Author: Lola Loustaunau
Organizing Against Disposability: Latinx Immigrant Workers in the Pacific Northwest
Precariousness has been at the center of the literature discussing working conditions for the past three decades. The ongoing collective effort to not only theorize but also provide detailed information regarding the particularities of work arrangements that can be characterized as precarious is vast (Campbell and Price 2016; Carré 2000; Carré and Heintz 2009; Kalleberg 2000, 2009, 2011; Smith 1997; Standing 2014; Vosko 2006). Scholars have also focused on immigrant workers and their efforts to collectively organize (Bronfenbrenner 1998; Fine 2015; Gordon 2005; Milkman 2011; Milkman and Ott 2014)
This paper will contribute to this effort by exploring the working conditions that non-English speaking Latinx workers faced at an industrial bakery in the Pacific Northwest. I will look into the workers collective organizing efforts to change their working conditions. This led to a unionization attempt with a formal vote, filing a class action lawsuit after the vote was lost, and advocating for legislation change at the state level. Critically analyzing this experience sheds light on the challenges and particularities of organizing precarious immigrant workers. Combining this case with literature devoted to immigrant workers’ organizing, this paper will also provide tentative path to answer how a multilingual, multiethnic workforce with diverse legal statuses can be successfully organized.
Using a Grounded Theory approach (Charmaz 2014), I draw from 15 in-depth interviews with Latinx workers, union organizers and lawyers, as well as participant observation in workers’ group meetings and house visits with union organizers, all of which was conducted between the Summer of 2016 and the Winter of 2017. Additionally, to triangulate my empirical sources, I collected and analyzed the following written sources: news media articles, Occupation Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) reports, information presented in the lawsuit and other documents provided by the workers, which included internal posters and information used by management at the bakery.
In the current political climate, it is more pressing than ever that labor scholars turn their attention to workers confronting intersections of precarity through their collective action. The case study analyzed in this research is a step in that direction.