Not a new story. But, it’s kind of amusing to see it in The Wall Street Journal, framed as the scary threat to business.

Workers centers have been growing for a number of years. I suppose that if the Journal is writing about them, something must be going right:

As union membership has fallen to 6.6% of the private sector, organized labor sees the worker centers as a new way to grow its ranks while mobilizing workers of all stripes.

Workers who are first organized by worker centers can be later organized by unions. That is what happened with nearly 200 carwash workers in Los Angeles and New York, organized by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union and the United Steelworkers. The steelworkers union also is trying organize several hundred pizza factory workers in Wisconsin who joined a worker center.

And:

Twenty years ago, there were only a handful of worker centers in the U.S. Many of those were formed in southern states—where there were few unions—to work with textile workers.

Today, there are more than 200, some with very specific missions, such as the Koreatown Immigrant Workers in Los Angeles and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which works with immigrant workers who harvest tomatoes in Florida.

Some worker centers target immigrants, organizing taxi drivers, day laborers and domestic workers who can’t join unions because they are independent contractors. Others lobby politicians and help workers with complaints like unpaid wages.