More Than the Sum of Their Parts? Labor-Community Coalitions in the Rust Belt.

Abstract

Multiracial labor-community coalitions have attracted considerable attention from scholars and activists based on their potential to rebuild local working class movements, but we lack a systematic understanding of why and how they emerge. This dissertation explores the divergent development of working class movement-building efforts in three Rust Belt cities—Chicago, Milwaukee, and Pittsburgh—following successful campaigns for living wage ordinances in the late-1990s. Chicago’s organizing efforts, which originally looked highly fragmented and less promising than the other two cities, have since coalesced into the most vibrant and effective local movement in the region. After considerable early success, ambitious efforts in Pittsburgh and Milwaukee to unite all potential allies in a single coalition failed catastrophically. However, Milwaukee activists were able to rebuild relatively quickly, while their Pittsburgh counterparts continue to struggle. This project explores why collaborative efforts in the three cities have followed such different paths by combining rich data gleaned from interviews with key participants, ethnographic work, and archival research.

My findings suggest that activists’ capacity to bridge cultural differences within an intermediary organizational level is the key factor in explaining the emergence of durable coalition-based movements. A strong infrastructure of membership organizations, networks, and technical assistance providers make the emergence of strong local movements more likely, but is insufficient. Organizers also need to develop new internal cultures that bring people together across entrenched differences. In addition, movements must navigate a political system stacked against them when they attempt to deliver concrete changes.

The most successful movement-building efforts represent an evolution of strategies on the part of local organizers forced to balance tensions between broad ambitions and sustainability. Effective intermediary structures not only help aggregate the power of participants, they also provide space for the transformation of interests and collective identities, allowing local movements to learn from their experiences and increase their strategic capacity. Through this dialogical interplay of aggregation and transformation, movements can become “more than the sum of their parts.” This study has important implications for research on social movements, community empowerment, and contemporary class and race relations.