Suburban Sweatshops
The Fight for Immigrant Rights
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- 27,99 €
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- 27,99 €
Publisher Description
Jorge Bonilla is hospitalized with pneumonia from sleeping at the restaurant where he works, unable to afford rent on wages of thirty cents an hour. Domestic worker Yanira Juarez discovers she has labored for six months with no wages at all; her employer lied about establishing a savings account for her. We live in an era of the sweatshop reborn.
In 1992 Jennifer Gordon founded the Workplace Project to help immigrant workers in the underground suburban economy of Long Island, New York. In a story of gritty determination and surprising hope, she weaves together Latino immigrant life and legal activism to tell the unexpected tale of how the most vulnerable workers in society came together to demand fair wages, safe working conditions, and respect from employers. Immigrant workers--many undocumented--won a series of remarkable victories, including a raise of thirty percent for day laborers and a domestic workers’ bill of rights. In the process, they transformed themselves into effective political participants.
Gordon neither ignores the obstacles faced by such grassroots organizations nor underestimates their very real potential for fundamental change. This revelatory work challenges widely held beliefs about the powerlessness of immigrant workers, what a union should be, and what constitutes effective lawyering. It opens up exciting new possibilities for labor organizing, community building, participatory democracy, legal strategies, and social justice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this compelling book, Gordon combines the harrowing stories of individuals with a broad perspective on suburban economics to create a vivid analysis of immigrant labor in America. An associate professor at Fordham's law school, Gordon begins by pointing out the recent shift of immigrant labor from the cities to the 'bedroom communities' of the nation. "Low-wage immigrant work in the suburbs is no kinder than immigrant work in cities," she writes. "In its long hours, illegally low wages, and staggering rates of injury, it is sweatshop labor all the same." Most of the book's examples come from Gordon's work with the Workplace Project in Long Island, New York, an organization that she formed in 1992 to help immigrants assert their rights on the job and organize collective action. She uses an account of the Project's history as a way into her broader examination of the pros and cons of unions, the problems of organizing workers and the legal aspects of immigrant rights. The technique works quite successfully, giving readers a vivid sense of these workers' conditions in restaurants, construction sites and residential homes while imparting useful lessons on activism. Gordon is understandably proud of the Project's accomplishments-such as getting a bill passed that increased, by 800%, the penalty for employers who did not pay workers in full-but she does not shirk away from the group's problems, like the difficulty of enforcing long-term workplace changes. Her unflinching study raises questions about the future of immigrant rights and the causes behind the "disturbing renaissance of sweatshop work."