Car Wash Workers’ Campaign Builds on AFL-CIO Worker Center Program

AFL-CIO General Counsel Jon Hiatt explains how the union movement’s campaign for justice for car wash workers in Los Angeles could become a model for future organizing.

 A newly launched campaign on behalf of some 10,000 car wash workers in Los Angeles offers one of the most exciting examples of a genuine community-labor coalition that could provide a model for similar efforts in other industries and other cities around the country.   

California leads the nation in the number of car wash operations and they are highly profitable, with a typical return on investment of more than 40 percent. However, the profits from this industry are largely derived from violations of workers’ legal rights, with rampant non-compliance with minimum wage, overtime, rest and meal period requirements. Car wash workers routinely work between 50 and 60 hours a week and average $12,500 a year with no benefits.  

Data from the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health reveals a wide range of health-and-safety violations at the workplaces as well, including exposure to toxic materials and inadequate drinking water provisions. 

The CLEAN (Community Labor Environmental Action Network) Car Wash Campaign is a cooperative, industry-wide strategy to raise the standard of living of this large, low-wage immigrant population through collective bargaining. The campaign began as a community initiative to address non-compliance with wage-and-hour and health and safety laws and regulations throughout the industry. However, the worker centers and other community groups involved soon realized they needed a contract to ensure labor standards did not revert to sub-minimum levels once the media spotlight was turned off and government enforcement agencies moved on to their next targets. 

The campaign is a direct result of the AFL-CIO worker center program, which has helped create increasing levels of co-operation between Los Angeles area worker centers and local unions. Members of the CLEAN campaign approached the AFL-CIO and asked us, together with a union affiliate, to partner with them. The United Steelworkers stepped up, along with the AFL-CIO and about 25 Los Angeles worker centers and other community organizations.  

The CLEAN campaign provides a unique opportunity for innovative collaboration between the union movement and the community. For example, the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor is mobilizing support from local unions throughout the area. The campaign also is reaching out to and educating a wide variety of groups—labor, community, immigrants rights, religious, academic and others—on the issues in the car wash workers’ struggle. The car wash workers have already won the support of the Los Angeles City Council, which recently passed a resolution of support. Many other public officials, including Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (D), have pledged their assistance and community groups are undertaking a consumer boycott of the worst offenders.   

Several labor lawyers, members of the Lawyers Coordinating Committee (LCC), are assisting the workers to create an incentive for employers to negotiate through targeted litigation, complaints to enforcement agencies and public education. 

When the AFL-CIO first launched the worker center program in the summer of 2006, there was a growing awareness that community-based worker centers around the country were expanding. There was also an increasing recognition among unions that many worker centers shared the union movement’s values and were eager to partner with labor to combat employer exploitation and to fight back against management efforts to lower wage and benefit standards.  

In Los Angeles, for example, a building trades local union is working closely with a day laborers’ worker center. Coordinating with the union, the center sends Spanish-speaking workers to non-union construction sites to help Spanish-speakers on the work site to identify violations of law. For its part, the union has encouraged the worker center to send its members to the union apprenticeship program.  In the end, the worker centers are recognizing that without collective bargaining rights, their ability to affect labor standards is limited.

The CLEAN campaign demonstrates how unions and collective bargaining offer communities a means to move out of poverty and as such, hopefully, will become an extremely valuable model for future organizing.

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