Schuyler, Nebraska, when Heartland Worker Center started organizing workers, there were only 14 Latino members of the community who had voted in the previous election. They started tapping their personal networks to encourage people to get out and vote and use their voice in the political process. The next year, they had 140 Latino low-wage workers voting—ten times the number. The next electoral cycle, they had 900 Latino voters voting, and they had people starting to run for the school board and city council and Chamber of Commerce seats, those sorts of things. They also have a large initiative called “I Vote for My Family,” which is premised on the fact that there are millions of U.S. citizens who live in mixed-status families. The idea is to encourage them to vote on behalf of their family and represent their concerns, because many members of their family are unable to vote. So, they're changing local political environments in small places like that, but also on a broader scale. LUCHA has been very successful at registering and mobilizing low-wage Latino voters in Arizona. And, actually, in 2020 LUCHA could, I think, legitimately claim to have turned out enough voters to make the difference in Joe Biden winning the election at the state level. So, even local efforts can aggregate to an important effect at the state and national level.
In terms of intervening in candidate selection, their first choice is to have members of their community actually run for office, because those people not only represent them, they are them. And you have that in several cases. Other times, they're looking to unseat members of the state legislature who have opposed them in the past. Workers Defense Project in Texas has a pretty strong record of success at flexing some electoral muscle in this sense. Somos Un Pueblo Unido, who I mentioned earlier, has been involved, with their (c)(4) organization, in the second congressional district of New Mexico. PCUN in Oregon, has made inroads at the local and state level. And the National Domestic Workers Alliance was part of the coalition that successfully elected Democrats to Congress in Georgia in the important runoff elections there and at other local levels as well. So, they've had impact. Most of this direct electoral work has taken place on the (c)(4) side, because that's the nonprofit status that allows them to do more direct engagement in these elections.
Q. What is the membership/funding dilemma for alt-labor groups? How do alt-labor groups navigate this dilemma?
The membership/funding dilemma refers to the fact that no alt-labor group, to date, has successfully managed to build a large, robust membership base that's capable of funding its operations through regular dues payments in the way that unions do. Because of this, most groups have turned to external funding sources, especially private philanthropic foundations. This external funding, which is often very generous, has reduced the pressure on alt-labor groups to significantly grow their memberships. But, as long as they remain small, they continue to be dependent on outside funders. And so that's the dilemma. It's a self-reinforcing cycle. For groups that strive to be member driven, people-powered organizations, this financial dependency has raised difficult questions about accountability that no group has fully answered. All are actively trying to square the circle, but balancing responsiveness to funders with their core commitments to democratic, bottom-up decision-making processes is a tricky balancing act. And the extent to which they've succeeded in striking this balance varies across the groups.
The other problem with being funded primarily by foundations, rather than by their members, is that grants can be difficult to win. Groups have to compete with each other to get them and future support is never guaranteed. If you're not a self-sustaining organization, you're fundamentally an unstable organization, and foundation funding is capricious and it's not reliable. So, this leaves alt-labor in a precarious place.
That’s also potentially problematic in a more fundamental sense. The wealth behind these foundations is typically owed to the successful efforts of wealthy individuals to navigate the capitalist system and amass great fortunes. Their wealth depends on the liberal market economy, and they benefit from its continuance. Many alt-labor group members and organizers, in contrast, have ideological commitments that involve deep critiques of capitalism and the neoliberal premise of our current political economy. So, these groups are explicitly trying to expose the dark side of the capitalist system and challenge it.
On the foundation side, there are now many pro-worker, anti-racist foundations that want to advance progressive causes. But that doesn't mean that they're going to want to fund the more militant groups that insist on highlighting the ways in which the capitalist system itself is to blame for the oppression of their members and the vast power inequalities that exist in the United States. So that's another tension there.
We can also view alt-labor’s turn to politics and policy as, at least in part, a reflection of the fact that there's just a lot more money out there for voter engagement and mobilization, especially around election time, than for year-round organizing and the pursuit of workplace justice, per se. Wealthy people like the horserace and are willing to open their wallets for groups that are doing voter engagement, registration, and GOTV [get out the vote] work. So, by doing more explicit voter engagement and issue education and effectively entering into the political arena, these groups have been able to take advantage of this funding stream and use it to support the broader community building and power building work that they're doing.
But their foray into politics and policy has also raised important questions about the groups’ role as political representatives. The question is: who exactly do these groups represent? Oftentimes, it's a small-ish core group of active members—and there's a lot of strength in that—but the critique is that their campaigns do more to represent the interests of the foundations that fund them than the interests of their members. I don't think this is an entirely fair critique, given the incredible work most groups do to cultivate robust membership bases and establish internal decision-making processes that ensure democratic responsiveness to their membership. It's just not an entirely well-placed critique in this space. But it is true that their memberships are not typically very large, which means that it is it is fair to question the extent to which they accurately represent and are accountable to the broader working class, which many groups do endeavor to represent, especially in the political arena.
Q. What is the difference between labor law and employment law? How did we drift from primarily relying on labor law to protect workers’ rights to employment law? What are some of the limitations of employment law?
The emergence and development of these alt-labor groups has taken place at precisely the same time that the old, New Deal model of labor relations has been collapsing. We have to go back to the 1930s, during the Great Depression, when the so-called “labor question” became more salient than ever and all the more urgent to resolve. At the heart of the labor question was how the United States was going to address the profound economic, social, and political inequalities between capital and labor that had arisen out of industrialization and urbanization and all the dramatic changes in the workforce and economy.
The answer that the New Dealers gave came in the form of the NLRA, the National Labor Relations Act, also known as labor law, which gave most private sector workers collective bargaining rights and legitimized unions for the first time. The term labor law refers to this law, which is also known as the Wagner Act—it has many names. It deals with labor-management relations, unionization, and collective bargaining, and it established the NLRB [National Labor Relations Board], which is a quasi-judicial agency at the federal level that's tasked with overseeing unionization and settling procedural disputes between management and labor. This Labor Law regime was envisioned by New Dealers as the primary pathway through which workers would secure rights and protections against exploitation. And it was viewed as a less intrusive way of establishing industrial peace and stability rather than having direct government intervention.
But the Labor Law regime never covered more than about a third of workers in the private sector. It reached its peak in the 1950s, but even then, two-thirds of workers in the private sector lacked basic rights and protections from exploitation. So, unions and worker advocates began to push more consistently for legislation that would establish universal protections in the workplace that would apply to everyone, not just union members. That's what employment law does. Employment law includes minimum wage, overtime, child labor, health and safety, protections against discrimination, sexual harassment, infringements on civil liberties, and so on. But with rising gridlock and polarization in Congress, workers’ rights advocates recognize that only so much progress could be made at the federal level. So, as I show in the book, unions and workers’ rights groups, including alt-labor groups, increasingly have turned to state legislatures and local governments and have campaigned for employment laws that would set a floor on the terms and conditions of work, establish some basic protections against exploitation and abuse, and establish some individual rights.
To this day, employment laws play a really central role in protecting workers. However, they have several big weaknesses. First, they only establish the most minimal terms and conditions of employment. So, unlike collective bargaining agreements that can be custom tailored to specific workplaces, employment laws are really blunt instruments, and they only get the minimum level of protections. And because most employment laws put the onus on workers to report rights violations by filing complaints with government agencies or initiating lawsuits, they make heroic assumptions about workers’ own capacities to root out noncompliance with the law. Many workers, understandably, fear that if they assert their rights, they might be subject to retaliation, termination, or deportation in some cases. And we know that the most vulnerable workers, by virtue of their race, gender, immigration status, low incomes, are the least likely to complain when their rights are violated at work. But they're also the people who need those protections the most.
Employment laws are also geographically fragmented and unevenly distributed across the United States, which creates inequalities in workers’ rights that are based solely on where you happen to live and work. Finally, they're pretty weak tools of deterrence. They do little to prevent abuses and illegal practices from happening in the first place. Preemptive investigations are rare. Penalties for noncompliance are low—they’re often not imposed. Lawsuits are really hard to win. As a result, employment law remedies are often called band aids by organizers in alt-labor groups because they address only the symptoms and not the causes of exploitation. They don't address the unequal power in the workplace, unequal power in society, or unequal power in the economy, which they view as the root cause of worker exploitation. So that's what ultimately leads them to get into policy and politics more directly.