Wage Theft and Work Safety: Immigrant Day Labor Jobs and the Potential for Worker Rights Training at Worker Centers

Immigrant day laborers routinely experience exploitative behaviors as part of their employment. These experiences are understood in the context of their immigration histories and in the context of their long-term goals for less precarious labor and living situations. Using mixed methods, over three data collection periods in 2016, 2019, and 2020, we analyze the work experiences of immigrant day labors in Houston and Austin, Texas. We report how workers judge precarious jobs and respond to labor exploitation in an informal labor market. We also discuss data pertaining to a worker rights training intervention conducted through a city-sponsored worker center. We discuss the potential for worker centers to be a convening and remediation space for workers and employers. Worker centers where immigrant day labors meet employers offer the potential for informal intervention into wage theft and work safety violations, by formalizing the context where laborers are hired.

Edge Computing Driven Scene-aware Intelligent Augmented Reality for Manual Assembly

Wearable augmented reality (AR) can superimpose virtual models or annotation on real scenes, and which can be utilized in assembly tasks and resulted in high-efficiency and error-avoided manual operations. Nevertheless, most of existing AR-aided assembly operations are based on the predefined visual instruction step-by-step, lacking scene-aware generation for the assembly assistance. To facilitate a friendly AR-aided assembly process, this paper proposed an Edge Computing driven Scene-aware Intelligent AR Assembly (EC-SIARA) system, and smart and worker-centered assistance is available to provide intuitive visual guidance with less cognitive load. In beginning, the connection between the wearable AR glasses and edge computing system is established, which can alleviate the computation burden for the resource-constraint wearable AR glasses, resulting in a high-efficiency deep learning module for scene awareness during the manual assembly process. And then, based on context understanding of the current assembly status, the corresponding augmented instructions can be triggered accordingly, avoiding the operator’s cognitive load to strictly follow the predefined procedure. Finally, quantitative and qualitative experiments are carried out to evaluate the EC-SIARA system, and experimental results show that the proposed method can realize a worker-center AR assembly process, which can improve the assembly efficiency and reduce the occurrence of assembly errors effectively.

How Worker Centers Organize Low-Wage Workers: An Exploration of Targets and Strategies

In response to the growing absence of unions from the private sector, community-based organizations known as worker centers have emerged as a new front in protecting and organizing workers. Scholars generally argue that worker centers have converged on a model of combining service provision with organizing and advocacy, supported primarily by funding from foundations and government agencies. I draw on interviews conducted with worker center staff, a dataset compiled from their public materials, and secondary research to add to the existing literature and to argue that a clear categorization of worker centers can be derived by attention to their primary workplace strategies. First, worker centers can be meaningfully distinguished by whether they attempt to raise standards in specific industries versus responding to problems in individual workplaces. But they can also be distinguished based on the extent to which they view public policy or winning agreements with employers as the primary route to systemic improvements. These divergences in strategy echo Progressive-era debates about the role for the state in redressing workplace ills. Similar to that era, strategic differences among today’s worker centers are driven less by ideology and more by the distinct structural challenges facing workers in particular political and economic contexts.

Desperate Responsibility: Precarity and Right-Wing Populism

This essay explores the mutual reinforcements between socioeconomic precarity and right-wing populism, and then envisions a politics that contests Trumpism through workers’ organizations that create alternatives to predominant patterns of subject formation through work. I first revisit my recent critique of precarity, which initiates a new method of critical theory informed by Paulo Freire’s political pedagogy of popular education. Reading migrant day laborers’ commentaries on their work experiences alongside critical accounts of today’s general work culture, this “critical-popular” procedure yields a conception of precarity with two defining characteristics. First, precarity is socially bivalent: it singles out specific groups for especially harsh treatment even as it pervades society. Second, precarity constitutes subjects through contradictory experiences of time in everyday work-life, exacerbated by insoluble dilemmas of moral responsibility. Antonio Vásquez-Arroyo’s conception of “political literacy” and Bridget Anderson’s notion of “migrantizing the citizen,” in turn, help us understand how precaritization blocks workers from developing the critical dispositions toward time needed for democratic citizenship. This analysis then makes it possible to elucidate, in dialogue with Daniel Martinez-HoSang and Joseph Lowndes, how precaritized worker-citizenship facilitates the cross-class and multiracial appeal of Trumpism’s white supremacist discourse of national economic decline and resurgence, while normalizing the temporal affects of shock and violence characteristic of Trumpism, as theorized by Lia Haro and Romand Coles. Day laborers’ worker centers, I argue, refunction precaritized time, regenerate political literacy, and migrantize the citizen. A large-scale alternative to right-wing populism thus could emerge if the worker center network were expanded throughout the economy.

‘There You Enjoy Life, Here You Work’: Brazilian and Dominican Immigrants’ Views on Work and Health in the U.S.

Structural inequalities in the U.S. work environment place most immigrants in low paying, high-risk jobs. Understanding how work experiences and influence the health of different immigrant populations is essential to address disparities. This article explores how Brazilian and Dominican immigrants feel about their experiences working in the U.S. and how the relationship between work and culture might impact their health. In partnership with the Dominican Development Center and the Brazilian Worker Center, we held five cultural conversations (CCs) with Brazilians (n = 48) and five with Dominicans (n = 40). CCs are participatory, unstructured groups facilitated by representatives from or embedded in the community. Brazilian immigrants focused on physical health and the American Dream while Dominicans immigrants emphasized concerns about the influence of work on mental health. Dominicans’ longer tenure in the U.S. and differences in how Brazilians and Dominicans are racialized in the region might account for the variation in perspectives between groups. Future studies should further investigate the relationship between health and how immigrants’ work lives are shaped by culture, race and immigrant status.

Visions of Community at Worker Centers

Two thematic strands characterize day laborers’ conceptions of their worker center communities. Many workers stress the need for order and efficiency backed by strong authority aimed at distinguishing worthy participants from the unworthy, providing security to migrants with a stout work ethic, and ensuring members’ unity as a disciplined workforce. Many others highlight convivial and mutualist practices through which day laborers assist suffering compañeros, govern centers autonomously and democratically, and mobilize politically. Day laborers thus manifest modes of democratic action grounded in mundane habits of reciprocity, enlivened through intercorporeal resonances, and catalyzing politicization within precaritized conditions. Workers’ community-making activities further shed light on the temporalities of transformative practices conceptualized by Raymond Rocco, Romand Coles, and Anna Lowenhaupt-Tsing, whose writings in turn illuminate the political significance of worker center cultures. Day laborers also rearticulate racial-ethnic identity according to temporalities that counter neoliberal permutations of the Latino unity ideal criticized by Cristina Beltrán.

Immigrant Worker Centers, Technologies of Citizenship, and the Duty to Be Well

Although worker centers have reenergized immigrant labor movements in the U.S., recent research points to their potential deradicalization as they expand and institutionalize. This article builds on emerging critiques of the nonprofit worker center model by interrogating this organizational form through the analytic lens of governmentality, particularly efforts to shape immigrant workers’ subjectivities, proclivities, and comportment to capacitate them for the exigencies of responsible citizenship. How do worker centers set out to make ethical subjects out of “illegal” immigrant workers? What technologies do centers rely on to redeem populations marked as criminal, deviant, and deficient? I explore these questions through a case study of a worker center in San Francisco, California, which serves immigrant day laborers and domestic workers. I focus on its “feminist wing” to highlight the technologies of empowerment and self-esteem aimed at reforming Latina immigrant women, a group historically deemed “neither ideal laborers nor ideal women.”

Whose Movement Is It? Strategic Philanthropy and Worker Centers

The nonprofit worker center model has been heralded as a promising development, given union decline and the rise of low-wage service jobs in the United States. Yet rather than challenging exploitative work conditions, some of the national organizations developed by worker centers have embraced neoliberal rationalities through projects such as workforce development, employer alliances, and entrepreneurial ventures. In the same period, strategic funding, which applies the logic and techniques of financial investment to grantmaking, has become standard practice for American foundations. As national worker center grantees adopt neoliberal rationalities through their interactions with funders, we argue that these grantees become less inclined to engage in contentious politics. We analyze the projects of two national worker center organizations, contrasting these groups with three local centers that still organize confrontational campaigns. We suggest that by emphasizing worker leadership, involving members in decision-making, and finding alternative funding sources, they have been able to maintain their confrontational politics.