Awards

• Winner of Winner, 2025 Michael Harrington Book Award.

Overview

Progressive political organizing faces a chicken-and-egg predicament. On the one hand, those who are most impacted by a circumstance should be the ones identifying problems and developing solutions. On the other hand, simply being a worker does not make one a unionist or anti-capitalist. When activists are moved to address the perceived injustices that other groups experience, they can get caught in a strong tension between their professed ethic of bottom-up leadership and their desire to change the status quo. Worker Centered is a close-to-the-ground, ethnographic narrative of a workplace organizing campaign at a company whose workforce was primarily low wage and immigrant. The book details the overall strategy of the campaign and its ultimate failure to win its core demands. The organization used an innovative strategic model and insisted on the importance of worker leadership. And yet allies and staff participated in a campaign that, although continually framed as such, was decidedly not led by workers. In crucial ways, the mere idea of a worker-led union acted as the interpretive frame that stitched the entire enterprise together. Ultimately, Worker Centered challenges conventional notions of political representation, inviting reflection on the complexities of organizing the marginalized and speaking on their behalf.

Full Product Details

9780197784907

Table of Contents

Reviews

A powerful insider's account of a failed unionization effort that beautifully exposes the contradictions and dilemmas facing progressives committed to worker-led organizing. * Ruth Milkman, City University of New York Graduate Center * This book provides a rare but vital glimpse of the way organizers negotiate values, relationships, and power in their work. By offering an honest analysis of the challenges of allyship and power-building in organizing, Worker Centered provides one of the greatest gifts scholars can provide to practice--a loving critique designed to bring us all closer to a vision of a just world * Hahrie Han, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Professor of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University * There's a principle within social justice movements and organizations that they should be led by those most impacted by the injustices. In Worker Centered, Biko Koenig examines the dynamics of how staff, who tend to come from more comfortable and educated backgrounds, often obfuscate the leadership roles they are actually playing, in order to emphasize worker leadership. But this keeps the day-to-day operation of power and leadership invisible, and does not result in the development of worker leaders. Koenig argues compellingly that developing effective worker-centered organizations requires a clear-eyed and systematic approach that fully appreciates the challenges, complexity, and hard work entailed in leadership development. * Jonathan Smucker, Author of Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals *

A powerful insider's account of a failed unionization effort that beautifully exposes the contradictions and dilemmas facing progressives committed to worker-led organizing. * Ruth Milkman, City University of New York Graduate Center * This book provides a rare but vital glimpse of the way organizers negotiate values, relationships, and power in their work. By offering an honest analysis of the challenges of allyship and power-building in organizing, Worker Centered provides one of the greatest gifts scholars can provide to practice--a loving critique designed to bring us all closer to a vision of a just world * Hahrie Han, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Professor of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University * There's a principle within social justice movements and organizations that they should be led by those most impacted by the injustices. In Worker Centered, Biko Koenig examines the dynamics of how staff, who tend to come from more comfortable and educated backgrounds, often obfuscate the leadership roles they are actually playing, in order to emphasize worker leadership. But this keeps the day-to-day operation of power and leadership invisible, and does not result in the development of worker leaders. Koenig argues compellingly that developing effective worker-centered organizations requires a clear-eyed and systematic approach that fully appreciates the challenges, complexity, and hard work entailed in leadership development. * Jonathan Smucker, Author of Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals * Worker Centered is a novel work of critical political science. [...] It is an evocative ethnography of labor struggles and the complexities of representation, collaboration, and decision-making outside of traditional institutions of government power. And yet, it is all about power and how it works. At a time when workers of all kinds, but especially immigrant workers, are facing threats from all directions, Dr. Koenig's book is a tool for how we can all respond better, for ourselves and each other. It is also a book about failures-and the lessons that can be learned from them. They are many, and everyone interested in how we can come together as workers and continue to struggle for more humane workplaces and a more just world, would hardly find a more engaging and thought-provoking book than Koenig's Worker Centered. * Critical Political Science *

Author Information

Biko Koenig is Assistant Professor in the Government and Public Policy programs at Franklin & Marshall college in Lancaster, PA, and co-founder of Research|Action, a worker-owned research and organizing firm. Trained as an ethnographer and qualitative specialist at the New School for Social Research, Koenig's research investigates questions of political behavior and mobilization that centers the experiences of everyday actors as they seek to challenge status-quo power relationships.

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