From the Bookshelves: Legalized Inequalities
Check out Legalized Inequalities: Immigration and Race in the Low-Wage Workplace, a new book from Kate Griffith, Shannon Gleeson, Darlène Dubuisson, and Patricia Campos-Medina. Here's the official pitch:
Beyond unlivable wages and a lack of upward mobility, low-wage work in the United States is rife with danger and degrading treatment. Immigrants and people of color are overrepresented in these “bad jobs” and often feel as though they are unable to change their working conditions. In Legalized Inequalities, law scholar Kati L. Griffith, sociologist Shannon Gleeson, anthropologist Darlène Dubuisson, and political scientist Patricia Campos-Medina investigate the government’s role in perpetuating poor and dangerous work environments for low-wage immigrant workers of color.
Drawing on interviews with over three hundred low-wage Haitian and Central American workers and worker advocates, the authors reveal how U.S. policies produce and sustain job instability and insecurity. Contemporary U.S. labor and employment law, immigration policy, and enduring racial inequality work in tandem to keep workers’ wages low, lock them into substandard working conditions, and minimize opportunities for change. Regulations meant to protect workers are weak and underenforced, privileging employers over workers. At-will employment policies, which allow employers to terminate employees without cause, discourage workers from bargaining for better jobs or holding employers accountable for even the most egregious mistreatment. Federal immigration policy further disempowers workers by deputizing employers to act as immigration enforcement agents leading undocumented workers to believe they must endure maltreatment or risk deportation. Anti-immigrant sentiment—encouraged by U.S. policy—impacts workers across all status groups. Additionally, despite a proliferation of civil rights legislation, racial disparities remain in the workplace. Workers of color are often paid less, forced to complete more dangerous and demeaning tasks, and subjected to racial harassment.
While these workers face formidable barriers to fighting for their rights, they are not entirely powerless. Some low-wage workers filed formal complaints with government agencies. Others, on their own or collectively, confronted their employers to demand fair and dignified treatment. Some even quit in protest of their poor working conditions. The authors argue that reforming labor and employment law, immigration law, and civil rights law is necessary to reshape the low-wage workplace. They suggest increasing funding for workers’ rights enforcement agencies, removing the mandate for employers to verify a worker’s immigration status, and making it easier to prove that employment discrimination has occurred to help empower and protect low-wage immigrant workers of color.
Legalized Inequalities not only highlights the crushing consequences of U.S. policy on low-wage immigrant workers of color but showcases their resilience in the face of these obstacles.
The Cornell Chronicle has a nice write up of the book today. I've been following Kate & Shannon's work for a while now – check out their 2020 article Immigrants in Shifting Times on Long Island, NY: The Stakes of Losing Temporary Status if you haven't before. (I may have been fan-girling a little too hard when their work inspired me to convince my eldest to apply to Cornell University ILR School.) Anyhoo – genuinely looking forward to this read!
