Working for Justice: The L.A. Model of Organizing and Advocacy

Working for Justice serves both to refine and expand our knowledge of employee representation in Los Angeles through a collection of chapters related to union- and worker center-led efforts' on behalf of low-wage earning individuals. It offers a nuanced study of specific instances in which unions and advocacy groups have sought to organize low-wage workers . . . . The collection also takes us beyond the well-trodden ground of union advocacy in Los Angeles, introducing readers to the importance of worker centers within the region . . . . In so doing, the authors cover tremendously varied terrain while concurrently interweaving numerous threads of commonalities across the campaigns and organizing efforts to create a portrait of the intricate links between union and nonunion worker groups, a picture that most fully emerges in the excellent afterword. - J. Ryan Lamare, ILR Review (July 2011)

The essays in this volume offer us not only an informative account of some of the most vibrant and creative organizing campaigns to have emerged in recent years; they may also provide a glimpse of labor's future. -Joseph A. McCartin, Labor/Le Travail (Fall 2011)

Working for Justice is an excellent stepping off point for even more empirically rich, theoretically grounded studies of the workers' center movement. -Jacob Lesniewski, Critical Sociology (March 2012)

Working for Justice brings to light the struggles, the strategies, and the unlikely triumphs of organizations on the cutting edge of low-wage worker organizing in Los Angeles, the epicenter of labor's resurgence in the United States today. The book offers insights that can be found nowhere else and should be read eagerly by labor leaders and organizers, academics in fields from political science to sociology to law, and all others who seek a deeper understanding of how social change really happens. -Jennifer Gordon, Fordham Law School

If there is to be a paradigm shift toward public sociology, Working for Justice could serve as the exemplar. Community leaders and activists helped shape the questions that scholars pursued, provided access academics can rarely achieve, reviewed drafts and offered feedback, and in the process enriched scholarship and advanced theory. These are cutting-edge studies of little-known campaigns based on the Los Angeles model of intimate connections between unions and worker centers. -Dan Clawson, University of Massachusetts Amherst