Immigrant and Migrant Workers Organizing in Canada and the United States

Casework and Campaigns in a Neoliberal Era

By (author) Jorge Frozzini, Alexandra Law

Hardback - £81.00

Publication date:

08 November 2017

Length of book:

172 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

Dimensions:

237x159mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781498518123

Across Canada and the United States, immigrant workers face important obstacles at work and in the broader society, whether their immigration status is temporary, permanent, or nonexistent. Hyper-precarious workers of all status groups, and their allies in unions and worker centers, are organizing to improve their conditions. In this book, Jorge Frozzini and Alexandra Law, two longtime volunteers with a Canadian worker center, draw on their own experience, in-depth interviews, and academic work from the fields of law, communication studies, and social movement theory, to produce a tactically focused, theoretically informed introduction to immigrant worker organizing in a neoliberal era. Frozzini and Law describe the phenomenon of employment precarity in the context of U.S. and Canadian labor history, explaining how union certification and collective bargaining function under the law. Without directing activists toward any single best strategy, they cover tactical and ethical questions raised when organizers offer casework as a recruitment and research tool. The royalties from this book will go to the Immigrant Workers Centre, Montreal.
Informed by their own experience of working with migrant and immigrant workers, Frozzini and Law make an insightful, interdisciplinary contribution to better understand labor and immigration precariousness in North America, while foregrounding today's struggles for justice and dignity waged by workers' centers and other (im)migrant organizations, innovative coalitions and campaigns.