Organizing Immigrants - by Ruth Milkman (Hardcover)

About the Book

Recruiting the growing numbers of immigrants into union ranks is imperative for the besieged U.S. labor movement. Nowhere is this task more pressing than in California, where immigrants make up a quarter of the population and hold many of the manual...

Book Synopsis

Recruiting the growing numbers of immigrants into union ranks is imperative for the besieged U.S. labor movement. Nowhere is this task more pressing than in California, where immigrants make up a quarter of the population and hold many of the manual jobs that were once key strongholds of organized labor. The first book to offer in-depth coverage of this timely topic, Organizing Immigrants analyzes the recent history of and prospects for union organizing among foreign-born workers in the nation's most populous state.

Are foreign-born workers more or less receptive to unionization than their native-born counterparts? Are undocumented immigrants as likely as legal residents and naturalized citizens to join unions? How much does the political, cultural, and ethnic background of immigrants matter? What are the social, political, and economic conditions that facilitate immigrant unionization?

Drawing on newly collected evidence, the contributors to this volume explore these and other questions, analyzing immigrant employment and unionization trends in California and examining recent strikes and organizing efforts involving foreign-born workers. The case studies include both successful and unsuccessful campaigns, innovative and traditional strategies, and a variety of industrial and service sector settings.

Review Quotes

Organizing Immigrants provides a timely and coherent analysis of the key issue facing North American unions, and of some of the strategies that will allow us to meet this challenge.

Organizing Immigrants... is set apart from conventional work in California labor history.... Each chapter presents a superb and original analysis of the process as it has evolved within an international and a national context and within California. Each chapter is well argued, concluding with a summary of the issues it has raised and the debates it has tracked....It is a welcome contribution to the debates about organizing immigrant labor in California, and it deserves to be widely read.

Los Angeles is now the largest manufacturing center in the United States. It is also one of the most exploitative.... What then, are we to make of the fact that organizing drives among immigrant workers in the Los Angeles region during the early 1990s scored American labor's most notable recent victories' This important book studies what these and subsequent campaigns tell us about the organizability of the 'new immigrants' and union adaptability.... Researchers interested in immigrant workers or unions should read the book.

There is strikingly little contemporary empirical research on union organizing. This makes Milkman's Organizing Immigrants an extremely welcome addition to the literature. Despite its subtitle, this is not a volume for scholars and activists interested in California alone... It should be required reading for anyone examining organizing today.

This book about the challenges of organizing immigrant workers into unions could not have come at a better time... This important volume breaks new ground in its analysis of how unions organize immigrants.

About the Author

Ruth Milkman is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute of Industrial Relations at UCLA. She is the coeditor of Rebuilding Labor: Organizing and Organizers in the New Union Movement (also from Cornell) and the author of Gender at Work and Farewell to the Factory.