CONSTRUCTING A WORKER IDENTITY Class, Experience, and Organizing in Workers’Awaaz LINTA VARGHESE Vassar College, USA  ABSTRACT This article examines the debates over the meaning of ‘worker’ in Workers’ Awaaz, a female domestic workers’ group in New York City, at three moments in the organization’s history.Workers’ Awaaz set itself apart from other South Asian groups through its focus on low-wage workers and by attempting to institute an organizing, rather than activist or service model. However, I argue that an infrastructure that divided workers from other membership along lines of occupation and income prevented Workers’ Awaaz from engaging in mass-based organizing due to its reinscription of roles of service provider and client. By examining the shifting construction of worker, I hope to illustrate the debates and processes occurring within new organizational forms in the South Asian American community. Key Words  class  new labor organizing  South Asian America  worker identity In contrast to the male, professional led Indian American organizations concerned with cultural promotion that formed soon after the entry of the post-1965 immigrants, and to the South Asian regional, national, religious, and ethno-cultural groups that formed from the mid-1970s onwards, South Asian organizations focusing on economic and social justice, oppositional cultural forms, and contesting established leaderships’ claims as community representatives began emerging in the 1980s (Khandelwal, 1997, 2002; Prashad and Mathew, 1999/2000; Vaid, 1999/2000; Waheed, 2006). These organizations highlight modalities of inequality, fight encroaching Hindutva ideology in India and the diaspora, mobilize against US imperialism, organize South Asian youth, work to end deportation and detention, perform cultural work, and participate in larger social justice movements. They provide spaces to construct subjectivities outside both the American 18(2): 189–211. [DOI: 10.1177/0921374006066698] http://cdy.sagepub.com Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications (London,Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Cultural Dynamics