The Center for Worker Justice of Eastern Iowa (CWJ) announced on Wednesday afternoon it is shutting down.
“After 13 years of uniting low-wage immigrant workers to promote social and economic justice regarding workers’ rights, housing, and immigration laws, all with the support of allies in faith communities, unions, and community volunteers, we have made the very difficult decision to permanently close the Center for Worker Justice of Eastern Iowa,” the Iowa City-based nonprofit’s board of directors said in a written statement.
CWJ has “always organized against difficult odds in areas where laws, enforcement agencies, and traditional institutions have failed to adequately protect workers,” the statement said. “The gaps and exclusions in our workers’ rights, housing, and immigration laws leave too many people vulnerable to rampant abuse and exploitation. Our power has always been rooted in the courageous leadership of low-wage immigrant workers from Latin America and Africa who make up the majority of our volunteer Board, backed by a small staff and a diverse coalition of allies.”
The nonprofit did not specify why it is closing, beyond saying, “We came to this decision in response to severe external threats that led to irreconcilable divisions within the organization,” and those “divisions have paralyzed our ability to respond to external threats and intensified the risks our vulnerable activists already face.”
On June 8, CWJ announced it was suspending work “indefinitely,” due to a labor dispute with Teamsters Local 238. The local, which represented three CWJ staff members, went on strike against the center after contract talks broke down. CWJ said at the time its work would not resume “until this is resolved.”
CWJ was founded in 2012, in reaction to concerns over growing xenophobia in the state and Iowa’s long-standing anti-labor policies. At first, members met on weekends or weekday evenings at the Iowa City Public Library. Without an office, the group’s papers were often kept in members’ cars, Mazahir Salih recalled when speaking to Little Village on the center’s 10th anniversary in 2022.
“Basically, our cars were our office,” Salih, one of the group’s original members, said. “We didn’t have money, everything was volunteer.”
Salih, a member of the Iowa City Council and the city mayor pro tempore, joined the center’s staff as a community organizer in 2016. She went on to serve as the vice president and president of the center’s board of directors, before becoming its interim executive director and then filling the role on a full-time basis. In 2022, she stepped down from the position.
The center’s first major victory was the creation of a community ID program, the first of its kind in the Midwest. CWJ, along with other groups like Iowa City’s Human Rights Commission and the Iowa City Federation of Labor, petitioned the Johnson County Board of Supervisors to create the program, which it unanimously approved in April 2015.
In 2015, CWJ also campaigned to increase the minimum wage in Johnson County to $10.10 per hour, from the state minimum wage of $7.25. The Board of Supervisors unanimously agreed. In one of their first acts after taking control of both chambers of the Iowa Legislature in 2017, Republican lawmakers passed a bill prohibiting municipalities from setting their own minimum wages, and Gov. Terry Branstad signed it into law, overturning Johnson County’s attempt to create a living wage.
Over the years, CWJ probably became best known for its work fighting wage theft. According to Wednesday’s news release, the center recovered over $250,000 in wrongly withheld wages for workers over its 13 years in existence.
CWJ did have turbulent moments as well. In 2022, the center briefly lost its nonprofit status for failing to file tax documents on time in 2019, 2020 and 2021. Charlie Eastham, a CWJ co-founder who stepped in to fill the role of treasurer on a voluntary basis after the filing problem became known, explained at the time the failure to meet the deadlines for those three years was a paperwork error. After forms were filed electronically, the IRS reinstated CWJ’s nonprofit status, but the center had to pay a total of $20,000 in fines.
“Coalitions like CWJ are powerful, but also fragile,” the board said in its statement on Wednesday. “Many workers’ centers don’t survive more than three to five years.”
The CWJ’s dissolution comes at a time when immigrants and workers are facing many threats, especially from state and national political leaders.
“Organizations serving vulnerable communities need our support and defense right now, and as individual board members, each of us is committed to joining other local efforts to fight for a better future for us all,” the board members said at the conclusion of their statement.
