Mobilizing against Inequality

Among the many challenges that global liberalization has posed for trade unions, the growth of precarious immigrant workforces lacking any collective representation stands out as both a major threat to solidarity and an organizing opportunity. Believing that collective action is critical in the struggle to lift the low wages and working conditions of immigrant workers, the contributors to Mobilizing against Inequality set out to study union strategies toward immigrant workers in four countries: Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and United States. Their research revealed both formidable challenges and inspiring examples of immigrant mobilization that often took shape as innovative social countermovements. Using case studies from a carwash organizing campaign in the United States, a sans papiers movement in France, Justice for Cleaners in the United Kingdom, and integration approaches by the Metalworkers Union in Germany, among others, the authors look at the strategies of unions toward immigrants from a comparative perspective. Although organizers face a different set of obstacles in each country, this book points to common strategies that offer promise for a more dynamic model of unionism is the global North. Visit the website for the book, which features literature reviews, full case studies, updates, and links to related publications at www.mobilizing-against-inequality.info.

"The immigrant workforce is both victimized as the most precarious element of the low-wage workforce and scapegoated by nativist and anti-immigrant elements as the cause of low wages and terrible working conditions. Through several case studies examining immigrant worker organizing in the United States and Europe, Mobilizing against Inequality provides vital insights into the importance of organizing the immigrant workforce and fully integrating immigrants into the general society as the best way to protect and improve wages and working conditions across the board. These insights can inform the debate in the United States at a time when immigration policy is under close examination and change is on the horizon."

Lee H. Adler teaches public sector collective bargaining and public education law at the ILR School at Cornell University and represents public sector unions throughout New York State. Maite Tapia is Assistant Professor at the School of Human Resources and Labor Relations at Michigan State University. Lowell Turner is Professor of International and Comparative Labor at the ILR School and Director of the Worker Institute at Cornell University. He is coeditor most recently of Labor in the New Urban Battlegrounds and Rekindling the Movement, both from Cornell. Ana Avendaño is Assistant to the President and Director of Immigration and Community Action at the AFL-CIO.