Conflicting Commitments: The Politics of Enforcing Immigrant Worker Rights in San Jose and Houston, by Shannon Gleeson . Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2012, 288 pp., ISBN: 978 0 8014 5121 8, $69.95, hardback.
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12063 |
| Author | Lisa Berntsen |
| Published date | 01 June 2014 |
| Date | 01 June 2014 |
his normative argument about what rights should be given to migrants, without
providing solid grounds to the central hypothesis of migrant numbers versus rights.
GABRIELLA ALBERTI
Leeds University Business School, Leeds University
Conflicting Commitments: The Politics of Enforcing Immigrant Worker Rights in San
Jose and Houston, by Shannon Gleeson. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY,
2012, 288 pp., ISBN: 978 0 8014 5121 8, $69.95, hardback.
Undocumented workers are an important part of the low-wage immigrant workforce
in the United States, where one in 20 workers is estimated to be undocumented.
Immigrant workers have become structurally embedded within the low-wage labour
market as undocumented migration has persisted, even during recent recessionary
times. Even though these workers are illegal in the United States and employers are
therefore not allowed to employ them, once undocumented workers have a job, they are
protected by certain basic workplace rights. Core labour protections against employer
abuse, such as the right to collection of unpaid wages for hours worked, protection
against discrimination and harassment, and basic health and safety standards, are in
place regardless of a worker’s legal status. This, however, places undocumented
workers in between the conflicting policy realms of immigration and worker rights.
In Conflicting Commitments, Shannon Gleeson analyses the process of immigrant
worker rights enforcement within the contradictory policy context of labour and
employment and immigration laws. She focuses on how state, federal and local laws
are made real for undocumented workers and examines the strategies of a variety of
actors who intervene in the enforcement of immigrant workers’ rights. Gleeson’s main
argument is that local context matters for the protection of undocumented workers.
She shows this through a comparative case study of two immigrant-receiving cities,
San Jose, California and Houston, Texas, which have two different local systems of
rights enforcement. These two cities, although similar in terms of demographics and
economics, present two distinct and opposite political fields for the enforcement of
immigrant labour rights, with Houston being one of the most conservative large cities
in the United States and San Jose considered among the most labour- and immigrant-
friendly cities. Using the ‘political field’ as an analytical tool, Gleeson analyses the
enforcement of immigrant worker rights by studying how actors operate in response
to and within the political field in which they are embedded. In both cities, the political
fields consist of a patchwork of institutions with varying organizational missions.
Gleeson shows that the political field in San Jose ‘allows various actors to advocate
for immigrant workers from different perspectives in resource-intensive ways while
also ultimately encouraging a single logic of formal claims-making via the state
enforcement apparatus’ (p. 23). The contentious political field and weak state enforce-
ment apparatus in Houston, in contrast, leads to a strategy of diversification
and collaboration between institutional intermediaries, requiring ‘advocates to
multitask and collaborate not only to make the formal claims-making route tenable
for undocumented workers especially but also to encourage the creation of alternative
avenues of seeking recourse outside the system’ (p. 23).
Workers’ formal rights can materialize through formal claims-making procedures at
labour standards enforcement agencies, which is a lengthy process. The bureaucratic
hurdles of a formal claims-making procedure, which are real even for legal workers, are
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