Mobilizing against Inequality: Unions, Immigrant Workers, and the Crisis of Capitalism, edited by Lee H. Adler, Maite Tapia and Lowell Turner. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2014, 232 pp., ISBN: 978 0 8014 7933 5, $21.95, paperback.
| Date | 01 March 2015 |
| Published date | 01 March 2015 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12112 |
to be useful for anyone who wants to understand the politics of industrial relations,
vocational education and training, and labour market policy, in advanced capitalist
countries.
NATHAN LILLIE
University of Jyväskylä
References
Bieler, A. (2006). The Struggle for a Social Europe: Trade Unions and EMU in Times
of Global Restructuring. Manchester: University of Manchester Press.
Menz, G. (2005). Varieties of Capitalism and Europeanization: National Response
Strategies to the Single European Market. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mobilizing against Inequality: Unions, Immigrant Workers, and the Crisis of Capitalism,
edited by Lee H. Adler, Maite Tapia and Lowell Turner. Cornell University Press,
Ithaca, NY, 2014, 232 pp., ISBN: 978 0 8014 7933 5, $21.95, paperback.
Mobilizing against Inequality is a volume edited by Lee H. Adler, Maite Tapia
and Lowell Turner that examines national union efforts to mobilize and organize
immigrant workers in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United
States. The chapters in the volume are interconnected and integrated into the main
theme as the authors draw on each others’ findings throughout the whole book. By
situating the comparative study in the larger context of the crisis of capitalism,
Tapia, Turner and Roca-Servat explain in the second chapter how in the book they
have combined Polanyi’s ‘double movement’ framework with social movement
theory to analyse unions’ reactions against neoliberal economic governance and the
strategies that employers use to exploit low-wage immigrant workers in the Global
North.
Thirty years of unsustainable neoliberal economic policies have led to a severe crisis
of capitalism. One of the characteristics of these policies has been the expansion of
low-wage workforces, in particular in the private sectors, that cannot be ‘off-shored’.
Immigrant workers occupy a central position in the low-wage workforce; therefore,
they become important for the future of organized labour: they can be a threat to
solidarity if left abandoned and a great potential for the struggle against capital if
organized. The contributors of the volume argue that collective action will be suc-
cessful only if unions and other collective representation organizations overcome
divisions, unite and give voice to the vulnerable, such as women, youth and immi-
grants. Starting from such premises, national labour movements are examined in
terms of union efforts to mobilize immigrant workers. The comparative analysis
across countries and industries suggests that unions in coalition with other commu-
nity and civil society organizations provide the necessary countermovement against
unsustainable neoliberal policies and globalization.
The book starts with an exposé of the economic context and moves on to explain
the analytical framework. In the second part, each country is discussed separately,
and each chapter takes a wider view on the relationship among unions, immigrant
workers and institutions, giving the reader a condensed but clear historical overview
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164 British Journal of Industrial Relations
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd/London School of Economics.
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