Global Restructuring, Social Distancing, and a Community-Based Worker’s Center Response

Abstract

This paper addresses the impacts of global “social distancing” on employers and workers and examines community-based worker center strategies to mitigate those impacts. Through a case study of El Centro Humanitario, Denver’s human rights center for immigrant day laborers, the paper addresses how community organizations can respond to social distancing by “organizing the unorganized,” and crafting strategies such as worker-owned cooperatives to promote workers’ rights while reconnecting workers to their work and to each other. JEL classification: L31, L33, P32