Immigrants and Los Angeles labor unions: Negotiating empowerment, politics, and citizenship

"Immigrants and Los Angeles Labor Unions: Negotiating Empowerment, Politics, and Citizenship" examines the ways immigrants impact the infrastructure and ideological practices of the organized labor in the United States. This project provides an in-depth examination of two unions and one large-scale immigrant rights campaign and asks how unions succeed in an increasingly anti-union, anti-worker environment. The Chinese Daily News and the SEIU 434b case studies highlight the importance of creating organizations that actively engage with workers' everyday lives, not just the conditions that impact them in the workplace. The Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride case study analyzes a campaign that models itself after a social movement as a way to address increasing racial tensions within service industries, and within unions. While some unions struggle with issues related to immigrant participation in unions, or how to incorporate immigrants and immigrant rights into their agenda, the IWFR highlights the complex nature of race and ethnic relations in work, unionism, and social movements. Immigrant workers' large presence in all labor markets, but particularly in the service industry, creates new sets of identity politics that social institutions like unions must address. During this campaign, organizers and unions needed to substantively engage in creating experiential common ground between immigrants and African Americans, where immigrants learned about the historic Civil Rights experiences of Blacks and Blacks learned about contemporary experiences of immigrants both in migrating to the United States as well as at work and home.;These three case studies, which reflect three different stages and types of union mobilization of immigrants, highlight the important ways in which race, immigration, and citizenship shape and structure both workers lives and the success of unions. The outcomes of the respective campaigns contradict the logical or expected outcomes; instead, this data and findings of this dissertation suggests that successful negotiation and understandings of differences, and broader conceptualization of citizenship within organizations can help, hinder, or create different forms of political empowerment for all workers.