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This chapter focuses on low-skilled employment. It shows that employers have a racial hierarchy of preference and that they rely on word-of-mouth hiring to attract Latino and Asian workers with the racial and/or immigrant abilities they prize. The chapter gives special attention to meatpacking, a sector that has been racially remade in the past few decades. It then explores the ways Title VII of the Civil Rights Act should prevent this kind of hiring and shows how judges have created new opportunities for employers to use word-of-mouth hiring to build and maintain their Latino and Asian workforces without running afoul of the law. This chapter also shows how two other laws, the Immigration Reform and Control Act and the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, would seem to prohibit immigrant realism but have nonetheless failed.

This chapter focuses on local and migrant domestic workers' unions in Hong Kong, in the context of the international domestic workers' movement for the International Labor Organization Convention No. 189 on Decent Work for Domestic Workers. Global norms are providing collective action frames that facilitate cohesive activism, as well as international opportunities, symbolic and material resources, and publicity to pressure governments and corporations. In Hong Kong, domestic workers' unions are an amalgamation of a women's movement and a trade union that goes beyond the organizing of women or workers, but incorporating the frames of democracy, human rights, and social justice locally and internationally. Transnational organizing, on the basis of common social location and interests as women and workers under global capitalism, allows local and migrant domestic workers to envision and enact solidarity. But it is also this interaction that hierarchies of class, gender, ethnicity, and nationality become visible, illustrating that privilege and oppression are often not absolute categories but, rather, shift in relation to different axes of power.

Based on interviews and participant observations with nail salon owners, workers, customers, and advocates, in addition to analysis of media representations, this chapter expands the concept of “body labor” to explore the dynamics of emerging circuits of “transnational body labor” that connect Asian workers to immigrant niches in the United States, and increasingly forge material and aesthetic ties back to Asia.

This chapter chart developments within Ford, laying specific emphasis on the shifts occurring amongst the rank and file, especially the gendered and racialized forces at play. In particular, the chapter focuses on the social, political, and cultural experiences of four Ford workers laying particular emphasis on the rise of grassroots trade union politics in the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU), the Equal Pay Strike of 1968, and the central role of black and Asian workers at Ford plants across the UK. The author asserts that Ford workers were motivated by a complex amalgam of political and social motivations rather than simply rash ‘bloody mindedness’ or crass greed, which is constantly purported in the myth of the Winter of Discontent. Instead, chapter reveals that a constellation of political identities that emerged in the Ford strike not only inspired their actions that winter, but also reflected broader social and political changes in Britain in the late 1960s on into the 1970s.

This chapter discusses the formation of labor organizations of Mexican and Asian workers, and their influence on both the labor movement and the movement for land reform. Following the decade of revolutionary upheaval, the population of Baja California increased from 23,537 in 1921 to 48,327 in 1930. During the same time frame, the Colorado River Land Company abandoned large tracts of uncultivated land, which led to an increase in unemployment and stiffer competition between Asian and Mexican workers. Unemployment, combined with the housing shortage caused by a new wave of Mexican migrant workers from the United States, led to the formation of labor unions where indigenous peoples, Mexicans, and Mexican Americans demanded access to farmland and called for restrictions on Chinese immigration. Chinese workers formed Chinese associations in the face of repression and forced deportations. While these struggles reveal how workers dealt with hard financial times, they also show how race, gender, and ethnic affiliations shaped activism and early land reform movements in the Mexicali Valley in the 1920s.

Western biomedical and traditional East Asian medical experts disagreed on the causes of the modern Asian epidemic named as beriberi/jiaoqi/kakké in English, Chinese and Japanese. While conflicting explanations made the epidemic experience most puzzling and elusive, there was general agreement among experts from competing medical traditions that the main victims were Asian men, especially soldiers and workers. The triumphant vitamin B1 deficiency theory based on white-rice as an inferior food also worked with East Asian diagnostic assemblages to frame the disease as native to East Asia, now eloquently explained as an unhealthy environment detrimental to masculinity.

This chapter describes the “pussy ballistics” featured in Asian American cultural production, specifically in the concert of Korean American stand-up comedienne Margaret Cho. These are referred to as (1) the parturition characterizing the privileged and procreative good mother of the global North; (2) the contrastive gratuitous explosions from Asian sex workers' vaginas; and the relationship of both of these to (3) the gut(teral) explosions from the mouth that sell Asian pussy and terrorize the audience with their surprise regurgitations. The chapter examines how these pussy bombshells erupt strategically in Cho's 2003 concert Cho Revolution and how she uses this stylistic repertoire to mount a critique of U.S. empire that focuses on the Asian sex worker as logistical support for the military troops of commodity capitalism. It also develops a theory of Cho's pulsing aesthetics as a valuable mode of pursuing a femiqueer and racial studies critique in analyzing the concert's overall structure.

This chapter looks at the modern just-in-time (JIT) economy, a novel economic context for producing goods—and facilitating pandemics. It examines points where the global economy, Covid-19, and Southeast Asian labour interact. These intersections reveal some important truths both about the JIT economy and about more general consequences of the mobility of humans and their “fellow-travellers.” Southeast Asian workers, whether labouring as migrant workers in Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand or labouring at home, supply relatively cheap wares for the world. Many experience confined living and working conditions, where disease transmission can accelerate. The chapter then considers some Southeast Asian workers’ experiences in production, care, and transport. It concludes with the often-forgotten material connectedness of humans to other plants and animals. Either inter-species disruption and sudden new interconnections will diminish, or they will pose ongoing challenges to this just-in-time world.

The chapter uncovers the major economic, political, social, and cultural causes of the Winter of Discontent. The author addresses key global and national shifts in the late 1960s and 1970s that precipitated the events of late 1978 and 1979. The chapter discusses how these broader pressures occurred at a time when the British workforce and trade union movement were changing, with women, black, and Asian workers playing a more important and assertive role that would prefigure centrally into the conflicts of the Winter of Discontent. Furthermore, grassroots movements, inspired by politics like that of Socialist feminists, on the Left clashed with the Croslandite politics on the Right of the Labour Party. Furthermore, the chapter details how Margaret Thatcher successfully began to lead a reconfiguration of Conservative Party politics in the 1970s that was poised to exploit these political fractures between the Labour Party and the British trade union movement on the eve of the Winter of Discontent in 1978.

This chapter looks at the strategies for implementing anti-racist practice. In the 1980s the anti-racist social work movement argued that effective anti-racist practice would also require the significant recruitment of black and Asian workers who could challenge practice on the frontline and change the culture of social work organisations. This chapter revisits some of the early 1980s debates and traces the history of the anti-racist social work movement and the role of early leaders of that movement. But rather than an overt focus on policy regimes and bureaucracies, which many in the 1980s became concerned to focus on, it argues we need to look at the practices and the networks of anti-racist practitioners ‘the catalysers’ who can bring about significant organisational changes to services.