The Promises and Perils of US Local Labor Ordinances

Abstract

Are American cities driving a “metropolitan revolution” that will reinvent the US political economy or are they succumbing to the final assault of neoliberalism in a race to the bottom where labor rights are increasingly infringed upon, public goods are commoditized, and direct democracy becomes an elusive quest? Drawing from urban sociology and political economy, the purpose of this chapter is to develop a theoretical and empirical framework for understanding the contained rise of progressive cities in the United States. To do so, it focuses on the proliferation of “living wage” ordinances and “sweatfree” procurement rules adopted by city governments over the past two decades, and their significance for broader debates on the dynamics of American political economy in the globalized era. The chapter proceeds in four parts. The first part discusses the notion of social change within the literature on urban transformations. The second section examines the nature of local ordinances: what they include (wages, benefits) and what categories of workers they apply to and exclude. The third part analyzes the driving forces behind local labor reforms and the conditions under which they developed, with particular attention to political mobilization inside and outside the electoral system. It also highlights the crucial function played by civil society groups in generating soft law and changing the terms of labor debates. The fourth and final part discusses the sustainability and broader political perspectives of this microlevel phenomenon. It examines the potentialities of using government procurement as leverage for a bottom-up movement and the prospects of a race-to-the-top scenario challenging the race-to-the-bottom commonly associated with globalization. It also considers the risks that local ordinances carry and the obstacles to their proliferation.