ABSTRACT
Low-wage labour markets in major US cities have become key sites of political activism and worker organizing in the early twenty-first century. The Fight for $15, which has seen strikes by fast-food workers pushing for higher wages; struggles against Walmart and the retailer’s low-road business practices; and a range of minimum-wage and living-wage policy fights across the country are just some of the campaigns that have signalled a rejuvenated urban politics of precarity. Many of these campaigns are being spearheaded by so-called alt-labour groups – independent worker organizations engaged in “economic action organising” (Fine 2006) to raise standards at the bottom of urban economies (Cordero-Guzmán 2015; Jaffe 2015; Jayaraman and Ness 2005; Milkman and Ott 2014) – as workers who have been long regarded as ‘unorganizable’ because of their precarious status in the job market take the lead in challenging spread of substandard work.
