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Scholars have long argued that churches play a critical role in mobilizing communities marginal to the political process, primarily by pooling resources, disseminating information, and providing opportunities for members to develop community networks, leadership, and civic skills. However, recent research suggests that churches only serve as effective mobilizing institutions when they engage in direct political discussion and recruitment. Even so, churches may face economic, legal, and institutional barriers to entering the political sphere, and explicit political speech and action remain rare. Through an analysis of two years of ethnographic fieldwork following faith-based community organizers attempting to recruit Spanish speakers throughout a Catholic Archdiocese into a campaign for immigrant rights, this paper explores the institutional constraints on church political mobilization, and how these are overcome to mobilize one of the most politically marginal groups in the United States today: Hispanic undocumented immigrants and their allies. I argue that scholars of political engagement must look beyond the structural features of organizations to consider the effects of their institutionalized domains and practices. While churches do face institutional barriers to political mobilization, activists who specialize their recruitment strategy to match the institutional practices of the organizations they target can effectively overcome these barriers to mobilize politically alienated populations.

The national immigrant rights campaign of 2006 stands as one of the largest mobilizations by people of color in US history, yet less scholarly attention has been given to systematically comparing these mobilizations at the local level. To develop an understanding of what led to sustained mobilization, a comparative case study analysis of seven cities in California's San Joaquin Valley is employed. The empirical evidence is based on interviews with key organizers and participants, newspaper documentation of protest events, census data, and other secondary sources. I find that the presence and size of policy threats explained the initial protest during the spring of 2006 in all localities, but cities with elaborate resource infrastructures (preexisting organizations, histories of community organizing, and coalitions) had more enduring levels of collective action.

This chapter compares and contrasts organizing and advocacy among US domestic workers and day laborers. These two occupations share many features: both are ill-suited to conventional unionism; immigrants, many of them unauthorized, have long dominated the workforce in both; both are entry-level jobs at the bottom of the labor market (although both are also internally stratified); and both have been the focus of advocacy and organizing at both the local and national level in recent decades. Yet, there are also significant contrasts between the two. First and foremost, women are the vast majority of domestic workers while men predominate among day laborers. Another striking difference is that while domestic labor is hidden from public view inside private households, day laborers are regularly on display on street corners and other public spaces. This chapter explores the effects of such similarities and differences on the collective action repertoires of day laborers and domestic workers. In both cases, many workers have individualistic, entrepreneurial ambitions, a formidable organizing challenge; yet, orientation does not necessarily impede and sometimes even facilitates collective action. Day laborers’ demands are largely economic, and these (predominantly male) workers often hope to return to their countries of origin; domestic workers (overwhelmingly female) are more interested in improved opportunities within the US. Although women are overrepresented in the leadership of both domestic workers’ and day laborers’ organizations, male day laborers and female domestic workers have distinct experiences and aspirations, and put forward different types of demands, generating gendered collective action repertoires.

Shows how the US economy has witnessed both a massive influx of immigrant workers and a sharp decline in organized labour. Examines the struggles of Latino workers in Los Angeles, USA and shows just how immigrant workers and labour unions have a complicated relationship there. Explains how the problems were eventually eased.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the operation of classification mechanisms in organizational life, and how they construct the skills and knowledge of initially marginalized client groups.

The paper is based on an ethnographically inspired case study of a Swedish labour market procedure, which was designed to validate the skills and knowledge of non-western immigrant job-seekers. Qualitative data were generated through observations, in-depth interviews and document analysis.

The study found that, contrary to policy-makers’ intentions, the validation procedure ended up dissociating the non-western job-seekers’ heterogeneous experiences, skills and knowledge from the organizing processes of the labour market, displacing them beyond the boundaries of legitimate knowledge, and reproducing their marginalized position on the labour market. As non-western skills and knowledge were found unclassifiable according to the validation procedure, they were deemed too different and monstrous.

The research approach and the specific institutional context of Swedish immigration and labour market policy means that the research results are not readily generalizable to other empirical contexts. Therefore, studies outside of Sweden are needed to generate knowledge about similar policies in other countries.

The classification of skills and knowledge and the organizing of difference does not primarily require new tools and methods, but a whole new perspective, which recognizes the multiplicity and heterogeneity of unusual skills and knowledge as an important part of labour market integration.

The paper examines the monstrous aspects of classification mechanisms within the empirical context of labour market integration efforts, which is hitherto underexplored in the literature on the management of difference and diversity.

In this paper, we draw from our own empirical data on worker organizing and identify important concepts that bridge social movement (SM) and industrial relations (IR) theory. In a context of traditional union decline and a surge of alternative types of worker mobilization, we apply SM and IR concepts related to the mobilizing structures and culture to cases of labor organizing via worker centers and community–labor alliances in the United States and China. From an analytical perspective, we argue that the field of SMs and IR can both benefit from this type of cross-discipline theorization.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) states in 2018 that safeguarding “civil liberties is critical” to their official duties. The Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties within DHS, as its website explains,

reviews and assesses complaints from the public in areas such as: physical or other abuse; discrimination based on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or disability; inappropriate conditions of confinement; infringements of free speech; violation of right to due process … and any other civil rights or civil liberties violation related to a Department program or activity.

My chapter tracks the centrality of deportability in shaping the civil liberties and rights that DHS is tasked with enforcing. Over the course of the twentieth century, people on US soil saw an expanding list of civil liberties and civil rights. Important scholarship concentrates on the role of the courts, state and federal governments, advocacy groups, social movements, and foreign policy driving these constitutional and cultural changes. For instance, the scholarship illustrates that coming out of World War I, the US Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment did not protect something the Justices labeled “irresponsible speech.” The Supreme Court soon changed course, opening up an era ever since of more robust First Amendment rights. What has not been undertaken in the literature is an examination of the relationship of deportability to the sweep of civil liberties and civil rights. Starting in the second decade of the twentieth century, federal immigration policymakers began multiplying types of immigration statuses. A century later, among many others, there is the H2A status for temporary low-wage workers, the H2B for skilled labor, and permanent residents with green cards. The deportability of each status constrains access to certain liberties and rights. Thus, in 2016, when people from the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties within DHS act, they are not enforcing a uniform body of rights and liberties that applies equally to citizens and immigrants, or even within the large category of immigrants. Instead, they do so within a complicated matrix of liberties and rights attenuated by deportability, which has been shaped by the history of the twentieth century.

Recent research begins to explore how organizations of informal workers function, and succeed or fail. Using cases of domestic-worker movements in Mexico and the United States, we seek to extend this research by adding historical analysis of the movements’ evolution through a cross-national analysis of movement differences. We draw on concepts from the social movement and intersectionality literature. Historically, the two movements have been propelled by multiple streams of activism corresponding to shifting salient intersectional identities and frames, always including gender but incorporating other elements as well. Comparatively, the US domestic-worker movement recently has had greater success due to superior financial resources and more facilitative political opportunities – advantages due in part precisely to intersectional identities resonant with potential allies. However, this relative advantage was not always present and may not persist. Social movement concepts and intersectional analysis thus help understand both historical changes and cross-national contrasts in informal-worker organizing.

This research examines how labor union involvement shapes the civic participation of low-wage Latino immigrant workers.

Drawing on survey and semi-structured interview data gathered from a Los Angeles janitors’ labor union, I examine whether or not and how Latino immigrants apply their union experience to involvement in their children’s schools.

Results indicate that the union’s targeted member mobilization efforts produce unequal participation in union activities among immigrant workers, fostering civic and leadership skills among some and not others. At the same time, immigrant workers who do become involved in their union are then able to draw on their labor organizing and advocacy experience to address issues and concerns at their children’s schools. For some, worksite activism functions as a catalyst for newfound civic engagement; for other immigrant workers with prior civic experience in their country origin or in the United States, union involvement enhances their leadership capacity.

This empirical investigation shows how the experience of mobilizing for protests and participating in worksite campaigns allows Latino immigrant union members to overcome what are typically considered barriers to civic participation – that is, limited formal education, low occupational status, and limited English language skills. This study therefore suggests that labor union participation can have long-term effects on immigrants well beyond the benefits of a union contract.