Worker Centers Offer a Backdoor Approach to Union Organizing

BRONX, N.Y.—Juan Campis was sweating in the 90-plus degree heat as he whipped a white towel across a gleaming black Chevy TrailBlazer at a carwash here—one of six in the city that was unionized in recent months with help from two nonprofit community groups. "They're the ones that kept us all together and showed us the steps we needed to take," Mr. Campis, 20 years old, said of the community groups. Workers probably wouldn't have joined the union without daily contact from the two groups, he said.

The community groups, called worker centers, are often backed by unions. But they aren't considered "labor organizations" by law because they don't have continuing bargaining relationships with employers. That gives them more freedom in their use of picketing and other tactics than unions, which are constrained by national labor laws. The new approach is sparking a backlash from some businesses, who call it an end-run around labor laws that can be used to help unionize new groups of workers.

The Center for Union Facts, which opposes organized labor and gets much of its funding from corporations, said it is launching an advertising campaign criticizing ties between unions and worker centers.

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As union membership has fallen to 6.6% of the private sector, organized labor sees the worker centers as a new way to grow its ranks while mobilizing workers of all stripes. Workers who are first organized by worker centers can be later organized by unions. That is what happened with nearly 200 carwash workers in Los Angeles and New York, organized by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union and the United Steelworkers. The steelworkers union also is trying organize several hundred pizza factory workers in Wisconsin who joined a worker center.

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The plan to organize the city's 200 carwashes, which employ about 5,000 workers, many from Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador, came out of a 2011 meeting between leaders of NYCC and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union at the union's Manhattan offices in 2011, according to union President Stuart Appelbaum. Also involved was another larger community group, Make the Road New York, which has 13,000 members and charges $120 in annual dues. Tasks were divided up: The community groups would build community support to back an organizing campaign. The union would file for elections with the National Labor Relations Board.

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