Catherwood LibraryILR School

This book illuminates how government regulation (and under-regulation) degrades workplace conditions, as well as workers' ability to contest them. The authors interpret government action and inaction broadly to include statutory frameworks, enforcement systems, and other implementation processes. They also include both punitive arms of governance and everyday mundane aspects of government bureaucracies. Through enacting, enforcing, administering, and interpreting laws, or by deciding not to do so, the government feeds poor working conditions and disempowers workers. The three parts of the book disaggregate and interrogate three key policy arenas through which this occurs: under-regulation of workers' rights, an immigration regime that disempowers workers, and failure to counteract racialized labor hierarchies and colonial legacies. The book examines three domains successively, via three pairs of chapters that focus on how the government fuels precarious working conditions and shapes barriers and pathways to change. Throughout, the authors highlight instances where workers have resisted despite the odds-sometimes individually, sometimes collectively; sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly. [from publisher]

Ebook available to Cornell community: https://catalog.library.cornell.edu/catalog/17172800