Working for Justice: The L.a. Model of Organizing and Advocacy
edited by Ruth Milkman, Joshua Bloom, and Victor Narro
(Cornell University Press)
I first found out about this book when I got an email from one of my activist friends, which she had sent out to all her activist friends, about the release party. I couldn’t make it that night, but the book seemed like the perfect thing to review for a political feminist website, so I ordered a copy as soon as I could. (You may think that, as a book reviewer, I get free copies of books. Very often this is true – in fact, some publishers like to send me two, even three copies of a new title, just to show they’re serious – but most of the university presses are too high and mighty for the likes of us.) Working For Justice argues that Los Angeles has its own distinct style of union and worker center organizing – that the transformation of the labor market through globalization and deregulation has led organizers to find creative new strategies for achieving fair working conditions. As a union member and labor activist (who worked on one of the very campaigns discussed in the book), I opened it hoping for – nay, expecting – a cornucopia of ideas and tactics that I could take to the organizers of my own campaigns.
I should probably mention that I fall prey to wishful thinking pretty easily.
What I didn’t know – and, in my defense, what the book’s ambiguous subject heading of “labor” doesn’t make incredibly clear – was that the book was written by sociologists for sociologists, and thus is almost unreadable to someone outside of academia. By unreadable, I don’t mean that it’s full of jargon or discipline-specific grammar; a college-educated reader shouldn’t have a problem parsing its sentences. I mean, rather, that most of the essays focus more on documenting the evolution of various organizations than tackling any specific problems, which makes for some of the most mind-numbingly boring prose I’ve ever seen in my life. And I’ve read the unabridged Moby Dick! I’m sure the essays are valuable to some activist somewhere, but over and over again I found myself slogging through quotidian details like the hiring of new staff members and the scheduling of coalition meetings, and then wiping my brow and groaning in exhaustion. Again, I don’t think that this types of minutiae is of no use to anyone; rather, I think the authors failed to demonstrate why it’s useful.
Look, the book is what it is; I know I shouldn’t criticize it for being a different genre than I expected. I won’t claim that sociologists should apologize for writing essays that further the field of sociology. I do think, though, that there’s an interesting problem at work here. It’s no secret that scholarly writing often feels sterile and irrelevant to a reader outside of a particular field, and I suppose in many fields that’s unavoidable. But is it possible to blur the boundaries between scholarly and popular writing without sacrificing the usefulness of a text for either scholars or laypeople? (If you’re reading this, bell hooks, feel free to chime in.)
Furthermore, I wondered about the book’s relationship to the workers around which it revolves. A back cover blurb boasts that the book “provide[s] access [to labor movements] that academics rarely achieve,” but is the field of sociology so backwards that writers get pats on the back for merely interacting with the people they write about? In the forward, Joshua Bloom mentions “an ongoing national dialogue among scholars, advocates, and activists,” but I wonder what happens when rank-and-file workers read the book. Are they, like me, left scratching their heads?
In any case, I did get some useful tidbits out of it. My favorite essay was Jong Bum Kwon’s “The Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance: Spatializing Justice in an Ethnic ‘Enclave,'” which chronicled the rise and development of KIWA, a worker center that serves low-wage workers of various ethnicities in Koreatown. First off, Kwon does a great job of highlighting what makes KIWA an effective organization, emphasizing its shrewd mix of aggressive direct actions and more flexible, subtle tactics. One especially impressive moment was KIWA’s ability, as they were facing defeat in a campaign to unionize Assi Market workers, to use their failure as a springboard to a larger living wage campaign. They couldn’t help the workers at Assi, but they did manage to start normalizing the idea of fair wages in the community. Even more intriguing, though, is Kwon’s insight into how labor organizing has changed Koreatown’s very concept of itself, from a space inhabited by wealthy entrepreneurs where low-wage workers, especially Latinos, are made invisible, to a multi-class, multi-ethnic community. Chinyere Osuji, in her study of “noncitizen citizenship,” highlights a similar phenomenon in the annual May Day marches, during which the very act of publicly displaying one’s ethnic heritage can be a potent strategy for changemaking.
All in all, if you’re looking for the type of material that’s included in Working For Justice, then Working For Justice is where you’ll find it. As for the editors’ claim that “the L.A. model” differs from organizing around the country – well, some comparisons to other cities would have made that difference more clear to me, but then, I think it’s obvious by now that I wasn’t the audience most of these writers had in mind.