Eve Tushnet
via Jesse Walker:
…The Walmart agreement is the latest, the largest, and probably the most surprising win for C.I.W. in a decade-and-a-half campaign to increase wages and ease working conditions for Florida produce workers. For free marketeers the story is how the agreements were won: entirely without government certification, regulatory backing or legal protection. C.I.W.’s innovative use of protests, pressure campaigns and solidarity boycotts to win concessions from the world’s biggest food corporations would be illegal had they stuck to bureaucratic templates for mainline, National Labor Relations Board-certified unions.
C.I.W. is a community-based worker organization, made up of tomato pickers in Immokalee, a migrant farmworker community in southwest Florida. Extremely poor, nearly all immigrants, many undocumented, and speaking four different languages, C.I.W.’s workers are exactly the sort of precarious manual laborers that AFL-line unions have written off as too transient or too divided to organize. Conventional unions have little incentive to try; from the Wagner Act on, U.S. labor law excludes farmworkers, domestic laborers, and independent contractors from legal bargaining-unit certification. …
C.I.W.’s big wins make them one of the most successful examples of the emerging trend of “alt-labor” organizations. Groups like C.I.W., the Restaurant Opportunities Center, OUR Walmart, and the Domestic Workers United dispense with formal unionization, sidestepping both the privileges and constraints of NLRB labor law, and employ deliberately non-state mechanisms – workplace activism, outreach to consumers, shaming protests, and pressure campaigns—to mobilize workers, provide social support and pressure companies for better pay and conditions. Alt-labor approaches have proven especially successful for workers excluded from NLRB recognition, or in sectors (like low-wage service or restaurant work) where AFL-style collective bargaining has proven difficult or impossible.
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