How can workers from Africa, Asia, and Latin America organise collectively to advance labour rights and strengthen democracy? Labour movements in the Global South have clearly been grappling with this question for a long time, including the crucial issue of how to gain traction in the vast, informal economy where workers lack basic legal and social protections. Amidst a surge in exclusionary nationalism, labour movements in the North also need to take up this question with added energy. How workers with origins in the Global South organise in the Global North and how labour movements from different regions pursue joint action will be hugely consequential for the future of labour rights and democracy worldwide.
Migration from South to North is neither new nor limited to any particular group or social class. However, immigrants from the South make up an outsized share of the North’s labour ‘periphery’, where precarious livelihoods and informal work are widespread. The American janitorial sector is a good example. In California and elsewhere, accelerated subcontracting of janitorial services in the 1980s led to de-unionisation and an erosion of hard-won gains. Many native-born workers subsequently exited the industry and were replaced by new immigrants from Latin America and elsewhere in the Global South.
The US lags behind its European peers in the strength and reach of its labour movement. Somewhat counterintuitively, this seems to have created more space for experimentation in the margins of the American labour market. In the case of the janitorial sector, the Justice for Janitors campaign developed a strategy for unionising subcontracted workers that applies direct pressure to companies at the top of contracting chains. Highly visible worker protests have been a key movement tactic, belying the notion that new immigrants are timid and ‘unorganisable’.
