WORKER EQUITY INITIATIVE RESOURCES
Worker centers are community-based organizations that support and address the needs of low-wage workers, underemployed, underrepresented marginalized populations, and immigrants by transforming industry practices. Worker centers provide direct services, organize workers for collective action, and advocate for policy change at the state and local level to contest substandard working conditions and expand economic opportunity.
This page provides analyses on the California worker and worker center ecosystems and reports that address employment inequities and provide policy recommendations regarding Black and Latinx worker centers and Day Labor worker centers. This page also outlines the National Worker Center landscape and provides recommendations to improve and expand worker centers and unions.
California Worker Center Ecosystem
Community Work
Day Labor Worker Centers
Landscape of Worker Centers
Worker Centers and Unions
Worker Centers and Workforce Development
This page provides analyses on the California worker and worker center ecosystems and reports that address employment inequities and provide policy recommendations regarding Black and Latinx worker centers and Day Labor worker centers. This page also outlines the National Worker Center landscape and provides recommendations to improve and expand worker centers and unions.
California Worker Center Ecosystem
- California Worker Center Ecosystem: Report presents a scan of California's worker center ecosystem to assess key strategies, identify challenges and opportunities, and offer recommendations to strengthen the infrastructure of California's worker center ecosystem.
- California Worker Ecosystem: Highlights key lessons, insights and gaps of worker ecosystem and capacity needs. The report includes an overview of the methodology and insights, recommendations for impact, organizations to watch, a field scan, and a philanthropy overview for each key lesson.
Community Work
- Los Angeles Black Worker Center Research Brief: Highlights impacts of unemployment and discriminatory practices in employment of black workers. Discusses how worker centers can help, and plans for addressing the black jobs crisis from the LA Black Worker Center.
- Empowerment through Peer Counseling: Developing Immigrant Women as Advocates and Leaders: Describes a case study involving Mujeres Unidas y Activas, which was established to increase its organizational capacity to reach, educate, and empower Latina immigrant domestic violence survivors to become community leaders based on a strengthening of cultural competency and replication of its peer counseling model.
- Ready to Work Uprooting Inequity: Black Workers in Los Angeles County: Report looks at the experience of the Black community in Los Angeles through a labor and employment lens, and details how the lack of access to quality jobs is adversely impacting the community. Centered on an extensive literature review, an analysis of government data, and the collection of worker’s stories and case studies, this report draws a portrait of the challenges that Black workers in Los Angeles face and this community’s present employment crisis.
Day Labor Worker Centers
- Day Labor Worker Centers: Report profiles day-labor in the US and describes the purpose of day-labor worker centers. Also provides policy recommendations to improve conditions in day-labor market.
- How Can Investments in Workforce Training Meaningfully Address the Needs of Immigrant Workers?: Report discusses the key takeaways from the day labor worker survey and workforce development convening in greater detail and highlights how community-based organizations have the frontline expertise and wraparound structure necessary to lead the workforce development system to a more promising future for workers.
- National Day Laborer Organizing Network: Describes project focussed on providing the immigrant and day laborer workforce educational opportunities relevant to their lives. Provides a description of results, lessons learned, challenges, and plans for the future to serve day laborers to protect and expand their civil, labor, and human rights.
- Workforce Training and Day Labor: Report discusses the key takeaways from the day laborer worker survey, recognizing the unique needs and challenges of day laborers. Also discusses the findings from the workforce development convening. Provides recommendations for community-based organizations to have the frontline expertise and wraparound structure necessary to lead the workforce development system to a more promising future for workers.
Landscape of Worker Centers
- Sectoral Worker Center Networks: Addresses the purpose of worker centers and worker center networks, their roles as labor market institutions and social movement organizations, and their focus on particular sectors of the low-wage labor market. Also discusses the impact of changing economic structures on low-wage workers.
- Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream: Defines worker centers and their purpose as a community-based mediating institution to provide support to low-wage workers. Examines how changing immigration patterns in the U.S. lead to the critical rise of immigrant worker centers. Describes case studies that were conducted to identify different worker center models, evaluate the effectiveness of worker center strategy in improving the lives of low wage workers, and highlight key lessons, strengths, weaknesses, and future challenges.
- Worker Centers: Past, Present, and Future: Outlines how worker centers have worked to build power for workers, strengthen partnerships with unions, raise standards in low-wage industries, and design new inclusive labor and social policies to benefit all workers.
- Worker Center Research Library: Provides reports on industry studies, strategies, networks, worker organizing, organizations, and alliances.
- Worker Center Trajectories: Provides introduction to worker centers and the context in which they emerged. Also explains why worker centers engage in a non-profit service and advocacy model instead of a union or community organizing model. Analyzes the trajectory of worker center growth and what accounts for growth spurts, geographic distribution of centers, and size of centers.
Worker Centers and Unions
- LIFT Fund Worker Center and Labor Union Affiliation Study: Report evaluates the affiliation process and establishes recommendations for the AFL-CIO on how to expand and strengthen worker centers and unions. Also addresses inclusivity and organization culture.
Worker Centers and Workforce Development
- New Directions in Racial and Economic Justice: How California's Worker Centers Are Bringing Worker Power into Workforce Development: Report highlights the role worker centers have in the state's public workforce development system in creating opportunities for socioeconomic mobility. Worker centers utilize a unique approach to workforce development that is community- and worker- centered, industry-responsive and systems-oriented.
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