Changing Priorities

In 2019, at Street Vendor Project (SVP),¹ a prominent and ethnically diverse worker centre based in Lower Manhattan, a group of unlicensed mobile Latina vendors revitalised participation ahead of the New York City Council’s (NYCC) vote on street vending reform. Solidarity among this important subsection of women vendors was, however, only strengthened after first addressing an issue seldom discussed in labour organising: domestic violence. Yet how did this group of vulnerable women vendors working on the lowest rungs of the so-called “vending ladder” become a tenacious core group, helping SVP overcome prior organisational inertia and secure vending reform?

For almost a decade, SVP’s vendor members had campaigned hard to end artificial permit scarcity, yet, more recently, participation at the project had faltered due to Mayor Bill de Blasio’s veto of the previous reform bill. This changed in late 2018 when the newly formed SVP women’s committee began to address care-related concerns–issues which before now were not considered vending-related–yet had long hindered the women’s full participation at the project. Before this, if Latina vendors needed to discuss personal problems, they would typically come into the office to schedule private meetings with an outside social worker. Hence, the discrete question of domestic violence was, at that time, not yet fully integrated with SVP’s regular order of business since such concerns were not considered entirely occupational.

Yet, by emulating the success of the Los Angeles Street Vending Campaign (LASVC) and drawing on recent sociological research into the feminisation of New York’s vending industry,² SVP recognised huge organising potential among this numerically significant but under-engaged contingent. As a result, staff and leadership decided that the prospects for organising might be improved if women vendors, who typically work in isolation in the outer boroughs, could experience aspects of their social life through the project. The first steps to integrate these Latina mobile vendors were taken with the foundation of the SVP women’s committee, and it was subsequently within this confidential women-only space that the defining theme of domestic violence was brought to the fore.

Since mobile Latina pushcart vendors often compete for vending space, intimate one-to-one conversations among the women helped build trust, overcoming self-stigmatisation while suppressing feelings of entrepreneurial competition. In turn, this allowed SVP organisers to seed political consciousness around other care-related social reproduction issues, until, in the words of SVP lead organiser Crystal Stella Becerril, the women soon became “each other’s reason to show up.”

Over the following year, as SVP’s major advocacy campaign, Lift the Caps, culminated, this initially small group of vulnerable Latinas grew to become an exemplary core group at the project. After securing a series of local victories, concentrated around Corona Plaza in Queens, they soon inspired other subsections of the membership to become truly engaged.

Yet, the question remains, why did the common experience of gender-based violence, which initially did not appear to be an occupational concern, have such strong organising potential at SVP? Moreover, how do such innovations reflect shifting priorities among the most advanced sections of the US worker centre movement? To answer this, however, it is worth returning to the original matrix of problems that worker centres first sought to address, constrained, as they are, by limits to organising within degraded informal labour markets already heavily stratified by race, gender and ethnicity.

The Advocacy Model

Due to pronounced racial and ethnic segmentation of the US labour market, the earliest worker centres typically organised immigrant workers along single ethnic lines around shared language and culture; a low-cost and efficient way of building group cohesion among a disaggregated workforce. Conversely, beyond the work site, most immigrants in the US live within tight-knit ethnically and racially distinct enclave communities, giving worker centre organisers a convenient foothold when seeking to intervene in the assimilation of migrant workers. This in turn, led to the development of what Jennifer Gordon broadly defines as the practice of “non-citizen citizenship”³: a near-ubiquitous formula, which trains worker centre members to raise their collective voice and advocate for public policy reform as if they were already fully enfranchised citizens.

The best-known example of this advocacy-led model is Jennifer Gordon’s account of the Workplace Project (WPP) which organised immigrant day labourers on Long Island during the 1990s. Gordon claims that WPP first organised around location and ethnicity, not because these two factors “are somehow the answer to the riddle of organising,” but chiefly because many “occupations were filled almost entirely by Latino immigrants who changed jobs frequently [and] tended to look for work within the bounds of Long Island.”⁴

However, while the WPP campaign resulted in the successful passing of New York’s Unpaid Wages Prohibition Act of 1995, some, including Gordon herself, argue that the advocacy model relies too heavily on professional legal staff and the whims of transactional politicians, consigning worker members to a passive symbolic role while leaving engagement shallow.⁵ While many US worker centres treat ethnicity, geography and immigrant status as the basic building blocks of solidarity, advocacy alone seems insufficient if the aim is to build durable working-class institutions. So while legislative reform is a necessary priority for worker centres when aiming to raise labour standards, enforcing these gains remains extremely difficult without robust member-led participation—which can only be achieved by prioritising organising over advocacy.

The Critique of Worker Centre Power

Provocatively, Steve Jenkins,⁶ an organiser at Make the Road (MRNY), intervened in early worker centre debates, attempting to resolve whether effective worker centres should concentrate more on advocacy–raising the qualitative voice of a small core group of worker members–or organising–building quantitative strength in numbers. This leads him to question the advocacy model altogether, arguing that an overreliance on professional legal staff reproduces the division of labour within the worker centre movement and ultimately teaches worker members the wrong lessons about building intimidating working-class power.

While the practice of “non-citizen citizenship” has been a successful formula for many worker centres, Jenkins sees advocacy’s reliance on staff-led expertise as being at odds with the original mission of worker centres to develop and retain grassroots organisational knowledge within the immigrant working class. Moreover, Jenkins insists that the advocacy approach generates poor strategic choices as, inevitably, the aims of staff and worker members diverge (a tendency that Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward famously remark upon when analysing poor people’s movements).⁷

In an attempt to break the deadlock, Jane McAlevey (also formerly MRNY),⁸ takes a different view on the constitution of worker centre “social power.” She sees little possibility for worker centres to emulate the strength-in-numbers strategy of traditional unions. Moreover, today’s business unions have fully conformed to the advocacy model, pacifying members and hollowing out rank-and-file participation. Instead, she suggests the tension between advocacy and organising can be resolved by transforming worker centres into hybrid organisations, through an approach known as the “high-touch model,” which flexibly balances professional expertise with community organising techniques to enhance active engagement among ordinary members.

By prioritising group cohesion, high levels of participation and worker-led deliberation, over advocacy and mobilisation, McAlevey claims that worker centres can develop a diverse range of novel responses, including activities and projects that fall short of full strike campaigns, yet allow worker centres to flexibly respond to the diverse needs of the membership while simultaneously expanding the available repertoires of worker centre collective action. Hence, if worker centres can prioritise their aims effectively, engage in consensual decision-making, hire dynamic staff and retain a highly active participatory base, they can avoid falling into the trap of sidelining their members.

Practical Innovation Among the Latest Wave of Worker Centres

While these framing debates about worker centre power remain relevant, they have, in practice, largely been surpassed by the latest wave of US worker centre organising. By experimenting and adopting each other’s successful strategies, the most dynamic centres have evolved beyond mere advocacy, becoming more participatory, politically combative and activist-led–a shift allowing them to secure gains in multiethnic industries.

The most apparent way effective worker centres have boosted engagement is by extending outreach, with staff travelling to meet workers wherever they are. Traditionally, worker centres have served as alternative hiring halls, thus requiring their members to travel back and forth to the centre. Yet this places additional demands on an already time-poor workforce. In response, successful day-labour worker centres, such as Seattle’s Voz and Casa Latina, have pioneered outreach strategies to “take the centre to the corners,” bringing services directly to shape-up locations where workers naturally gather.⁹ Likewise, in 2019 SVP started new local chapters in New York’s outer boroughs, bringing the project closer to mobile women vendors, who, because of familial obligations, cannot easily travel to the project’s Downtown offices.

Further expanding their reach and relevance, many worker centres have recently sought to address broader systemic failure, intervening during moments of environmental crisis by transforming themselves into disaster recovery hubs–providing mutual aid to immigrant workers routinely excluded from federal relief programs. For example, earlier this year, in Los Angeles, the National Day Labourer Network (NDLON) and the Community Organised Relief Effort (CORE) came together in Pasadena and Altadena to provide food, water and supplies after the Eaton Fire.

SVP also exemplified this approach in 2019 by establishing food pantries in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens, providing free hot meals for thousands of immigrant workers made unemployed during the pandemic. This initiative not only highlighted the city’s dependence on vendors as essential workers but also, more concretely, SVP’s vendor members kept the city’s workforce fed during the restaurant shutdown, enabling the project, thereafter, to build a coalition with other worker centres such as Make the Road (MRNY) focused on immigrant worker protection and compensation.

Diversifying tactics make worker centres overall less defensive, helping them navigate the multiple legal constraints facing 501(c)(3) non-profits—particularly since legislative advocacy risks the centres being classified as labour unions under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).¹⁰ Hence, by adopting an activist stance, worker centres have grown more politically confrontational, since they no longer need to present themselves as concession-seeking and palatable to lawmakers. By avoiding political clientelism, this activist posture enables worker centres to target both bad employers and the local state, seeing both as equal adversaries.

Meanwhile, worker centres have secured further autonomy by diversifying funding sources away from philanthropic foundations, which impose restrictive grant requirements. Such arrangements force organisers to devote excessive “time, resources and expertise to deliverables”—a dynamic that extends neoliberal logic into the heart of worker centre activity and diverts energy away from the politics of contestation and direct action.¹¹

By breaking with the perverse incentives of philanthropic funding and instead concentrating on base-building, worker centres can better resist neoliberal rationalities and pressure from the foundations to form entrepreneurial partnerships with employers. Conversely, centres which fail to prioritise organising, risk abandoning “the practices and discourse of confrontation.”¹² As a result, worker centres that have divested from the philanthropic model such as Workers Centre United (LWC), the reorganised Domestic Workers United (DWU) and the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA) have each successfully preserved their combative functions.

While such innovations have proven invaluable, it also remains true that no universal model for worker centres exists. As Jessica Garrick observes,¹⁵ the strength of worker centres lies precisely with their flexibility and readiness to respond to shifts in the labour landscape. Likewise, worker centres excel at rapidly adapting to changes within the lives of low-income workers, meaning their strategic orientations evolve dynamically depending on each centre’s level of development. As a result, Garrick highlights a crucial divergence within the movement, between: (1) multi-sector centres prioritising advocacy and policy reform; and (2) sector-specific organisations focused on securing winnable industry agreements. This distinction reflects which strategies worker centres choose, and the precise mix of advocacy and organising depending on the scale at which the centre operates.

Expanding on this perspective, Tom Juravich conceptualises worker centres not as competitors to traditional unions,¹⁴ but as strategic complements, thereby acknowledging that social struggle occurs across multiple scales. Likewise, the dual capacity of worker centres for advocacy and organising provides unions with a model for greater flexibility, suggesting that unions should value the autonomy of worker centres rather than seeking to co-opt them. It is hence the very process of grassroots deliberation central to worker centre identity, which makes them responsive to their members while encouraging the tactical versatility required when confronting intersecting systems of oppression affecting low-income communities of colour.

California’s robust worker centre ecosystem offers one of the clearest examples of how diverse yet overlapping approaches can combine to drive systemic change. Here, cross-racial working-class coalitions have expanded beyond wage struggles to confront broader systemic failure—particularly around housing, immigration and mass incarceration. California worker centres have achieved this success by pursuing two key strategies: building network alliances with each other and, where strategically viable, forming selective partnerships with mainstream unions. If considered judiciously, such collaborations are often mutually beneficial, since unions can still mobilise significant material resources, and in return worker centres provide unions with access to the deep community ties they have long cultivated.

Strategic partnerships among organisations like the Los Angeles Black Worker Centre (LABWC), LA Coalition Against Wage Theft, California Coalition for Worker Power (CCWP), California Domestic Workers Coalition (CDWC), ICE Out of California and NDLON have, as a result, proven instrumental in securing victories at multiple scales––exemplifying how intentional solidarity-building while, at the same time, centring those most vulnerable to intersecting oppressions converts seemingly disconnected struggles into collective power.

Along these lines, the significant rise of Black worker centres reflects the dual crises of unemployment and mass incarceration within Black communities. Organisations such as Chicago’s Equity and Transformation (EAT) embody this trend, creating innovative models to simultaneously organise the “bootleg” survival economies of the urban poor and informal workers piecing together multiple hustles.¹⁵ In response to such survival strategies, EAT employs a multi-issue approach that uniquely bridges the struggles of immigrant day labourers and economically marginalised Black communities. Hence, by confronting labour segmentation (i.e. the racial and ethnic stratification of the formally and informally employed, the unemployed and the dispossessed poor), the centre has successfully forged new cross-class and cross-racial solidarities.¹⁶

Enhancing Participation at Street Vendor Project

In 2018, in an attempt to overcome organisational inertia experienced after Mayor Bill de Blasio’s unilateral veto of the previous vending reform bill, SVP embarked on a series of changes to its internal process, pivoting towards a more diverse strategy addressing the needs of its most vulnerable members. This bottom-up approach concentrated first on organising vulnerable Latina vendors, yet did so in a manner that complemented and bolstered the project’s continuing advocacy campaign to Lift the Caps: a legislative effort aimed at increasing the total number of available vending permits and simplifying New York’s bewildering thicket of vending regulations.¹⁷

Artificial permit scarcity stems from a hard cap on the issuance of new licences first imposed by the city in 1983, which subsequently produced a black market for food vending permits, which exchange hands illegally for as much as $25,000 for a two-year licence. Meanwhile, the city’s farrago of vending laws allows the NYPD to arbitrarily harass licenced and unlicensed vendors equally, subjecting them to daily fines, confiscations and even on occasion, deportation.

While all vendors support vending reform, when I arrived at SVP participation at the project had stalled due to the mayor’s rarely used veto—an apparent concession to Big Real Estate and the restaurant associations. This setback demoralised SVP’s vendor members, making recruitment and retention difficult. Moreover, many of the vendors I spoke with during outreach were disillusioned by the campaign’s slow progress, believing reform to be a multi-generational fight. As one Arabic-speaking vendor near Zuccotti Park put it: “My father died waiting 30 years for a permit. I’m still waiting. Inshallah, my son will get one.”

Despite being a universal work-related appeal to all vendors, because of the campaign’s long duration, there was a gap between the project’s occupational aspirations and the immediate survival needs of the poorest vendor members. Problematically for SVP, the complex chains of subcontracting that constitute the vending industry prevent the vendors from going on strike, severely limiting the project’s capacity to develop new campaigns. As a result, organising at the project had long been subordinated to advocacy goals. Yet, by crafting a more varied care-related appeal; enhancing member-led deliberation; and extending outreach, SVP aimed to increase the number of short-term campaigns and small victories required to keep participation buoyant.

Accordingly, while Lift the Caps was originally crafted as a universal work-related appeal, it was clear to most at SVP that by 2018, the project’s main advocacy campaign was no longer serving as an effective spur to participation. Additionally, the women’s survey soon discovered that, due to the unevenness of New York’s vending laws, there is a highly gendered distribution of vendors across the city, with over 70% of women vendors operating in the outer boroughs¹⁸ where policing is less zealous and fines less frequent. Additionally, renting a permit remains a risky criminal activity for women vendors and, as a result, the lack of permits is not always the highest concern for Latina vendors, who face an altogether different set of more immediate survival-related priorities.

Unlike male vendors, who tend to work in more lucrative Downtown and Midtown Manhattan spots, women vendors are predominantly single mothers who head multigenerational women-only households, yet remain tethered to their home neighbourhoods. Among the women, vending work is preferred since it allows Latina vendors to combine productive and reproductive needs, letting them conveniently pick their kids up from school, attend medical appointments and care for elderly dependents. However, these same care-related concerns keep the women close to home, making full participation at the project difficult.

In response to the women’s survey findings, SVP sought to create a space where women members could connect socially, helping combat isolation while addressing childcare needs. Simultaneously, SVP expanded outreach, starting new chapters in the outer boroughs, drawing inspiration from successful women-led vendor organisations such as the Red Hook Food Vendors (RHFV), based around Sunset Park and VAMOS Unidos, previously active in Queens.

More broadly, the project sought to emulate the Los Angeles Street Vendor Campaign (LASVC), which in 2018, successfully decriminalised street vending. This ten-year effort to alleviate poverty in the city began by organising Latina vendors around MacArthur Park, focusing on the theme of domestic violence, and securing a string of local victories across East LA. This series of “small wins” subsequently attracted other groups across the city, such as Black merchandise vendors from South Central—until LASVC was organising through eleven neighbourhood chapters citywide.

Following suit, SVP aimed to leverage the ready organising potential of the Latina vending family, whose extended kinship networks, formed as a defence against neoliberal austerity, were seen as a way to rebuild participation. However, this meant first reducing competition between Latina vendors who often jostle over prime vending locations. This was achieved by bringing the women into intimate dialogue within the SVP women’s committee–a safe, confidential space where Latina vendors could let their guard down while collectively interrogating their shared experiences and conducting a form of self-inquiry.

Through this intensive emotional work, the women soon identified domestic violence as a common theme—one that drives many Latinas to migrate to the US and ultimately leads them to pursue vending as a profession. Domestic violence consequently represents an obstacle to assimilation and integration for many Latina migrants.¹⁹ An issue compounded by the mixed immigration status of Latinx family members; a high regard for family unity; and the gendered expectation that men should be sole breadwinners, leaving many immigrant Latinas stigmatised and isolated, even within their enclave communities.

Encouraging the women to be more trusting was, however, not straightforward. As SVP lead organiser Stella told me, while there are already incredible forms of parity among the women, “it’s not uncommon to see intense forms of rivalry because the women face such dire circumstances.” Yet after conducting intensive one-to-one emotional work within the committee, the women slowly built trust, giving organisers a route in––thereafter seeding political consciousness by drawing a comparison between domestic violence and daily harassment experienced at the hands of the NYPD when attempting to work in public space.

Consciousness-raising in the women’s committee, therefore, went further than simply building bonds between the women–it gave them a vantage point on the “sum of their lives,” allowing them to appreciate how vending work not only plays an essential role in their communities, enabling other workers to go to work, but more generally, reproduces the city and its social relations. Accordingly, the fruit of this work was most evident when, in March 2020, SVP committee members attended Women’s Strike NYC (Paro de Mujeres) in Washington Square Park. There, alongside 50,000 other women, they amplified slogans about women’s work, the product of earlier consciousness-raising sessions around the double shift. As organiser Stella noted, they became “not only the face of vending work but also the face of social reproduction.”

As if to confirm the imperative to organise Latina vendors, in November 2019, churros vendor Elsa was arrested at Broadway Junction and her cart confiscated. A bystander’s video went viral, showing Elsa being cuffed and detained by transit police. SVP swiftly mobilised, raising emergency funds and holding a press conference to expose the specific vulnerabilities of Latina vendors. To the surprise of many, Elsa’s story resonated widely, amplifying the urgent concerns already felt by many New Yorkers over gentrification, police violence (for example “loosie” vendor Eric Garner’s killing), ICE abductions, food insecurity and the crumbling transit system essential to low-income commuters. Moreover, this momentum aligned with a broader wave of anti-police uprisings—from the Fuck the Police (FTP) protests in New York to the nationwide George Floyd rebellion—pressuring the NYCC into making concessions around racialised policing in an attempt to pacify revolt.

During this climatic sequence of events, Intro 1116 passed after SVP’s vendor members persuaded enough NYCC council members to vote for vending reform. However, this legislative victory would never have happened without the continuous pressure applied by the vendors, culminating in a hunger strike. Yet, more significantly it was made possible by the bottom-up revitalisation of SVP’s internal process, which went beyond advocacy and simply mobilising around occupational grievances. Instead, by responding to the needs of the “whole worker,” SVP updated the occupational profile of street vending in line with the increasing feminisation of the industry, thereby prioritising base-building, reinvigorating participation and broadening inclusion.

Ultimately, it was through their shared sociality, that SVP finally engaged its most vulnerable members. For this to occur, however, Latina vendors had to be first brought into intimate dialogue within the women’s committee and become a listening ear for each other. In turn, the women collectively displaced many of the negative stereotypes under which they had previously laboured–as vulnerable immigrants, informal streetworkers, victims of gender-based violence, women of colour and single mothers. Moreover, the outcome of trust-building and empowerment within the committee was the self-recognition among SVP’s Latina vendors that they too could be class protagonists and agents of effective change.