New Urban Immigrant Workforce: Innovative Models for Labor Organizing

This ground-breaking look at contemporary immigrant labor organizing and mobilization draws on participant observation, ethnographic interviews, historical documents, and new case studies. The expert contributors provide tangible evidence of immigrants' eagerness for collective action and organizing, and argue lucidly that this propensity to organize stems from the immigrants' social isolation. Thus the book parts company with mainstream thinking that recommends building an array of social networks to aid in organizing efforts. Many of the contributors highlight a specific ethnic group and special labor niches, such as the dominance of Punjabi in the New York City taxi industry. Each case study examines efforts beyond the conventional unions to organize the immigrants, including independent syndicalism on the job and worker centers such as the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York, created to support displaced workers and victims' families of Windows on the World, the restaurant on top of the World Trade Center. An essential text for labor-relations and immigrant studies, the book takes into account the latest debates in the fields of labor studies, urban studies, sociology, and political science.