Repurposing American Labor Law

• Published date: 01 December 2014
• Author: Jessica Garrick
• DOI: 10.1177/0032329214547352
• Date: 01 December 2014
• Subject Matter: Articles

Politics & Society

2014, Vol. 42(4) 489 –512

© 2014 SAGE Publications

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DOI: 10.1177/0032329214547352

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Article

Repurposing American Labor

Law: Immigrant Workers,

Worker Centers, and the

National Labor Relations Act

Jessica Garrick

University of Michigan

Abstract

The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935 has been widely portrayed as an

anachronistic piece of legislation that needs to be reformed or abandoned. In the

absence of reform, many US labor unions try to avoid the NLRA process altogether

by organizing workers outside the confines of the law. But Somos un Pueblo Unido,

or “Somos,” a worker center in New Mexico, has been using a novel interpretation

of the NLRA less to boost union density than to develop an alternative to contract

unionism. By helping nonunionized workers use Section 7 of the NLRA to act

concertedly in their own defense, I argue, Somos is combating employer abuse, in

the short run, and demonstrating that worker centers and their memberships may be

transforming the US labor movement, in the long run. Their experiences illustrate the

ability of organizations to redeploy existing institutional resources with potentially

transformative results.

Keywords

labor movement, law, worker centers, immigrants, institutions

Corresponding Author:

Jessica Garrick, Department of Sociology, University of Michigan, 500 S. State St. Ann Arbor, MI 48104.

Email: jgarric@umich.edu

547352PASXXX10.1177/0032329214547352Politics & SocietyGarrick

research-article2014

490 Politics & Society 42(4)

A substantial body of literature documents the perils of the low-wage labor market in

the contemporary United States. These include falling wages, rising insecurity, and an

epidemic of underground and illegal employment in blue- and pink-collar occupations

in particular. While almost all low-wage workers are at risk of abuse by unscrupulous

employers, undocumented workers are particularly vulnerable, and the most compre-

hensive study undertaken to date thus identified a “high prevalence of workplace vio-

lations among unauthorized immigrants” in the country’s largest cities.1 Observers

continue to debate the sources of this trend, but many activists point to the de facto

deregulation of the labor market, in general, and the watering down of the National

Labor Relations Act (NLRA), in particular.2 The NLRA’s failure, they argue, derives

from the corrosive effects of amendments, such as the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, and

judicial decisions that allow employers to circumvent the unionization process out-

lined by the Act and overseen by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB or “the

Board”). Illegal approaches to union avoidance are also widely available and rarely

punished, and much of the organizing activity in the United States today therefore

presupposes either the reform of the NLRA by means of lobbying and political mobi-

lization or the circumvention of the NLRB by means of “card check” certification and/

or alternatives to traditional unions (e.g., minority unions and affinity groups).

But the experiences of some nonunion organizations that help workers defend their

rights on the job suggest that other possibilities are available. Worker centers—defined

as community-based organizations that organize, serve, and advocate on behalf of

low-wage workers—and legal justice clinics have been taking advantage of the “con-

certed activities clause” of Section 7 of the NLRA to help workers defend themselves

against abuse and exploitation on the job. And they have done so in the absence of

broader organizing campaigns, let alone collective bargaining agreements, which have

traditionally been portrayed as the Act’s raison d’etre.3 Their efforts suggest that the

NLRA is both more expansive and less anachronistic than most observers believe.

Despite a longstanding focus on the collective bargaining provisions of the NLRA,

Section 7 has always protected workers who act together for their own “mutual aid or

protection,” regardless of their collective bargaining status. Workers who are aware of

these rights can therefore join forces to improve their working conditions, knowing

that if their employers retaliate (e.g., with their dismissal or discipline), they will have

suffered an unfair labor practice under the NLRA’s Section 8. Section 8 makes it ille-

gal for employers to interfere with the employee rights in Section 7, and workers may

be eligible for reinstatement and back wages. What has changed is less the law, there-

fore, than the social and organizational infrastructure around the law, including 1) the

decline of the private sector unions, 2) the increasing prevalence of worker centers that

have arisen to fill the gap left by the unions’ demise, and 3) their creative use of a law

that has been almost exclusively the domain of unions. Although unorganized workers

have traditionally been unaware of the NLRA, and have thus turned to Section 7—if

at all—in an ad hoc manner after suffering retaliation, worker centers and legal justice

clinics increasingly are informing workers of their rights, thus making them more

likely to act proactively in their own defense. Such efforts are particularly pronounced

in the lower depths of the US labor market, where immigrants are omnipresent, unions