The struggle for rights in labor-community coalitions: The Los Angeles clean carwash campaign

The paper presents the story of the CLEAN Carwash Campaign as unique labor-community organizing campaign. This campaign is not only important as an innovative model for organizing labor but also because it incorporates the worker centers’ emphasis on immigrant workers’ social and political necessities. While organizing to achieve economic rights, carwash workers claim rights as immigrant workers, and in doing so challenge various forms of exploitation. In this regard, even though the predominant approach to immigrant worker rights within the CLEAN Carwash Campaign centers on economic rights, a large portion of it focuses on building civic participation and social inclusion to U.S. American society. There coexists within the campaign a less articulated and marginal approach based on the idea that carwash workers’ rights transcend the notion of national membership and instead as based on their rights as human beings to mobility and to a decent life wherever they are. So, how does this community-labor hybrid campaign serve immigrant workers attain their rights and navigate the world of work and that of larger U.S. American[1] society? I argue this is done through at least five dimensions of a constructive discourse and practice of rights. Together, the first three dimensions represent a broader definition of rights and manifest as collaborations between labor and community alliances, as well as through political and socio-cultural constructions of rights. The last two dimensions are tied more closely to the world of work and it can be seen through the efforts of CWOC’s Workers’ Brigade and the Health and Safety Committee.