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This chapter evaluates the role civil society organizations have played in implementing the rights of immigrant workers. It considers both the framing of the issue in each place and the strategies that have emerged. Specifically, the chapter specifies three ways that civil society organizations are advancing immigrant worker rights: direct service to individuals, collective organizing with workers, and policy advocacy on behalf of workers. This chapter examines a range of civil society organizations involved in promoting immigrant workers' rights, including but not limited to central labor councils, worker centers, immigrant rights groups, faith-based agencies, legal advocates, and even business groups. In doing so, the chapter compares and contrasts the accessibility and performance of the civil society organizations in San Jose and Houston.

This chapter addresses the racial position of eastern and southern European immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, finding it to lie “inbetween” full whiteness and the fiercer oppressions inflicted on people of color. The development of racial awareness and attitudes and an increasingly racialized worldview among new immigrant workers themselves are described. The chapter also aims to destabilize modern categories of race and ethnicity and to capture the confusion, inbetween-ness, and flux in the minds of native-born Americans and the immigrants themselves. Americanization was never just about nation but was always about race and nation. “White men's unions” often seemed the best path from inbetween-ness to white manhood, but they also erected some of the most significant obstacles. The chapter then moves from the racial categorization of new immigrants to their own racial consciousness. Both “becoming American” and “becoming white” could imply coercive threats to European national identities.

This chapter explores the first phase of the global history of guestworker programs, which began in the late nineteenth century and lasted until the Great Depression of the 1930s. Before that time, there were no guestworker programs because there were no immigration restrictions. Immigration restrictions led to guestworker programs as states sought to guarantee employers access to the immigrant workers that restrictionists were trying to deny them. Temporary immigration schemes—guestworker programs—were state-brokered compromises designed to placate employers' demands for labor and nativists' demands for restriction. Guestworker programs offered clear-cut distinctions between citizens and noncitizens, natives and aliens, insiders and outsiders, whites and nonwhites. This first phase in the history of guestworker programs thus reveals the essential features of the guestworker programs to come.

This introductory chapter presents statistical and analytical data on immigrant labor conditions in the United States. It explains that immigrant—particularly undocumented—workers labor in nearly every low-wage industry across the country. However, in today's de-unionized, postindustrial economy, they continue to experience such breaches of their rights as unpaid wages, dangerous workplaces, and outright discrimination. Yet ironically, unlike the laborers of a hundred years ago, immigrant workers today have access to a range of formal protections. Their implementation is, however, not a given, particularly for vulnerable populations like undocumented workers. As union membership has declined, workplace rights have become even more important. Nonetheless, ensuring that worker rights exist is only half the battle: getting workers to make claims on those rights, and getting responsible agencies to follow up on those claims, is the other half.

This chapter discusses SEIU’s massive Los Angeles victory in 1999 in light of the Americans with Disability Act, welfare reform, Clinton’s health care debacle, and managed care. In California, the union assembled all the components necessary for success when it built alliances, especially with the independent living centers, stepped outside the NLRB framework, organized tens of thousands of workers, and created new institutional state structures, particularly the public authority, that enabled union representation on a sectoral, rather than worksite, basis. As in Illinois, home care unionism in Los Angeles was really welfare state unionism beholden to the location of home-based, long-term care in government welfare programs. But, in Northern California, SEIU advanced a health care unionism that organized home-based workers with hospital workers. There a culture of organizing, use of worker centers and popular education, and development of member leaders and rank-and-file participation enhanced citizenship rights for immigrants as well as African Americans. SEIU adapted its model to Oregon, where voters authorized collective bargaining. At the end of the 20^th century, home care promised a non-adversarial unionism that joined the providers and receivers of care together to demand respect, recognition, and rights, but remained dependent on state budgets.

This chapter examines the economic impact of immigration—including illegal immigration—at a time of economic crisis. It argues that the answer is crucial for Americans and immigrants alike. It reviews the nature of the debates in the field of economics. The consensus among economists is that on balance the impact of immigration on the economy is positive. However, it is a complex story defying easy generations, never mind sound bites. The chapter contends that the negative effects of immigration have been on the wages of unskilled workers, many of whom are poor African Americans and United States-born Latinos, and on local taxes in communities that have to deal with the services required with the sudden influx of young families with education and medical needs. But at the macroeconomic level, immigrant workers benefit the economy.

This chapter assesses how agency bureaucrats incorporate immigrant workers into their mission, by drawing on interviews with the staff at the helm of labor standards enforcement agencies (LSEAs) in San Jose and Houston. It begins with a close examination of the aftershocks of the 2002 Hoffman Plastic Compounds, Inc. v. National Labor Relations Board Supreme Court decision and the legislative and regulatory responses handed down in California and Texas. Next, the chapter examines the ways that agency bureaucrats interpret their relationship to undocumented workers, revealing that while agents in both places remain committed to the goal of serving all claimants without regard to their immigration status, they still face significant barriers to doing so. The chapter ends by describing the ways institutional intermediaries can act as brokers between LSEA bureaucrats and immigrant workers.

This concluding chapter offers several lessons learned from assessing the political field of immigrant worker rights in San Jose and Houston. It addresses the question of whether workers are better served by a strong formal bureaucracy in San Jose or by a diffuse set of alternatives in Houston, before considering the theoretical implications of the increased institutionalization of rights and opportunities for immigrant civic engagement. The chapter also reflects on the significance of the San Jose and Houston enforcement models in light of stagnant workplace rights and the increasing surveillance of undocumented immigrants. Finally, this chapter suggests that each of the actors discussed in this book will remain relevant to the project of making rights real for immigrant workers.

This chapter examines the role that grassroots organizing and leadership development play in tackling social and economic inequalities along multiple axes of difference, including race, gender, immigration status, and language ability. It locates immigrant women workers at the center of social change by focusing on Asian Immigrant Women Advocates's (AIWA) self-reflexive organizing approach. AIWA is a grassroots community-based organization whose mission is to improve the living and working conditions of Asian immigrant women employed in low-paid and socially devalued jobs. AIWA's English-language dominance workshop embodies many of its core principles and organizing philosophy. The chapter analyzes AIWA's theory and method of change as well as its intersectional organizing approach, with particular emphasis on its English-language classes, workplace literacy classes, and Community Transformational Organizing Strategy (CTOS). It shows that AIWA produces new kinds of politics, polities, and personalities by placing immigrant women workers at the center of the struggle.

This chapter discusses further developments for guestworkers around the world. As efforts to protect labor standards, make immigration temporary, or manage migration, guestworker programs have failed and still fail, whether they are in the United States, the Middle East, South Africa, or the Pacific Rim. Yet as labor supply systems designed to quarantine immigrant workers from natives and keep them a caste apart, they have been very effective. They have drawn nations together in a new, government-crafted dependency, in which the world's wealthy nations import foreigners to do their hardest, dirtiest, and often their most intimate work. The chapter argues that this, indeed, was their true purpose and their most pernicious legacy.

As the workers of the world came to the United States and to Detroit, Ford went into the world. This chapter details the massive global expansion of the Ford Motor Company that was made possible by the changes in the labor regime and the patterns of social reproduction of immigrant workers in Ford’s Highland Park plant. In the Highland Park years, Ford managers bossed—and the “sociologists” he employed molded—immigrant workers thought to be of multiple European “races.” They were required to participate in Americanization programs that included learning to speak English and professing allegiance to new values on and off of the job.

This chapter focuses on public policies that impact the processes of integration. Although the chapter stresses some of the most controversial and negative immigration policies at the federal, state, and local levels, it is important to point out that California and especially the city and county of Los Angeles present a more favorable stance toward immigrants than many other regions of the United States. Indeed, not all the local and state policies and ordinances are negative; several initiatives serve the goal of integration for immigrants. It is also worth stressing that the positive aspects of policy initiatives—such as those combating wage theft or those defending the rights of domestic workers and day laborers—are intimately tied to the capacity of immigrant workers to organize and demand respect for their rights, and to the backing provided by the civil organizations that support these initiatives.

This chapter offers a general overview of the Italian radical movement in the United States. It begins by mapping the social and political scene in Italy after the struggle for unification in 1861, focusing particularly on the rise of anarchism and revolutionary socialism. It then turns to the United States and the emergence of the Italian immigrant radical movement from the first anarchist and socialist clubs at the turn of the nineteenth century, when the great Italian immigration began, to the fight against fascism and the movement's eventual decline after the 1930s. The story of Italian American radicalism begins with the massive emigration of Italians who entered the New World between 1880 and 1920. More than five million migrated to the United States during this period. The radicalization of thousands of Italian immigrant workers can be traced back to their exposure to ethnic discrimination and economic exploitation in America.

Thousands of immigrant workers flooded to Nevada's casinos in the 1980s and 1990s, pushed by economic crises and civil wars in their countries of origin and pulled by global gaming's insatiable hunger for workers. The stories of the immigrant women both mirrored and substantially differed from those of the African American women who preceded them. Of every race and multiple languages, the new workers were poor people who shared with their African American coworkers a legacy of endless work and struggle. But unlike native-born workers, immigrants, who had often lost both families and homelands to war, globalization, and U.S. imperial dreams, struggled to survive in a new language and within a culture that did not appreciate and often actively disparaged them. In this chapter migrating women describe their lives and the confrontation between themselves and global gaming—not as a series of events that might be reported in the newspaper but rather as a process of transformation in which ordinary women, unwilling to turn away from suffering and in the context of a grassroots union open to their leadership, take on responsibilities that unite them in struggle with others. In time—in Las Vegas—this alliance would result in the construction of an extraordinary base of worker power.

Italian immigrants came to America to pursue an artistic dream, but they remain “immigrant workers” at heart. They strongly maintain the ethos of the artisan, with its mixture of manual labor and creativity, more than pretenses of artistic genius. They tell their stories in the quiet mode that links our autobiographies. One of them in particular who does not find success, Luigi Olari, strikes a very human note in his description of failure. Even the quite well-known Alfred Crimi, a painter, Pietro Montana, a sculptor, and Luigi Lombardi, an orchestra director, never put on airs about the position they acquired but always highlighted their struggles, being men of survival. Two of them, the actors Rocco De Russo and Emanuel Gatti, directly experience the decline of theater due to television, and their autobiographies become narratives of the end of an era more than tales of personal triumph. All of these artists started at the bottom, and they unabashedly admit that.

This chapter discusses the public discourse around the integration process of immigrant Latino workers in Emporia, Kansas. It employs aggregate statistical analysis, media-content analysis, and key-informant interviews to examine how the public discourse has changed over time. Particular attention is given to the arrival of the Somali refugee workers that subsequently altered the discourse on immigrant-worker integration. Findings show that the community perception of Latin Americans shifted significantly once a culturally and ethnically less similar group arrived in town. The discussion includes the role of local actors in immigrant integration with an emphasis on their main employer, Tyson Foods. Contrary to the general challenges of immigrant integration, revolving largely around unauthorized migrants, in this case the difficulty had to do with integrating legal immigrants who had racial and religious differences from not only the mainstream community but from the dominant minority as well.

This book explores the reproduction of social inequality within everyday service settings. Wilson analyzes everyday relations among different types of workers, managers, and, to a lesser extent, customers in restaurants. Seen from the ground level, workers negotiate their surroundings by finding ways to make their labor conditions more palatable using the resources available to them. Amid compounded forces that pull workers into divided worlds of work, class-privileged whites and working-class Latinos derive meaningful forms of identity and community from their respective roles in restaurants. This nuances the workplace in unexpected ways: while immigrant Latino workers struggle to contend with their structural disadvantages in marginal jobs, later-generation workers have been able to leverage some of these very conditions to their advantage.

This chapter features stories and examples of the people who led the 1970s union organizing efforts in the private sector, including women, African Americans, Southerners, young baby boomers, and immigrants. It spotlights workers from auto parts plants, university offices, banks, airlines, hospitals, clothing and textile plants, and the construction trades. It includes figures showing union voters by sector and in the South.