Suburban Sweatshops

Reviewed by Gabriel Thompson
06.21.05

A person would be hard-pressed to invent a more difficult environment to organize. Recently arrived Latina/o immigrants—the vast majority of them undocumented—gather each morning on Long Island corners, desperate for work. Employers pull up in trucks on their way to worksites, setting off a bidding war among the laborers to see who among the group will work for the lowest wages. Those too proud to drop their going rate quickly learn that the only award for their principled stand is another day without work. With so many individual agreements between unknown bosses and vulnerable immigrants, abuse is rampant. And if, by chance, one case is won against the employers, rest assured that tomorrow will bring dozens more willing to risk a small fine by paying well below the minimum wage or withholding payment entirely.

Day laborers involved in landscaping, construction, and domestic work—jobs that are ever in flux and at scattered sites—are among the most difficult to organize. For this reason, unions have largely focused on organizing workers a few steps up the economic ladder; this more easily leverages unions’ role within an industry. One battle-hardened labor organizer visited Long Island to provide tactical advice to Jennifer Gordon’s Workplace Project, which was then planning a campaign to increase the going wages at several busy corners. After witnessing the chaos and disorganization on the corners, he saw no chance of success. “Give it up and go find an organizing campaign where you have a prayer of success,” he told Gordon.

Gordon, of course, did not give up, and her recent book Suburban Sweatshops is a primer for budding organizers and a thoughtful reply to skeptics like the aforementioned union official. Yet Gordon’s most valuable contribution to the practice of organizing is her sober analysis of the difficulties inherent in the task, and her willingness to acknowledge the limitations of any chosen tactic. In a field that tends to create a few especially loud individuals who make grandiose claims and boast about the discovery of “the one model that works,” Gordon is humble and clear-eyed, modest but motivated.

Gordon founded the Long Island based Workplace Project in 1992, and was its director until 1998 (she is now an associate professor at the Fordham School of Law). The project is primarily made up of Central American and Mexican immigrants, and most of its 500 members are not citizens. Nevertheless, in 1997 they were able to pass statewide legislation entitled the Unpaid Wages Prohibition Act, which dramatically increased the fines for employers that pay below the minimum wage.

Yet equally important, as Gordon writes in a chapter titled “Noncitizen Citizenship,” was the realization among members that they could indeed dare to become political actors. “A new thought begins to gain currency: ‘We probably can’t win. But we might learn a lot—and what do we stand to lose if we try?’” What members and Gordon learned was that not only could they pass legislation, but that they could, in fact, do it from the ground up, with low-wage undocumented workers driving the campaign—leading meetings with politicians, conducting sustained protests against opponents, and achieving media coverage that highlighted the need for reform.

Not everything was easy, however. For aspiring organizers, the chapter entitled “A Legal Clinic and Organizing” contains 52 pages of essential reading. In straightforward prose, Gordon chronicles the internal debates at the Workplace Project over the presence of a legal clinic at the workers’ center, and in the process neatly outlines the tensions and contradictions between organizing and providing services. For inexperienced organizers, a legal clinic for workers would seem uncontroversial. What better way to bring in new members than to demonstrate that tangible wins are possible? Yet, as Gordon writes—in a sentiment that permeates her entire book—“all is not so simple.”

Organizing and the development of leaders, after all, are based upon the core belief that people have the ability to achieve change on their own, without relying upon others with specialized knowledge. By holding legal clinics for workers, the inevitable message was sent that workers didn’t need to organize and challenge employers collectively, but simply file individual lawsuits and watch attorneys go to work on their behalf. In addition, Gordon notes that once potential workplace leaders won their lawsuits, they disappeared: “By ‘paying off’ the bravest and most determined workers with a settlement or an award [we were] unwittingly playing the role of the employer who decapitates an organizing effort by making a deal with its leaders.”

Yet the legal clinic did bring new leaders in, and the use of lawyers enabled workers to battle their employers and, at times, to fit into a larger organizing campaign against a specific boss. In the end, the Workplace Project decided to continue the legal clinic, but also required people to give back to the organization by participating in committees and taking a Workers’ Course where they would discuss and analyze the exploitation that they faced, look at previous efforts to organize for change, and receive training on basic organizing techniques. As Gordon writes: “If outreach and the legal clinic were the broad mouth of the Workplace Project’s funnel, the Workers Course was its narrowing point. All immigrants who wanted to become members had to pass through it.”

Gordon’s discussion of the inevitable tensions between organizing and service provision, and her eventual conclusion that the best one can do is juggle contradictions in a way that works more often than it fails, is the result of her many years actually spent organizing (as opposed to simply talking about it). For Gordon, the process of organizing demands constant experimentation, reflection, and analysis—the learning curve is nearly infinite. There is no “one size fits all” when it comes to organizing; what works today, works today. Tomorrow, it very well might need to be abandoned.

And yet, with many caveats, extreme modesty, and a clearheaded analysis about the structural difficulties in organizing low-wage immigrant workers, the real spirit of Gordon’s work and attitude is summed up in her final sentence: “[The Workplace Project] has shown that, try as we might to assess power with a clear, cold eye, to pin it down on the page according to the characteristics of a community or a labor market, there is often room for surprising change.”