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Over the last half century, two major developments have transformed the nature of workers’ rights and altered the pathways available to low-wage workers to combat their exploitation. First, while national labor law, which regulates unionization and collective bargaining, has grown increasingly ineffective, employment laws establishing minimal workplace standards have proliferated at the state and local levels. Second, as labor unions have declined, a diversity of small, under-resourced nonprofit “alt-labor” groups have emerged in locations across the United States to organize and support marginalized workers. In Alt-Labor and the New Politics of Workers’ Rights, political scientist Daniel J. Galvin draws on rich data and extensive interviews to examine the links between these developments. With nuance and insight, Galvin explains how alt-labor groups are finding creative ways to help their members while navigating the many organizational challenges and structural constraints they face in this new context.

Alt-labor groups have long offered their members services and organizing opportunities to contest their unfair treatment on the job. But many groups have grown frustrated by the limited impact of these traditional strategies and have turned to public policy to scale up their work. They have successfully led campaigns to combat wage theft, raise the minimum wage, improve working conditions, strengthen immigrants’ rights, and more. These successes present something of a puzzle: relative to their larger, wealthier, and better-connected opponents, alt-labor groups are small, poor, and weak. Their members are primarily low-wage immigrant workers and workers of color who are often socially, economically, and politically marginalized. With few exceptions, the groups lack large dues-paying memberships and are dependent on philanthropic foundations and other unpredictable sources of funding. How, given their myriad challenges, have alt-labor groups managed to make gains for their members?

Galvin reveals that alt-labor groups are leveraging their deep roots in local communities, their unique position in the labor movement, and the flexibility of their organizational forms to build their collective power and extend their reach. A growing number of groups have also become more politically engaged and have set out to alter their political environments by cultivating more engaged citizens, influencing candidate selection processes, and expanding government capacities. These efforts seek to enhance alt-labor groups’ probabilities of success in the near term while incrementally shifting the balance of power over the long term.

Alt-Labor and the New Politics of Workers’ Rights comprehensively details alt-labor’s turn to policy and politics, provides compelling insights into the dilemmas the groups now face, and illuminates how their efforts have both invigorated and complicated the American labor movement.
 

Caritina Piña Montalvo personified the vital role played by Mexican women in the anarcho-syndicalist movement. Sonia Hernández tells the story of how Piña and other Mexicanas in the Gulf of Mexico region fought for labor rights both locally and abroad in service to the anarchist ideal of a worldwide community of workers. An international labor broker, Piña never left her native Tamaulipas. Yet she excelled in connecting groups in the United States and Mexico. Her story explains the conditions that led to anarcho-syndicalism's rise as a tool to achieve labor and gender equity. It also reveals how women's ideas and expressions of feminist beliefs informed their experiences as leaders in and members of the labor movement.

A vivid look at a radical activist and her times, For a Just and Better World illuminates the lives and work of Mexican women battling for labor rights and gender equality in the early twentieth century.

A biography of Bruce Crawford, a southwest Virginia journalist-writer of the radical tradition and one of the first to interpret Appalachian labor history.

Hell’s Not Far Off is a grounded, politically engaged study of the Appalachian journalist and political critic Bruce Crawford, a scourge of coal and railway interests. Crawford fought injustices wherever he saw them at major risk to his own life and became an early interpreter of Appalachian labor history.

His writings and actions from the 1920s to the 1960s helped shape southwest Virginia and West Virginia. Through Crawford’s Weekly, a newspaper active from 1920 to 1935, Crawford challenged the Ku Klux Klan, lynch mobs, and the private police forces of coal barons. The wounds received for these efforts were the closing of his paper and a bullet to his leg during a Harlan County strike in the 1930s. In his work after journalism, he led the West Virginia branch of the Federal Writers’ Project during the political standoff over the contents of the state’s official guidebook.

In Hell’s Not Far Off, Josh Howard resurrects strands of a radical tradition centered especially on matters of labor, environment, and race, drawing attention to that tradition’s ongoing salience: “Present-day Appalachia’s fights were [Crawford’s], and his fights are still ours.”

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, Griffith, Gleeson, Dubuisson, and Campos-Medina reveal how U.S. policies produce and sustain job instability and insecurity. Together, 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 to push for change. Workplace 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 through immigration status verification requirements. Undocumented workers often 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. 
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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, among other policy proposals, 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.

How street vendors tangle with the law in São Paulo, Brazil.
 
With a little initiative and very little startup money, an outgoing individual might sell you a number of delights and conveniences familiar to city dwellers—from cold water bottles while you’re sitting in traffic to a popsicle from a cart on a summer afternoon in the park. Such vendors form a significant share of the workforce in São Paulo, Brazil, but their ubiquity belies perpetual struggle. Some have the right to practice their trade; others do not. All of them strive to make it—or stay afloat.
 
In The Edge of the Law, sociologist Jacinto Cuvi introduces us to the world of street vendors and teases out the relationship between the construction of legality and the experience of citizenship. As São Paulo’s city government undertakes a large-scale plan to cancel street vending licenses and evict street vendors, Cuvi reveals how the rights of informal workers can be revoked or withheld and how the lines can be redrawn between work that is “legal” and work that takes place under constant fear of law enforcement. Alongside the mechanics of disenfranchisement, Cuvi captures the lived experience of criminalization, dissecting the distribution of (shallow) rights among vendors who continually reinvent strategies to eke out a living while dealing with the constraints and pressures of informal citizenship at the edge of the law.