Table of Contents for Laboring for Justice
Introduction: Introduction: Stolen Wages on Stolen Land
This chapter introduces the problem of wage theft and the plight of immigrant day laborers in Colorado. It argues that wage theft offers a productive lens to examine how changing immigration enforcement patterns and the fear of deportation impact labor rights, as well as the potential to develop organizing and policy strategies to advance immigrant worker justice. Set against the backdrop of a "purple state" like Colorado that has swung between different positions on both immigration and labor rights, the chapter briefly explores the regional and local historical context, describes day labor hiring sites, introduces local stakeholders working to advance workers' rights, and lays out the approach to community-based ethnographic research. The chapter ends with a summary of the book's chapters.
1.Stealing Immigrant Work
This chapter provides a background to wage theft and situates it within a context of declining labor standards enforcement, the proliferation of precarious work arrangements, the historical devaluation of Latino immigrant—especially Mexican—labor, deepening interior racialized immigration enforcement, and militarized border enforcement. It situates Latino immigrants' experiences with wage theft in the United States within a longer history of appropriating immigrants' labor value. The chapter also globally expands the problem of wage theft to other forms of migrant labor exploitation, which it contends is globally produced through the conjuncture of neoliberal restructuring, militarized borders, and intensified immigration enforcement.
2.Boomtown: Construction and Immigration in the Mile High City
This chapter examines why day laborers, who frequently work in jobs associated with residential construction, could not leverage Colorado's post-Great Recession (2008-9) building boom to their advantage. Despite earning higher hourly wages than earlier studies of day laborers, lack of work depressed their overall income. Day laborers faced difficulties transitioning out of contingent work, tending to cycle between day labor and roles in the residential construction sector that were rarely much more secure. The chapter shows how pervasive labor contracting and heightened immigration enforcement combined to limit immigrant workers' employment options, instill fear, degrade working conditions in the industry, and exert pressure onto workers' social networks. Instead of producing benefits for day laborers, the construction bonanza was conducive to labor violations.
3."Dreaming for Friday": How Employers Steal Wages
This chapter examines the patterned strategies employers use to commit wage theft and why immigrant day laborers are vulnerable to various forms of harmful employer practices, only some of which are illegal. In the context of studies documenting day laborers' high exposure to wage theft, the chapter explores why wage theft rates in Denver might not have been as high as expected. By taking insufficient and unpredictable work into consideration, the chapter argues that while wage theft is indicative of worker precarity, it may fail to capture its full extent when lack of work and income are most pressing.
4."A Day Worked is a Day Paid": Preventing and Confronting Wage Theft
This chapter details the strategies day laborers use to protect themselves from wage theft and the obstacles they face pursuing redress for stolen wages. Day laborers make decisions among a variety of options including non-action, or tolerating the abuse, efforts to avoid future harm, and legal and non-legal strategies to recover unpaid wages. Although legal knowledge among day laborers was low, it was also insufficient to protect them in contingent markets, where workers compete with one another for scarce work. Because day laborers risked potentially losing more income from lack of work than from wage theft, they faced troubling trade-offs when considering whether to organize with one another, chance taking a job offer that could be risky, or expend the time and energy to pursue unpaid wages.
5.Failure to Pursue: The Legal Maze
This chapter ethnographically traces how workers and advocates navigate legal avenues to recover unpaid wages, with a focus on Colorado's administrative claims process. The largest portion of claims closed by Colorado's Department of Labor are closed because of "failure to pursue," meaning that workers fail to continue their cases or cannot be reached. However, rather than workers who fail to pursue, a reactive and individualized labor rights enforcement system interacts with the exigencies of low-wage immigrant workers lives to routinely fail workers. Chasing wages through available legal avenues risks further embedding low-wage immigrant workers into the banalities of bureaucratic power in ways that reproduce their subordinated inclusion in the U.S. The chapter discusses the limits of regulatory approaches to advance the labor rights of unauthorized immigrants while highlighting policies that respond to some of these critiques.
6.God's Justice: Resignation and Reckoning
This chapter centers the explanations of day laborers who appear resigned to wage theft, who claim that nothing can be done to prevent exploitation, or only hold faith in God that wrongs will eventually be righted. However, rather than merely accepting or rationalizing their structural vulnerability, the chapter shows how discourses about God's will, faith, and karma also articulate a moral politics of justice as immigrant day laborers insist on the right to live and work with dignity amidst ongoing precarity and risk. Entering debates about agency, resistance, and solidarity, the chapter shows how day laborers cultivate a sense of convivencia (co-existence) with one another that stimulates human connectedness while guarding them from the risks that can ensue from placing too much trust in their peers.
7.Authorship: Abbey Vogel, Diego Bleifuss Prados, Amy Czulada, Tamara Kuennen, Alexsis Sanchez, and Rebecca Galemba: The DAT: Justice and Direct Action
This chapter experiments with a co-written format alongside former students, a collaborating law professor, and activists to critically reflect on the work of the Direct Action Team, a group of volunteers that allies with low-wage immigrant workers to apply direct action tactics to recover unpaid wages and prevent wage theft. Contributing to debates about decolonizing research, we explore tensions between assisting workers with wage theft cases and wider goals of stimulating worker-led social change. By reflecting on our positionalities and the power dynamics that influenced our relationships with one another and with workers, we offer that critically embracing these tensions in our work can highlight avenues to move towards a praxis that advances solidarity.
8.Conclusion: "Sí, se puede": Learning to Convivir Amidst Broader Indignities
The conclusion reflects on larger challenges towards advancing immigrant and worker justice so long as low-wage immigrant workers occupy a subordinate position in society with limited actionable rights. It also expands beyond day laborers and wage theft to show how day laborers' experiences can offer lessons for the wider unfolding of racial and economic inequality and exploitative labor practices. Wage theft is not an exception, but instead inheres in the trajectory of neoliberal and racial capitalism. The conclusion further probes the ethical ambiguities and power dynamics raised by conducting community-based research and building partnerships towards social change. The chapter offers the concept of convivir-to co-exist and listen alongside-as an incipient approach to building deeper relationships of accompaniment, solidarity, and justice that also admit and begin to address the discrepancies of power and privilege that undergird community-engaged and activist research.