Mark Doussard and Greg Schrock, Justice at work: The Rise of Economic and Racial Justice Coalitions in Cities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2022)

This book addresses a very important topic: How can communities respond to increasing inequalities, and how do they successfully mobilize for racial and economic justice? Mark Doussard and Greg Schrock approach these questions from a historical and comparative perspective. Between 2006 and 2019, they conducted over 270 interviews with activists, low-wage workers, elected officials, and others involved in the policy process. More than half of the interviews were conducted in Chicago, which the authors consider “a node in a network.” (84) Additional interviews were conducted in St. Louis, Indianapolis, and Denver. Furthermore, the authors observed developments in Portland, Seattle, and New Orleans. They also include primary and secondary data, including 50 long-form interviews made available through the University of Washington’s Minimum Wage History Project, and participant information. Doussard and Schrock do not claim to carry out a systematic comparison or case studies, instead, they admit, “our research sites came about via a mix of careful selection, happy accident, and pure opportunism.” (84) They aim to “build viable explanations of why equity campaigns succeed where they do, where they fall short, and how they are attempting to expand the pursuit of justice at work to encompass justice beyond work.” (85)

Doussard and Schrock introduce two concepts: Economic and racial justice (erj) coalitions and urban policy entrepreneurs. These concepts are briefly defined as follows: erj coalitions are conceptualized as emerging “from unions and community organizations embracing what they previously shunned: ideological critique, antiracist messages, and demands for transformation rather than negotiation.” (8) Urban policy entrepreneurs are understood as developing policies “as a network that strategically shops for policy venues” while benefiting “from the resources of the city itself, which allows them to set the agenda with an ease that interest groups in Washington cannot.” (6) Chapter 2 of the book is devoted to an overview of ecj coalitions and surveys four recent phases of urban economic justice movements, contrasting the erj coalitions that they observe in the 2010s with the neighbourhood movements of the 1970s and 1980s, the Living Wage Movement of the 1990s, and the Community Benefits Movement of the 2020s. The impetus, mechanisms, response, and limitations of these coalitions are concisely summarized in a table (42). What is absent (or remains implicit) from this overview is the mobilization of women, in particular women of colour, for economic and racial justice.

The following Chapter 3 is devoted to urban policy entrepreneurs (upe), which “include leaders in community organizations and labor unions, and policy analysts scattered across research organizations, think tanks, and universities.” (64) They work through coalitions and are engaged in multi-site, multi-issue policy entrepreneurship. Drawing on John Kingdon, Doussard and Schrock identify three streams – problems, policy, and politics – that “must align for a major policy to pass into law.” (67) Just like the erjs, the upes remain abstract, and it is not quite clear how the positionality of a upe – for example, a white middle-class academic or a female African American working-class union leader or community organizer – might differ in the framing of issues and their priorities.

Employing these concepts, Doussard and Schrock examine four policy domains: campaigns for the minimum wage, targeted hiring, home and work policies, and public finance. The examination of minimum wage campaigns (Chapter 4) gives an overview of the diffusion of minimum wage between 2013 and 2020 and focuses on Sea-Tac, Seattle, and Chicago. Based on their comparison of these three cases, the authors emphasize electoral incentives as one of the explanations for success. In addition, national fast-food strikes, and the development of a national policy network mattered. Doussard and Schrock’s explanation of the success of minimum wage campaigns puts less emphasis on local networks like the long-term initiatives to deepen the relationships between unions and community organizers in Puget Sound or Seattle’s strong protest culture and vigorous left-wing movements.

The examination of targeted hiring policies (Chapter 5) focuses on New Orleans and Seattle after providing a national overview of three waves of targeted hiring policies between the 1970s and the 2010s. Doussard and Schrock consider the different manifestations of racial capitalism in the two cities: whereas New Orleans is characterized by a black central city and white suburbs, Seattle is shaped by complex immigration patterns including white settlers, Asian and Pacific islanders, migrants from East and South Asia, Black migration and international migration from Africa, and Latinx migrants who joined Native American and Alaska Native communities, resulting in “complex racial dynamics and inequalities.” (130) Furthermore, different types of economic growth shaped the framing and outcomes of the campaigns. The authors consider the campaigns for good jobs a “limited, tactical response to a broader problem of racial inequalities” (135) and note that the promise of good jobs does not mean that such policies are implemented.

Doussard and Schrock then turn to the “politics of reproduction” (Chapter 6) and examine erj coalitions that concern the relationship between paid labour and unpaid domestic care. They give an overview of sick time legislation and fair workweek laws. The authors refer to the scheduling conflicts as a “problem without a name” and briefly mention “first wave feminist movements,” but by and large ignore decades of feminist mobilization and scholarship that considers reproductive labour.

The last of the four case studies addresses austerity measures and fiscal policy (Chapter 7), in particular fiscal racism, which involves redistributing resources from low-income neighbourhoods and communities of colour to benefit white residents and “funding racist police forces.” (164) In Chicago, the Teachers Union was able to build a coalition with community groups that centered on racial inequality and successfully countered proposed school closures while negotiating “smaller class sizes, increased funding for arts and music programming, and social services for lower-income students,” (173) Grassroots activists for racial equity also mobilized against tax increment financing that was framed as “racist development.” (176)

Doussard and Schrock provide a remarkable broad overview of these policies in a clearly structured book that includes many useful tables summarizing policy developments. The authors are right to assure confidentiality and keep the identities of the participants anonymous, but throughout the book, the erj coalitions and urban policy entrepreneurs remain quite abstract. A short section at the end of Chapter 3 gives an overview of the data rather than describing the methods, nor are the strengths and limitations of their approach evaluated. It would have been helpful to include a table providing an overview of different types of organizations and the demographic characteristics of the research participants included in the study. Furthermore, I missed a positionality statement by the authors reflecting on their own relationships with erj coalitions and urban policy entrepreneurs and how they shaped their data collection and analysis.

Although organizations are mentioned throughout the book, I would also have liked to know more about the composition of the erj coalitions of unions, grassroots organizations, and local governments in the different campaigns. What role do race, class, and gender play in these coalitions? I missed an engagement with literature examining “social movement unionism,” campaigns like “Justice for Janitors,” or the existing scholarship on coalitions, in particular those looking at unions and cross-movement coalitions. Thus, this book is a good starting point for more in-depth analyses of economic and racial justice coalitions and urban policy entrepreneurs.

Silke Roth

University of Southampton

DOI: https://doi.org/10.52975/llt.2023v92.0024.