Author Description

"How can movement actors navigate the tensions between allyship, representation, and power while striving for transformative change? This question serves as the cornerstone of Worker Centered, which provides an ethnographic study of a worker center campaign run at a primarily low-wage, immigrant workplace. Alongside an innovative strategic model, the organization drew on deeply held commitments to the leadership of workers. These values lie at the root of the conflict the book explores, where a group of labor allies-activists and staffers who have devoted their lives to the importance of worker leadership-run a campaign that is decidedly not led by workers and yet is continually framed as such. In following the campaign from an insider perspective, Worker Centered explores the complexities of member-led movement work and illustrates the challenges that the staff faced in their work-both internal tensions of strategy and analysis as well as external hurdles of employer resistance and the strength of pro-employer narratives among workers. Though using an approach grounded in strategic thinking about power based in their political values of worker leadership, the campaign staff ultimately failed to reach its goals. The question is why. The answer is not about a lack of commitment among staffers and allies nor about a fervent counter campaign. Instead, we will see a much more ambiguous story, one characterized by an ambitious strategy with limited capacity and a workforce with only, at best, muted enthusiasm for the campaign. In this context we will see how the narrative of worker leadership continually defined how staff and allies made sense of the campaign and acted in its name. In following the tenacious work of staff and allies to win the campaign, this book emphasizes the transformative nature of movement work, where our aim is not to unveil some natural predisposition to collective action or justice but to fundamentally alter how someone sees the world and acts wi