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Having spent the last several years helping workers organize, Saket Soni encounters the changing nature of work on a daily basis. Many people – whether they wear blue, pink or white collars – are dealing with the new reality of the precarious economy.
For example, a few weeks ago in Massachusetts, Soni helped organize a group of janitors, many of whom were immigrants or undocumented, whose jobs shifted to piece rate work. They decided to seek the support of the teachers at the local college.
“We had this fascinating encounter with a beautiful couple … they were adjunct faculty – and they were working piece rate. They had been transformed into contingent workers – working class by class,” Soni said.
The teachers had to supplement their classroom pay with online work, which also turned out to be piece rate. This was similar to the way the janitors had been supplementing their income with restaurant work as line cooks and dishwashers, he added.
Soni, who is executive director of the National Guestworker Alliance and the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice, spoke recently at an event organized by the University of Minnesota Labor Education Service for past and current participants in its Minnesota Union Leadership Program. He has become nationally known for his organizing among day laborers and other workers in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina.
The future of employment is being transformed in major, structural ways, Soni said. If the labor movement is to remain relevant – and be able to raise standards for workers – it needs to respond, he said.
Soni’s vision of labor organizing is two-fold: broadening the definition of the labor movement to include nonunion groups and at the same time narrowing the scope – honing in on very specific grassroots movements to execute the necessary change.
In the beginning of his speech he announced the founding of an affiliate structure of the National Guestworker Alliance called New Worker Network, consisting of 15 worker centers across the country. Worker centers are places where people come together to address workplace issues, often with the support of the community.
“[These workers] are trying to find the same things that union workers are trying to find. They are trying to get to collective bargaining. But they are just further away from the table,” said Soni.
Three big shifts
According to Soni, in organizing exploited workers in a precarious economy, one must recognize three big shifts. The first is the change in the nature of employment.
“The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that 42.6 million workers, a third of the workforce, is contingent,” said Soni. He added that many jobs are ascribing to the antiquated “piece rate” pay system, where a worker is paid a fixed rate for each unit of what he or she produces. For example, if a farmer grows a strawberry, he or she is paid for that strawberry.
The second major shift is seen through the change in the nature of unemployment as people are out of work for longer periods of time.
Soni argued that workers can no longer rely on the economy bouncing back and their jobs reappearing. He added that 40 percent of people who are unemployed remain so for more than 27 weeks.
“Try being unemployed for 27 weeks and then going into an interview and the first question you get is not, ‘So tell me about your skill set.’ It’s, ‘Why have you been unemployed for 27 weeks? What’s wrong with you?’” said Soni.
This is also a racial problem, he said, noting that African Americans are unemployed three times longer than white workers and Latinos are unemployed for twice as long as white workers.
The third major shift has been in the abandonment of the local labor market – the idea that someone can live and work in the same region. Soni said that this is not only detrimental to immigrant workers who are forced to move to support their families abroad but also to the process of organizing labor movements.
In short, the global labor market can undercut the costs of a local labor market.
“The idea of the local labor market has completely fallen apart. Workers can now be sourced from anywhere to anywhere,” said Soni. He argued that organizing by creating a crisis in a tight labor market no longer exists – that there is no single bargaining unit and there is no single labor market anymore.
Living the new corporate model
In August 2011, one month before Occupy Wall Street drew worldwide attention to the struggles of the 99%, Soni helped a group of 250 guestworkers organize and occupy the Hershey candy processing plant in Hershey, Pa., for three days. The protestors were college students in their home countries and were brought to the United States through an exchange program.
These workers, hailing from about a dozen different countries, were paid between $1 and $5 an hour after deductions and were forced to pay to live in unfurnished company housing, often sleeping on the floor, Soni said.
Soni explained how these students were threatened with retaliation, deportation, and shame on their families. When they sat down with the company, Hershey executives told them the firm had outsourced its distribution to another global agency. That agency claimed no responsibility also because they had contracted the work out to a temp agency – and the finger pointing continued down a chain of companies.
“More and more work in the U.S. is looking more and more like the work of the Hershey workers,” said Soni.
The student workers pursued their case through the U.S. Labor Department and eventually won more than $200,000 in back pay.
More recently, Soni worked with a group of Mexican immigrants toiling on 24-hour shifts, locked into a facility peeling, packing and processing seafood on the Gulf Coast in Louisiana.
“We came in and we proposed to them: You’re not going to win as seafood workers. That’s not a category a lot of people can come together around,” Soni said. Instead, because the small seafood company was sourcing to Walmart, the group could focus on being Walmart supply chain workers and gain more leverage, he said.
Eventually, the workers had the opportunity to have the first-ever meeting about supply chain standards with Walmart executives. Interestingly, they walked away from the deal because they did not get what they wanted.
“They come out imagining what you and I might call a secondary strike – a supply chain boycott of Walmart. Not knowing whether it’s allowed or not by law – not caring!” said Soni. “That is what is going to re-ignite and re-inspire the labor movement.”
Next steps and lingering questions
Because they can operate outside the restrictions of federal labor law, worker centers are a critical component for building worker power, Soni said. At the same time, they lack the resources and institutional structures that make unions so important.
“The kind of sustainability and scale of a union does not yet exist for a worker center,” Soni said. “However, what does exist for worker centers is an extraordinary, completely incredible energy, moral authority, and a kind of militancy.”
Some unions engage with worker centers, but it remains to be seen whether these relationships can re-invigorate the labor movement, which faces a number of complex challenges, Soni said.