Strengthening Workers’ Rights - USA

UUSC is committed to defending and supporting workers’ right to organize, especially laborers marginalized by race, language, and/or gender who are therefore most vulnerable to exploitation. Within the United States, UUSC applies several strategies to achieve this objective:

Strengthening worker centers

In recent years, worker centers have emerged as a vital new community-based labor institution, delivering essential support to low-wage workers who are most in need and most at risk. Worker centers cultivate worker-based leadership and organizing, create job-ladders through targeted job training and placement programs, and often fill a gap as worker advocates in industries, geographic locations, and communities where union presence is weak or non-existent.

Strengthening racial unity

Strengthening workers’ rights will be impossible without solidarity between workers of different races, ethnicities, and nationalities. Workers of different backgrounds are pitted against each other in the workplace and in their communities. Additionally, communication and collaboration is hampered by barriers such as language, culture, and gender differences. This divide is a huge challenge facing the construction of a broad based workers’ rights movement. UUSC supports workers’ rights partners that are developing, testing and sharing new tools and strategies for bridging worker solidarity among an increasingly diverse workforce.

Focus on poultry workers

Poultry processing is one of the most exploitative and dangerous industries for workers in America – and an industry known for its chronic human and labor rights abuses. The vast majority of US poultry processing is done in the South, historically hostile to organized labor, and where long-standing racial tensions are being exacerbated by an influx of immigrant workers. For these reasons, UUSC works to build capacity and networks among worker center partners that are responding to the needs of workers in the poultry industry.

Protecting the rights of informal economy workers

UUSC works to defend the rights and improve the wages, working conditions, and quality of life of the most vulnerable and marginalized workers within the informal economy.

By definition, the term "informal economy" refers to workers and companies that are not recognized or protected under legal and regulatory frameworks and are characterized by a high degree of vulnerability. Around the world, the informal economy is exploding in size, both in terms of the vast numbers of new workers drawn into these unprotected jobs, but also in terms of the growing economic contribution of informal workers to their national economies.

Female and child workers are an enormous presence in the informal economy. Another extremely vulnerable population is migrant workers who are denied protections and rights due to their residency status and precarious living situations imposed by mobility. In this context, UUSC creates partnerships with groups who are developing new strategies for informal worker organizing and policy work.