Unionization efforts have made impressive gains over the last five years, leading many commentators to declare we’re in the middle of a resurgence in union organizing. Notably, service sector workers have claimed a large portion of these victories, such as the ongoing negotiations between Starbucks and its now 400 unionized stores or the recent bill passed in California raising the minimum wages of fast food workers from $16 to $20. Queer and trans people are on the front lines of this new labor movement and that’s no accident. LGBTQ+ service workers represent a crucial group within these labor campaigns and have turned to unions for protection against discrimination in the workplace.
As baristas staged union drives, conservative policymakers have engaged in a concerted, nationwide attack on LGBT communities, with the ACLU now listing 527 active anti-LGBT bills across the nation. The history of queer and trans involvement in labor organizing suggests that as transphobic and homophobic political attacks escalate, LGBTQ+ people will face heightened employment discrimination, making unionization efforts in low-wage service economies crucial to their economic well-being.
LGBTQ+ Service Workers
LGBT+ workers are more likely than their straight counterparts to work service jobs at businesses such as grocery and convenience stores, and more so if they are trans or queer people of color.
This trend arose from their historic exclusions from labor markets following the Lavender Scare, a purge of gays and lesbians from government positions during the Cold War due to their alleged vulnerability to communist influence. As well, private sector workplaces frequently excluded applicants based on sexual preference or gender nonconformity. As Margot Canaday writes in Queer Career, queer and trans workers in the second half of the 20th century often took precarious, low-wage, service jobs at cafes, restaurants, and bars because these jobs allowed them to express themselves at work openly.
Though not often included in the broader history of labor organizing, service workers made significant contributions to unionization efforts across the 20th century, with nearly 25% of all food servers unionized in the 1950s near the height of union activism. In the 1980s, UNITE HERE, a hospitality union, successfully organized 90% of service workers in Las Vegas where Republican legislators had previously passed state-wide right-to-work laws. Large segments of the service sector, such as the hospitality industry, became dominated by women and people of color, following the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. By the 1970s, queer service workers in cities such as San Francisco and Seattle publicly came out to fight for protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender presentation which they saw as key aspects of the gay liberation movement. From 1980 on, this cross-racial and cross-gender coalition of workers secured workers’ protections in states like California, Washington, Oregon, and Colorado, often in the face of right-wing campaigns that sought to protect the ability to discriminate against queer and trans workers.
Workers in the service sector led the charge to reverse the AFL-CIO’s longstanding opposition to immigration which they successfully overturned in 2000, diversified the internal union leadership in chapters such as Local 2 in San Francisco, and organized at the forefront of the globalized movement against poverty wages in their participation in the worldwide fast food strike in May of 2014. However, at each junction, they were met with opposition from business and conservative policymakers. Beginning in 1980, the Reagan administration appointed a new slate of NLRB officials that delivered a series of cases, starting with the Rossmore House decision in 1984, that greatly expanded an employer’s ability to interrogate their employees on union activity and narrowed the scope of protections for workers on the job. In congruence with this conservative turn in labor policy, overall union membership fell from 20.1% of all workers in 1983 to 10.0% in 2023, according to the U.S. Labor Department.
Queer Labor in the Informal Service Sector
Despite the inroads that queer and trans people made within unions and their workplaces, not all service workers had the opportunity to organize. Trans women, particularly trans women of color, have historically been excluded from a majority of jobs in the formal job market and forced into informal street economies, such as sex work.
Sex work can be seen as a segment of the informal service sector due to its criminalized status, its structure as an often self-managed occupation that entails care and bodywork, and the popular misconception that it does not qualify as work.
The criminalization and informalization of sex work means that sex/service workers often face high rates of violence and exploitation on the job by clients or law enforcement. It is only in recent years that organized labor has partnered with workers in the stripping industry. To date, only one strip club in the country is currently unionized. Additionally, anti-trafficking legislation such as FOSTA (Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act)-SESTA (Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act) has made survival-based sex work more dangerous for sex workers of color. Sex workers, many of whom are queer or trans, continue to face dangerous and unequal working conditions and remain overlooked in labor organizing efforts.
Queering Labor Movements
Queer and trans service workers have been and continue to be a vital part of union organizing. Frequently, queer and trans laborers have directed their efforts toward challenging cisheteronormativity within their unions. In doing so, they have transformed the internal and external strategies of unions to reflect their rank and file membership better, as seen in recent changes in contract languages stipulating anti-discrimination policies and improved health care for trans workers as a bargaining goal. Exclusion from professional labor markets, particularly for women and workers of color, created the context through which new coalitions of service workers organized and won more equitable working conditions in the latter half of the 20th century.
Understanding the history of LGBTQ+ service workers underlines the need for a more expansive vision of labor organizing in the future, one that explicitly responds to the exclusions faced by LGBTQ+ workers. A queer vision of labor includes:
- Creating queer and trans caucuses within union organizations, as the United Auto Workers and the American Federation of Teachers have done, will identify how to support LGBTQ+ workers in labor contract negotiations better.
- Supporting fair workweek legislation to address the burden of unpredictable scheduling and fluctuating pay faced by service workers.
- Passing state laws such as Senate Bill 357 in California that repeal anti-loitering laws which disproportionately affect queer and trans sex workers of color.
- Ending the criminalization of HIV transmission penalties for sex workers who face increased punishments in California, Florida, Kentucky, Missouri, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah.
- Organizing to oppose financial discrimination against sex workers by institutions such as MasterCard, Venmo, and Paypal. This discrimination creates vulnerable conditions for sex workers by interrupting their access to financial institutions.
- Sponsoring conferences and caucuses to unite and foster collaboration between formal and informal service workers.
The service sector has become the backbone of the US economy, and yet too many service workers are non-unionized, exploited, and in some instances, criminalized. LGBT+ service workers hold the potential to bridge the formal and informal dimensions of service work in the US; to do so would make for a stronger, queerer labor movement.
