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To what extent does the American Labor Movement conceive of justice in ways beyond narrow economic benefits? To assess the notion of justice in discourse and practice, this paper examines cases from three dominant models of labor organizing in the United States: traditional unions, worker centers, and the hybrid form of the Fight for $15. Over four case studies, we use interviews with workers and organizers, analytical accounts of the differing organizational structures of these labor advocacy groups, and discourse analysis of organizational materials of each to illuminate the strengths and weaknesses of each model. Through this examination, we show that across all organizing forms relatively little attention is paid developing and articulating the reasons why a strong labor movement is necessary and beneficial to either workers as a class or society as a whole. We then submit that if labor is to be a movement, rather than a collection of service organizations, then it is important to put forward an idea of "labor justice" which can help members of the polity reconceptualize the relationship between work, leisure, care, dignity, productivity, and prosperity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an examination of the puzzle of why there has been so little organizing of the unemployed and the precariously employed in the years since the beginning of the Great Recession in 2008. I argue that this paucity of organization is, in part, the result of the sedimentation of a neoliberal commonsense, or a particularly dominant colloquial interpretation of American individualism, which makes it difficult to perceive structural relation - not only in the case of economic politics, but generally speaking. I propose that using Youngian seriality as a lens can help us see structural relation more lucidly without reducing all structural relation to class relations or making essentialist claims about who we may be as persons or about the objective nature or static organization of structures themselves. This way of seeing provides an opportunity to perceive the multifaceted and intersectional 'we's' that contemporary people perceive themselves to be, while not reducing the individual to an atomistic being outside the context of social, political and economic relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]