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Indiana Law Journal

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Winter 2023

Publication Citation

99 Indiana Law Journal 127 (2023)

Abstract

In the history of new labor localism, city-level living wage ordinances—emerging in the 1990s with Los Angeles leading the way—have generally been understood as a second-best, limited antipoverty device designed to raise wage floors, with only indirect effects on organized labor. Drawing upon original archival materials, this Article offers an alternative reading of the history of the living wage in Los Angeles, showing how it was designed and operationalized as a proactive tool to rebuild union density and reshape city politics. Doing so makes four key contributions. First, the Article theorizes and empirically examines the living wage as a pioneering form of mobilizable labor law: a local legal reform with pro-labor potential unlocked through collective action by unions, in this case, enabling union organizing by addressing regulatory weaknesses in the National Labor Relations Act. Second, the Article deepens labor history by reframing the LA living wage movement as a key inflection point connecting the seminal Justice for Janitors campaign, considered the launching pad for new labor efforts to organize low-wage immigrant workers, to new labor organizing building toward the Fight for $15. Third, contrary to the standard critique of lawyers demobilizing movements through legalization, the LA campaign reveals the creative role of lawyers behind the scenes in developing new understandings of labor law that established conditions of possibility for successful union organizing. Finally, by illuminating how labor actors mapped local government power to identify opportunities for mobilization—particularly in publicly held assets such as airports—the Article sheds new light on the dynamic relation between social movements and local government. Specifically, in the case of labor, strategic localism has catalyzed an iterative cycle of union organizing by helping build a power base for organized labor in big cities and promoting diffusion of pro-labor policymaking across political boundaries. Recovering this history of the living wage serves as a means to unlock law’s transformative potential in labor campaigns that rise to meet contemporary challenges of economic and racial inequality.

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