Catherwood LibraryILR School

Celeste Vaughan Curington

Laboring in the Shadow of Empire: Race, Gender, and Care Work in Portugal examines the everyday lives of an African-descendant care service workforce that labors in an ostensibly “anti-racial” Europe and against the backdrop of the Portuguese colonial empire. While much of the literature on global care work has focused on Asian and Latine migrant care workers, there is comparatively less research that explicitly examines African care workers and their migration histories to Europe. Sociologist Celeste Vaughan Curington focuses on Portugal—a European setting with comparatively liberal policies around family settlement and naturalization for migrants. In this setting, rapid urbanization in the late twentieth century, along with a national push to reconcile work and family, has shaped the growth of paid home care and cleaning service industries. Many researchers focus on informal work settings, where immigrant rights are restricted and many workers are undocumented or without permanent residence status. Curington instead examines workers who have accessed citizenship or permanent residence status and also explores African women’s experiences laboring in care and service industries in the formal market, revealing how deeply colonial and intersectional logics of a racialized and international division of reproductive labor in Portugal render these women “hyper-invisible” and “hyper-visible” as “appropriate” workers in Lisbon. [from publisher web site]

Claudia Strauss

What Work Means goes beyond the stereotypes and captures the diverse ways Americans view work as a part of a good life. Dispelling the notion of Americans as obsessive workaholics, Claudia Strauss presents a more nuanced perspective. While some live to work, others prefer a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic that is conscientious but preserves time for other interests. Her participants often enjoyed their jobs without making work the focus of their life. These findings challenge laborist views of waged work as central to a good life as well as post-work theories that treat work solely as exploitative and soul-crushing.

Drawing upon the evocative stories of unemployed Americans from a wide range of occupations, from day laborers to corporate managers, both immigrant and native-born, Strauss explores how diverse Americans think about the place of work in a good life, gendered meanings of breadwinning, accepting financial support from family, friends, and the state, and what the ever-elusive American dream means to them. By considering how unemployment experiences diverge from joblessness earlier, What Work Means paves the way for a historically and culturally informed discussion of work meanings in a future of teleworking, greater automation, and increasing nonstandard employment. [from publisher web site]

Eli Friedman, Kevin Lin, Rosa Liu, and Ashley Smith

From trade wars and pandemic politics to rioting workers, intercontinental balloons, and battles over TikTok, the US media tends to present contemporary China—when it’s discussed at all—in sensationalist terms. This portrayal has only intensified as China’s relationship with the United States has grown increasingly hostile. Whether in the form of overtly racist rhetoric and aggressive trade actions, or the more buttoned down but equally antagonistic efforts to oppose Chinese interests abroad, the US has made clear that it has no interest in giving up its position as global hegemon. This seemingly endless cycle of nationalism, jingoism, and reactionary politics on both sides of the Pacific suggests a downward spiral that could plausibly result in catastrophic military confrontation.

China in Global Capitalism forcefully makes the case that workers and socially marginalized people in both the US and China must oppose our rulers’ claims that they have our best interests in mind as they ratchet up their rivalry. Rather, if we’re to avert nuclear calamity, we must oppose imperialism in all its forms, and regardless of its source and rhetoric.

Through snapshots of China’s growing social movements—from its labor struggles to feminist campaigns, and more—Lin, Liu, Friedman, and Smith provide some of the building blocks we’ll need to construct a movement that centers international solidarity across borders. [from publisher web site]

Debbie J. Goldman

Call center employees once blended skill and emotional intelligence to solve customer problems while the workplace itself encouraged camaraderie and job satisfaction. Ten years after telecom industry deregulation, management had isolated the largely female workforce in cubicles, imposed quotas to sell products, and installed surveillance systems that tracked every call and keystroke.

Debbie J. Goldman explores how call center employees and their union fought for good, humane jobs in the face of degraded working conditions and lowered wages. As the workforce coalesced to resist the changes, it demanded the Communications Workers of America (CWA) fight for safe and secure good-paying jobs. But trends in technology, capitalism, and corporate governance--combined with the decline of unions--narrowed the negotiating options for workers. Goldman describes how the actions of workers, management, and policymakers shaped the social impact of the new digital technologies and gave new form to the telecommunications industry in a time of momentous change.

Perceptive and nuanced, Disconnected tells an overlooked story of service workers in a time of change. [from publisher web site]

Allison J. Pugh

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence and labor-saving technologies like self-checkouts and automated factories, the future of work has never been more uncertain, and even jobs requiring high levels of human interaction are no longer safe. The Last Human Job explores the human connections that underlie our work, arguing that what people do for each other in these settings is valuable and worth preserving.

Drawing on in-depth interviews and observations with people in a broad range of professions—from physicians, teachers, and coaches to chaplains, therapists, caregivers, and hairdressers—Allison Pugh develops the concept of “connective labor,” a kind of work that relies on empathy, the spontaneity of human contact, and a mutual recognition of each other’s humanity. The threats to connective labor are not only those posed by advances in AI or apps; Pugh demonstrates how profit-driven campaigns imposing industrial logic shrink the time for workers to connect, enforce new priorities of data and metrics, and introduce standardized practices that hinder our ability to truly see each other. She concludes with profiles of organizations where connective labor thrives, offering practical steps for building a social architecture that works.

Vividly illustrating how connective labor enriches the lives of individuals and binds our communities together, The Last Human Job is a compelling argument for us to recognize, value, and protect humane work in an increasingly automated and disconnected world. [from publisher web site]

Kevin J. Middlebrook

International trade agreements have often been criticized for limited attention to the rights of workers. The North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC), a side agreement to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), stands out for linking labor rights provisions to a U.S. trade agreement. Kevin J. Middlebrook provides a comprehensive and systematic examination of the NAALC, assessing its efficacy in protecting workers’ rights over the entire period it was in effect and demonstrating its broader significance for the role of trade and labor standards in U.S. foreign policy.

Placing the NAALC in comparative context, Middlebrook considers various ways of promoting workers’ rights and how other U.S. international trade agreements have influenced labor rights abroad. He investigates the origins of the agreement; the political controversies among Canada, Mexico, and the United States over its scope; how the agreement operated in practice; and its longer-term policy legacies. Middlebrook emphasizes the tension between state sovereignty and the international promotion of labor rights in the negotiation and implementation of trade agreements, as well as how labor movements in one partner country can galvanize action in others.

Drawing on interviews with high-level officials involved in the trade negotiations and previously unexamined primary sources, The International Defense of Workers is a groundbreaking analysis of the effects of U.S. trade agreements on labor rights. [from publisher web site]

Robert Bruno

For nearly thirty years, Robert Bruno has taught labor history and labor studies to union members from a wide range of occupations and demographic groups. In the class, he asked his students to finish the question “Work is—?” in six words or less. The thousands of responses he collected provide some of the rich source material behind What Work Is. Bruno draws on the thoughts and feelings experienced by workers in the present day to analyze how we might design a future of work. He breaks down perceptions of work into five categories: work and time; the space workers occupy; the impact of work on our lives; the sense of purpose that motivates workers; and the people we work for, in all senses of the term.

Far-seeing and sympathetic, What Work Is merges personal experiences with research, poetry, and other diverse sources to illuminate workers’ lives in the present and envision what work could be in the future. [from publisher web site]

Hamilton Nolan

Inequality is America’s biggest problem. Unions are the single strongest tool that working people have to fix it. Organized labor has been in decline for decades. Yet it sits today at a moment of enormous opportunity. In the wake of the pandemic, a highly visible wave of strikes and new organizing campaigns have driven the popularity of unions to historic highs. The simmering battle inside of the labor movement over how to tap into its revolutionary potential—or allow it to be squandered—will determine the economic and social course of American life for years to come.

In chapters that span the country, Nolan shows readers the actual places where labor and politics meld. He highlights how organized labor can and does wield power effectively: a union that dominates Las Vegas and is trying to scale nationally; a successful decades-long campaign to organize California's child care workers; the human face of a surprising strike of factory workers trying to preserve their pathway to the middle class. Throughout, Nolan follows Sara Nelson, the fiery and charismatic head of the flight attendants’ union, as she struggles with how (and whether) to assert herself as a national leader, to try to fix what is broken. The Hammer draws the line from forgotten workplaces in rural West Virginia to Washington’s halls of power, and shows how labor solidarity can utterly transform American politics—if it can first transform itself.

A labor journalist for more than a decade, Nolan helped unionize his own industry. The Hammer is a urgent on-the-ground excavation of the past, present, and future of the American labor movement. [from publisher web site]

Brianna L. Alderman and Roger D. Blair

The economics of monopsony power results in lower wages and other forms of compensation, as well as reduced employment. Wealth is transferred from workers to their employers. In addition, the employer's output is reduced, which leads to increased prices for consumers. Monopsony in Labor Markets demonstrates that elements of monopsony are pervasive and explores the available antitrust policy options. It presents the economic and empirical foundations for antitrust concerns and sets out the relevant antitrust policy. Building on this foundation, it examines collusion on compensation, collusive no-poaching agreements, and the inclusion of non-compete agreements in employment contracts. It also addresses the influence of labor unions, labor's antitrust exemption, which permits the exercise of countervailing power, and the consequences of mergers to monopsony. Offering a thorough explanation of antitrust policy, this book identifies the basic economic problems with monopsony in labor markets and explains the remedies currently available. [from publisher web site]

E-book available to Cornell community: https://catalog.library.cornell.edu/catalog/16204325

Laura López-Sanders

In The Manufacturing of Job Displacement, Laura López-Sanders argues that the walls of American businesses hide a system of illegal practices and behaviors that lead to racial inequality in the labor market. Drawing on extensive research in South Carolina manufacturing facilities, nearly 300 interviews, and her own experience working at both the “bottom” of the labor market (e.g., cleaning toilets and on assembly-line jobs) and in mid-level supervisory positions, López-Sanders provides a behind-the-scenes accounting of daily factory life.

She uncovers preferential hiring practices that fly in the face of civil rights legislation barring employment discrimination, including orchestrated actions of employers to systematically replace Black workers with Hispanic unauthorized immigrants. López-Sanders argues against the predominant view that worker displacement occurs primarily because of hiring biases or social networks. Instead, she shows that employers intervene strategically, relying on subcontractors, agencies, and intermediaries to shift the race and gender in an organization. They also use vulnerable and tractable immigrant labor to impose and justify untenable standards that drive native-born workers out of their jobs and create vacancies to be filled by additional immigrant workers. The Manufacturing of Job Displacement sheds new light on a classic question about ethnic succession and segmentation in the labor market and reorients the ongoing debates about the economic impact of immigration. [from publisher web site]