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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 examines developments in social security policy in 2005. It discusses the continuation of the government's primary focus on reducing poverty through paid work, supplemented with means-tested benefits in the form of tax credits. It notes that these cover an increasingly wide range of those in low-paid work, following the extension of the working tax credit to those without children. It identifies the greatly extended role of Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) in delivering social security in the form of tax credits, as a significant development in social security policy. It involves extending the department's role to one of distributing income as well as collecting revenue, and in the process dealing with a significantly poorer population with different needs and expectations than the traditional client base of the Inland Revenue.

This chapter explores the gig economy’s entrepreneurship narrative, juxtaposing platforms’ promises of autonomy, freedom, and self-determination with the sobering reality of algorithmic control. Life as a ‘micro-entrepreneur’, it turns out, is heavily conditioned by ever-watchful rating algorithms, which aggregate customer feedback and compliance with platform guidelines to exercise close control. Failure to comply can have drastic results. Moreover, depending on consumer demand, the promised flexibility of on-demand work can quickly turn into economic insecurity, as gig income is highly unpredictable from week to week. The promise of freedom similarly rings hollow for many—not least because of carefully constructed contractual agreements that ban some gig workers from taking platforms to court. Instead of enjoying the spoils of successful entrepreneurship, a significant proportion of on-demand workers find themselves trapped in precarious, low-paid work.