Organizing Immigrant Workers in New York City: The LIUNA Asbestos Removal Workers Campaign

Abstract

This article examines how the new LIUNA organizers re-created a working union, successfully rebuilding its membership base and estab lishing enforceable recognition and bargaining relationships with man agement. We maintain that understanding the structure of local industries and local markets is essential to formulating and implementing successful organizing campaigns. Unions need to take into account both preexisting compromises and the constantly shifting balance of power between capi tal and labor. Unions need to adapt to changes in the local labor market by formulating strategies to address vertical disintegration. Encouraging construction industry networks and employer associations is one such strategy that was employed in the LIUNA campaign. Another, comple mentary, strategy was aimed at fluid labor markets and their undermining of trade union power and wage standards. In New York City, construction firms had subcontracted asbestos removal work to labor brokers who employed a work force made up almost entirely of recent immigrants. To rebuild the union, the campaign appealed to the interests of these mostly undocumented workers by recruiting as organizers respected members of immigrant networks.

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