Full Description
Migrant workers around the world are subject to exploitative labor practices that give employers extraordinary bargaining power. This book brings together researchers, practitioners, and advocates who explore the many ways that contracted migrant workers are rendered vulnerable in the workplace. In this book, the term '21st-century coolie' is deployed as a heuristic device that foregrounds the deeply unequal structures shaping the transnational flows of short-term, migrant workers. The term 'coolie' harkens back to the labor arrangements of earlier centuries that involved conscripted labor, indentured servitude, and contract labor across national borders. Like those of past centuries, today's 'coolies' are subject to legal constraints inside and outside the employment relationship that force them into subjugated positions within the workplace.
The chapters of this anthology situate contemporary global migration regimes in histories of colonization, uncover their racialized as well as gendered nature, and examine the role of nation-states in perpetuating conditions of extreme exploitation. The permeability, mutability, and durability of racial capitalism is revealed through an interdisciplinary and practice-oriented lens.
Law and social science students in graduate courses on migration, labor, employment, employment discrimination, and race and the law will gain a deeper understanding of the issues facing migrant workers today, as will students in humanities, performance studies, narrative studies, and communication studies.
Contents
Contents:
PART I MIGRANT WORKERS, GLOBAL RACIAL
CAPITALISM AND UNFREEDOM
1 Introduction to Race, Gender and Contemporary
International Labor Migration Regimes 2
Robyn Magalit Rodriguez
2 The narrative of ethno-racial labor competition and
employee choice 21
Leticia Saucedo
PART II THE RETURN OF THE BRACERO
PROGRAM? H-VISA HOLDERS IN THE
UNITED STATES
3 Bringing back the Bracero Program: the migration
industry in the recruitment of H-2 visa workers 35
Rubén Hernández-León, Efrén Sandoval Hernández and
Lidia Muñoz Paniagua
4 Delegating discrimination in the temporary worker visa
programs 63
Jennifer J. Lee and Rachel Micah-Jones
5 Tech coolies: Indian scientists and engineers entering the
United States on H-1B visas 89
Roli Varma
PART III LEGAL AND ORGANIZING STRATEGIES FOR
U.S. IMMIGRANT AND MIGRANT WORKERS
6 Workers with temporary protected status: the value and
limits of delinking immigration and employment status 110
Shannon Gleeson and Kati Griffith
7 Garment worker organizing in Los Angeles 124
Mar Martinez and Mercedes Cortez
8 Emerging forms of organization for precarious migrant
workers 130
Ken Wang
PART IV DOMESTIC WORKERS AND THE POLITICS
OF REPRESENTATION
9 Domestic workers and storytelling advocacy: competing
visions of migrant worker organizing 152
Sujatha Fernandes
10 Aesthetics of precarity: racial performativity in the archive
of migrant domestic work 174
Maria Eugenia López
PART V THE COMPLEXITIES OF GLOBAL
PROCESSES FOR WORKERS
11 Sustaining inequality: the incorporation of migrant
remittances in the Philippine political economy 192
Suzy Lee
Index
