organizing low-wage immigrants—the workplace project

Organizing Low-Wage Immigrants

WorkingUSA—Summer 2001 87

JENNIFER GORDON is the founder and former executive director of the Workplace Project in NewYork, a nationally recognized grass-roots workers center that organizes low-wage Latino immigrantsto fight for just treatment on the job. Led by an all-immigrant-worker board of directors, the Projectuses a combination of organizing, community education, and legal and legislative advocacy strate-gies. Gordon left the Project in 1998. In that year, she was named “Outstanding Public InterestAdvocate of the Year” by the National Association for Public Interest Law. She was awarded aMacArthur Prize Fellowship in 1999.

WorkingUSA, vol. 5, no. 1, Summer 2001, pp. 87–102.© 2001 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved.ISSN 1089–7011 / 2001 $9.50 + 0.00.

Organizing Low-WageImmigrants—TheWorkplace ProjectInterview with Jennifer Gordon

In 1992, Jennifer Gordon founded the Workplace Project, aLong Island-based labor-organizing center committed todeveloping and expanding the economic, political, and socialpower of recent immigrants working in low-wage jobs. In thelast decade, the Workplace Project has become a vitalinstitution for organizing immigrant workers to advance theirown interests, with a primary objective of bringing workers intoleadership positions. Gordon’s model of worker education isdrawn from Paolo Freire’s philosophy of popular education,stressing the importance of participant leadership andinvolvement, and is based on the belief, with its attendantpractices, that worker education and organizing are ongoingprocesses. By relentlessly accentuating worker participation, theWorkplace Project has become a vibrant labor organization thatbuilds worker and community solidarity and unconventionalforms of unionization. Its victories have included the passage ofpathbreaking legislation that expanded the political andeconomic power of recent immigrants.

Interview with Gordon

88 WorkingUSA—Summer 2001

QWhat is the Workplace Project?A. The Project is an independent membership center that or-

ganizes Latino immigrant workers in Long Island, New York. Ithas about six hundred members, most of whom work in low-wage service jobs such as landscaping, small construction, do-mestic work, janitorial, restaurants, and so on. Its Board ofDirectors is composed of all immigrant workers elected fromthe membership, and most of its staff members are immigrantsas well. I stepped down as director in 1998. The organizationhas continued to grow and develop since then under directorNadia Marín-Molina.

QHow does the Workplace Project define “organizing”?Is the goal always—or ever—a contract? What are a few ex-amples of the Workplace Project’s organizing campaigns?

A. The Workplace Project organizes at a number of differentlevels—around individual workers’ claims, at particular work-places, across industries, and around issues that affect all low-wage workers. Some of its most intensive work has beenindustrywide with domestic workers and day laborers.

For example, the first Workplace Project day labor campaignwas an organizing effort with workers on the three major streetcorners in Nassau County. It raised daily wages by about 30 per-cent through the most basic kind of organizing: The workersformed committees, the committees met to set the same wagefor all those corners, and workers enforced the wage by refus-ing to get in the trucks of contractors who would not pay the setwage. The project lasted three years, from 1994 through 1996,during which the base wage on the corner went from $40 to $60for an eight-hour day, and it has held at that level or higher.

Despite that success, the organization encountered a lot of



challenges in organizing day laborers around wages. One hadto do with the way the corners worked. The workers who wereelected to represent the corner on the committee were those rec-ognized as leaders by the others on the corner—those who hadthe most skills, spoke the most English, were most respected.Those same people were also the first to get work each day. Soas the day went on, the committee would fall apart. A similarprocess of attrition took place as the season went on—over timethe workers on the committee often got permanent jobs. Whenharsh federal immigration measures passed in 1996 and peoplebecame desperate to make what money they could, at whateverwage, because they feared they were going to be deported, theorganizing effort dissolved. Workers were no longer able to holdthe committees together, and the Workplace Project had no in-terest in forcing people to form committees.

Since 1999, the Workplace Project has gone back to workingwith day laborers, this time in Farmingville in Suffolk County,where they are under attack from organized anti-immigrantgroups.

QThe day laborers model is reminiscent of the IndustrialWorkers of the World model—where unified workers are ableto force employers to pay the wages that they demand. This isclearly an effective short-term form of unionization outside ofthe collective bargaining agreement.

A. It can be effective, but it is limited. You have no contract;the wage that workers decide on is enforced through direct, face-to-face demands. In some industries it is the best we can do, butit is too easy to romanticize that kind of organizing. Having seenit firsthand, I am very aware of where the romance falls short. Astable contract has real advantages. Contracts are extraordinar-ily important in institutionalizing gains.



On the other hand, a contract is not a substitute for ongoingorganizing. Too often unions operate on the philosophy that orga-nizing is what you do until you get a contract, then you stop orga-nizing and service the contract. That is a real waste of theleadership and energy that the initial campaign generates. Orga-nizing is an ongoing process that should be happening all thetime.

QYou mentioned a campaign with domestic workers. Howsuccessful was that?

A. The Workplace Project domestic worker campaign was re-ally interesting. In 1997 the organization’s domestic work com-mittee, made up of immigrant women, developed an organizingcampaign that focused on the intermediaries, the six largest do-mestic worker placement agencies in Nassau County. The agen-cies were advertising domestic workers at less than minimumwage and charging the worker double the legal fee for the privi-lege of a sub-minimum-wage job. The committee came up witha list of demands—including an end to those practices and thenew requirement of an up-front contract through which theworker would have a record of the promises made to her aboutwages and conditions of work—which were incorporated into aWorkplace Project Domestic Worker Bill of Rights.

Then they organized allies, including the Industrial AreasFoundation group Long Island CAN and churches and syna-gogues, to support the campaign. Allies’ members called em-ployment agencies and said that they would not hire domesticworkers through those agencies unless they signed the bill ofrights. The campaign also used pickets of agencies, accountabil-ity sessions with agency heads and public officials, and mediaexposure of agency practices. The organization was able to forcefive out of six agencies to sign the bill of rights.



Another part of the Project’s approach to organizing domesticworkers since I left has been the development over the past threeyears of the Unity Cooperative, a worker-owned and -operatedhousecleaning co-op that has been very successful.

Q Your best-known campaign was the Unpaid Wages Pro-hibition Act, which targeted all industries that employed work-ers below minimum standards. Can you tell us more aboutthe effort?

A. Many Workplace Project members were angry that the NewYork State Department of Labor, the agency in charge of enforc-ing wage laws for many immigrant workers (those whose jobswere not covered by federal law), was failing to respond to theircomplaints about underpayment and nonpayment of wages.People brought claims to the department’s Long Island officeand were rejected. The officer would say, “You’re a domesticworker, and it is your word against your employer’s, so I justdon’t take these cases,” or “You’re a construction worker, and Iknow you were paid off the books, and you are going to owe asmuch in taxes as you can get back in wages, so let’s just forgetthis.” Every time that happened, beginning in 1993, we wouldhave people come back to the Workplace Project and swear outan affidavit, and for years the organization collected them. Atthe same time people’s frustration grew.

In early 1996 the workers’ frustration boiled over. The mem-bership met over three months to develop a strategy to deal withthe problem. They decided that they wanted to see a penalty fornot paying workers that was high enough to be self-enforcing.That is, employers would so fear the possible consequences ofnot paying that they would comply with the law. The penalty atthe time was a 25 percent fine on top of what the employer owedfor repeat or willful nonpayment of wages. Workplace Project



members decided they wanted to see a 200 percent penalty. Atthe time it was a misdemeanor to repeatedly not pay your work-ers. They wanted to make it a felony. There were a number ofother changes they wanted to see as well.

Then we all took a look at the political picture, which was prettyclear. The anti-immigrant Proposition 187 was becoming law inCalifornia, and a number of New York State legislators wantedto bring many of Proposition 187’s provisions to New York State.Republicans controlled the Senate, and George Pataki, a Repub-lican, controlled the governorship. If this bill that WorkplaceProject members had pulled together was going to have any hopeof passage, it needed not only Republican votes but also Repub-lican sponsorship in the Senate, and it needed Governor Pataki’ssignature. With that in mind, Workplace Project members crafteda message about the bill designed to appeal to Republicans. It isworth pausing here to say that this is the kind of work that wouldusually be done by strategy staff in a top-down organizing model.What was interesting about this effort was how intensively work-ers participated at the strategy level as well as when it cametime to mobilize around the strategy. The message they devisedemphasized that the bill—by now called the Unpaid Wages Pro-hibition Act—was going to keep people off public benefits, putmoney in the state’s coffers through penalties and taxes (becausethe same employers who do not pay their workers also evadetaxes), and advance the interests of “good” businesses in NewYork by punishing the “bad” businesses that were undercuttingthem by paying sub-minimum wages. On that theory, the orga-nization was able to get Long Island’s most prominent businessassociation, the Long Island Association, to sign on to the bill.The Long Island Chapter of the New York State Restaurant As-sociation also endorsed the bill.

With that message, Workplace Project members began prepar-ing to take the bill to the legislature. Almost no Workplace Project



members could vote, almost none of them could speak English.But they themselves carried out the meetings in groups of five,ten, fifteen with Republican legislators and their staff. They didit in Spanish with simultaneous translation. Members spent nightafter night preparing at the Workplace Project. Different mem-bers took responsibility for responding to different kinds of ques-tions that regularly came up—did this bill help “illegals,” wouldit be a drain on the state’s resources, what was the Departmentof Labor’s position, and so on. We would neutralize the possi-bility that the senator and his staff would turn to the only En-glish-speaking person in the room by putting that person on thesimultaneous translation headphone, so there was nobody totalk to but the immigrant workers, who were very articulateadvocates for their cause.

After an eighteen-month campaign, we succeeded in gettinga number of Republican senators, even those who had previouslytaken anti-immigrant positions, to support the legislation. The billpassed unanimously in both the Senate and the Assembly. After afurther organizing fight, another eight weeks, we were able to getGovernor Pataki to sign the legislation into law. The Farm Bu-reau, which represents agricultural employers’ interests, put agreat deal of pressure on him not to sign it. But the Project wasable to generate pressure against him—including a New York TimesLabor Day editorial—and he signed in the end. New York Statenow has the strongest wage enforcement law in the country.

QHow does the average immigrant worker come to jointhe Workplace Project?

A. I don’t want to speak for the organization now, since itsapproach has changed somewhat. But when I was at the Projectthere were two points of entry: the organization’s legal clinicand the Workers Course. About a third of the members came in



through the clinic. The Workplace Project legal clinic drew inimmigrants with active labor problems, such as unpaid wagesor discrimination. The thinking behind the clinic was twofold:that the project needed to have a concrete benefit to offer people,something that would serve as the initial attraction; and that aclinic around labor issues would bring in people in the midst ofa labor crisis, on the theory that people who had complaints abouttheir work would be more interested in organizing than thosewho had no problems on the job.

About two-thirds of the members had come in because theyhad heard of the work the group was doing through friends,coworkers, or the Spanish-language media, they became inter-ested in joining, and they took the Workers Course, which is aprerequisite for membership. Upon graduation from that class,an immigrant worker could choose to become a member of theWorkplace Project, and almost everybody who took the class,with only a handful of exceptions, chose to join. So the combina-tion of the clinic and the course was an effective conduit to mem-bership. Of course, over time fewer people stayed to becomeactive than joined at first. Perhaps 15–20 percent of the member-ship was active. At the point when I left the Workplace Projectin 1998, there were about five hundred members, of whom aboutone hundred were active.

Q What does it mean for an immigrant worker to be “ac-tive” at the Workplace Project?

A. An active member participates in one of the organization’scommittees—which, when I was at the organization, includedthe Women’s Organizing Committee focusing on domestic workissues, the Day Laborers Organizing Committee, the Justice Com-mittee, which protested outside the homes of employers whodid not pay their workers, and so on. Now the committees are



industry-based. Those committees plan and carry out the Work-place Project’s organizing campaigns. An active member is onat least one committee and helps strategize campaigns and carrythem out, then evaluate them. Or an active member might be amember of the organization’s housecleaning cooperative, Unity.Members also come to the monthly membership meetings, serveon the board, and participate in fund-raising for the organiza-tion, but the heart of the active membership comes through thesecommittees.

Q You described the organization’s legal clinic as a “draw”for the Project. What role do you see service as playing inorganizing?

A. In my experience, service can play an important support-ing role in organizing. But you have to recognize the dangers.The Workplace Project has always struggled with how to pro-vide service in ways that serve organizing ends. Its legal clinic,designed both to draw people into the organization and to be aconduit to organizing, has gone through a variety of formatsover time as the organization has tried to avoid the perils thatservice can pose to organizing.

It is worth spelling out what some of those risks are. A legalclinic that focuses on recovering unpaid wages as a way to drawnew immigrants into the organizing effort can end up under-mining organizing in a number of ways. First, if the service issuccessful, people will definitely be attracted to the group—butbecause of the service it provides, not necessarily because of theorganizing it seeks to do! In other words, the group gets a repu-tation as a service organization, not an organizing organization.Two, the people who come to the clinic with live problems maybe very angry and motivated to organize at that moment. Byresolving their cases through a legal proceeding, you short-



circuit the possibility that their anger will flow into organizing.Likewise, some people who come into the clinic may be leadersin their workplaces, and if you resolve their cases alone, you can“behead” a potential organizing effort by, in essence, buying offthe leader. Finally, such a clinic can also reinforce the sense thatthe legal process is the best method to solve workers’ problems—not organizing.

Given these problems, it takes a lot of thought to create a ser-vice approach that actually does lead to organizing, as opposedto one that cuts organizing off at the pass. In 1994 the WorkplaceProject realized that the legal clinic the organization had createdwas not, in fact, supporting organizing, so we retooled it so thatit would. One important part of this new strategy was requiringpeople to take the Workers Course in exchange for getting ser-vices. Another part was taking an organizing approach to resolv-ing the problems people brought into the clinic. The idea was tomake the clinic people’s first experience of the power of organiz-ing, to lead from the clinic to the course where people would havea chance to reflect on the systemic nature of the individual prob-lems that had brought them to the clinic, and to lead from thecourse to active and ongoing participation in the organization.

In 2000, the Project again reconfigured its legal clinic, this timemoving from an individual case approach toward group prob-lem-solving workshops and the formation of industry commit-tees. In other words, the Project has found that the key to effectiveuse of service is not any one structure—it is a constant evalua-tion process to make sure that the service is advancing the orga-nizing goals and not becoming an end in itself.

QWhat role do you see for popular education inorganizing?

A. The Project has tried to build a bridge from service (for



those who enter the organization with particular cases) to edu-cation to organizing. To achieve that, it has made popular edu-cation a central part of its organizing model.

To be eligible to join the Project, an immigrant worker musttake the Workers Course, a nine-week night class in Spanish onlabor law, organizing techniques, and labor and immigrationhistory. The Workers Course helps people develop critical con-sciousness and an organizing perspective. But part of the courseis structured to make practical links between education and ac-tion. For example, while I was at the workplace project, in theWorkers Course class session before graduation, representativesof the organization’s workers committees came to the class toinvite students to join both the organization and particular com-mittees. At the last class a list of the new members of each ofthose committees was presented, along with the next meetingtime, which was soon after the last class, so that people wouldtransition immediately from the habit of coming to the class tothe habit of coming to the committee.

The class is one of the organization’s real strengths. It hasplayed a critical role in building a sense of community amongmembers, in developing the membership’s systemic perspectiveon the problems they face, and in moving people who mightotherwise have drifted away toward a serious commitment toorganizing.

Q. Popular education is centered on the idea of “critical con-sciousness,” on the belief that people need to be critically con-scious in order to act. How did that play out at the WorkplaceProject?

A. It is interesting. I had always found Paolo Freire’s argu-ment convincing, that the way people go from passivity to ac-tion was through popular education, which creates criticalconsciousness. But in thinking back on my experience at theWorkplace Project, it is a lot more complicated than that.



If you think about Paolo Freire’s model in the most simplifiedterms, he basically says, “Workers suffer from false conscious-ness, and popular education is going to bring them to criticalconsciousness—and critical consciousness is going to lead toaction to advance their political and economic interests.” Start-ing at the beginning of this model, Friere was assuming that allworkers (or whoever we are working with) come into the class-room with the same level of consciousness. But if you examinethe composition of a typical class of immigrant workers at theWorkplace Project, they have had a wide range of experiencesand have very different views of the world. They come fromcountries with very different histories. They represent a varietyof races and classes and genders. Some are liberation theology

teachers in their home country, some are rural tenant farmers,some are union leaders, some of them have supported the mili-tary against revolutionary movements. Participants bring a hugerange of different perceptions about the world to the WorkersCourse. Certainly I do not feel comfortable looking at the peoplein that class and saying their consciousness is all the same, muchless that it is “false.”

It also seems to me that Freire thought we could look at anindividual and classify her as having one kind of consciousnessor another. But no one individual has a single, unified conscious-ness. All of us—workers, everybody—we all have messy andcontradictory minds. That is true going into a popular educa-tion class, and it is true coming out as well.

But no one individual has a single, unifiedconsciousness. All of us—workers,everybody—we all have messy andcontradictory minds.



And, finally, it is my experience that whatever level of criticalawareness a person develops through a class is rarely sufficient,alone, to move her into action. To begin to organize, most peopleneed much more. They need a sense that there is a real organiz-ing effort they can participate in, that the effort’s goals coincidewith their goals (not just their economic self-interest, but theirinterests defined more broadly), that they have the skills theywill need to organize, that they feel a sense of community withthe other people involved, and so on. So to be effective, a “con-sciousness” approach needs to examine more practically howpeople make the move from education to various kinds intoaction.

But to be fair, I should also say that it is a mistake to go all theway in the other direction and focus only on “skills training,”without doing a deeper analysis of what is going on systemi-cally. Education that separates skills from politics too often justmobilizes people into action without educating them in a deepersense. People do not have a chance to develop a long-term po-litical analysis and perspective and vision of social justice thatsustains them when things get hard and that helps them thinkstrategically over the long term—all those things you need tostay in organizing. So I still believe very strongly in educationthat starts with participants’ reality, moves on to analyze the rootcauses of the systemic problems they face, discusses long-termand short-term solutions, moves into action, and returns to re-flect and evaluate. That is the basic popular education model.

QWhat is the relationship between workers centers andlabor unions? Are workers centers in practice diametricallyopposed to the goals of unions?

A. The answer depends on the workers center. Some centerswere born of collaborations between unions and community



groups. Others experimented with joint campaigns with unionsover time. Still others do not work with unions at all.

In the case of the Workplace Project, the relationship varieswith the union. Initially, relationships with unions were a smallpart of the organization’s work. This was not as a result of someprinciple, but because domestic workers, day laborers, and work-ers in small restaurants had no union on Long Island. It was nota matter of saying, “We have to be an alternative to these ter-rible unions.” It was more that there was no union for most ofour members.

Where unions were interested, the organization had a highlevel of cooperation. On Long Island in the early 1990s, therewere a few unions that wanted to organize immigrants but feltthey did not have the cultural or even, with regard to immigra-tion issues, legal expertise to do that. The United Food and Com-mercial Workers (UFCW) local was one example. The WorkplaceProject fully supported several UFCW organizing campaigns.Our organizers would do trainings for their organizers. Therewere UFCW campaigns in which all the meetings between theunion organizers and the workers were held at the WorkplaceProject, and our organizer made visits to the workers hand inhand with the union’s organizer—a very close collaboration.

With some other unions, the Project’s membership had nooverlap, but we joined solidarity campaigns, for example, whenthere was a Teamsters strike at a King Kullen supermarket.Though the Teamsters were primarily white workers who earnedmuch more than our members, Workplace Project members gath-ered funds for them, went to support meetings, and walked pick-ets in solidarity with them. Although they were fewer, there weretimes when unions came in to support the Workplace Project onissues that grew from our work rather than theirs—like the Un-paid Wages Prohibition Act. So there was mutual support wherethere was not necessarily immediate joint organizing.



But then there were some cases where the organization sup-ported workers in dissent with their union because they werenot getting the service they needed or because they felt theyhad no voice. Most notably, at the time the project began, Ser-vice Employees International Union Local 32B/32J on LongIsland had a large number of immigrant members, but no oneon the union’s staff spoke Spanish. The Workplace Project wasconstantly in the position of helping those workers put pres-sure on their union because the union was not servicing thecontract on their behalf. The organization also helped severalgroups of workers who wanted to run for election as shop stew-ards or representatives within their unions. So the Project has hada wide range of relationships with unions, depending on the unionand the workers.

QWhat is your reaction to the AFL-CIO’s current posi-tion on immigration issues?

A. It is so important that the AFL-CIO came out for legaliza-tion and against employer sanctions. That was a long time incoming and is incredibly necessary. Now the work comes inmaking that commitment real, in at least two ways. To do thatwe have to directly address the fact that many members ofunions—and for that matter the leadership of many unions—donot support this position. There are very painful issues—issuesof race, of economic competition, of xenophobia—that we haveto talk about if we want to build unity around the immigrationquestion. And while we build that internal consensus, we haveto be working on an external strategy to make meaningful legal-ization possible. The only way I can imagine that happening isthrough a mass movement of immigrants and allies around thecountry. The AFL-CIO is ideally positioned to support and helpdevelop such a movement, but it is not happening yet.



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QMore leaders of organized labor are exploring new or-ganizing models. What do workers centers have to contributeto building the power of labor?

A. A few things. First is the example that workers centers pro-vide of creative organizing strategies in contexts where the tra-ditional union model has been unsuccessful—for example, withundocumented workers, or in labor markets where workerschange jobs and even industries frequently, or with industriescharacterized by very small businesses.

Another is workers centers’ dedication to bottom-up organiz-ing, where the membership plays a critical role in generatingand carrying out organizing strategy, and in governing the cen-ter as well. Organized labor has traditionally used a top-downorganizing model, where unions mobilize their members arounda strategy created by professional staff. That approach does toolittle to develop real leadership among workers. The WorkplaceProject found that the more time it put into developing the skillsof its membership and the more its members were involved inevery aspect of the organizing, the more powerful the organiza-tion became. That flies in the face of the common argument thatyou have to choose either democracy or efficiency. The point isthat it can be extremely efficient—if you see efficiency as theability to win hard campaigns over the long term—to pay seri-ous attention to democratic, bottom-up organizing.

organizing low-wage immigrants—the workplace project

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