Worker Centered Allyship & Action in the Contemporary Labor Movement

Progressive political organizing faces a chicken-and-egg predicament. On the one hand, those who are most impacted by a circumstance should be the ones identifying problems and developing solutions. On the other hand, simply being a worker does not make one a unionist or anti-capitalist. When activists are moved to address the perceived injustices that other groups experience, they can get caught in a strong tension between their professed ethic of bottom-up leadership and their desire to change the status quo.

Worker Centered is a close-to-the-ground, ethnographic narrative of a workplace organizing campaign at a company whose workforce was primarily low wage and immigrant. The book details the overall strategy of the campaign and its ultimate failure to win its core demands. The organization used an innovative strategic model and insisted on the importance of worker leadership. And yet allies and staff participated in a campaign that, although continually framed as such, was decidedly not led by workers. In crucial ways, the mere idea of a worker-led union acted as the interpretive frame that stitched the entire enterprise together. Ultimately, Worker Centered challenges conventional notions of political representation, inviting reflection on the complexities of organizing the marginalized and speaking on their behalf.

Biko Koenig is Assistant Professor in the Government and Public Policy programs at Franklin & Marshall college in Lancaster, PA, and co-founder of Research|Action, a worker-owned research and organizing firm. Trained as an ethnographer and qualitative specialist at the New School for Social Research, Koenig's research investigates questions of political behavior and mobilization that centers the experiences of everyday actors as they seek to challenge status-quo power relationships.