| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 59

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Jennifer Gordon, Suburban Sweatshops: The Fight for Immigrant Rights (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2005)

SUBURBAN SWEATSHOPS is a most unusual book. Written by a lawyer possessed of both a keen sense of social justice and a well-developed writing style, it is both a first-rate analysis of a much understudied phenomenon — the plight of immigrant workers in suburban settings — and a well-reasoned critique of the methods used to reach out to these new "sweatshop" workers in the post-industrial era.

The author, Jennifer Gordon, is particularly well qualified to address these issues. As the founder of "The Workplace Project," an organization designed to aid the immigrant workers who found themselves toiling in Long Island, New York, in the early 1990s, Gordon was privy both to the personal stories of these new "indentured" servants and to the successes and failures of the grassroots organization which sought to give them a collective voice and some legal protection in their workplaces.

Gordon carefully delineates the factors that have contributed to the creation of this new sweatshop economy: the decline in manufacturing employment, the dramatic rise in service-sector jobs, large-scale immigration from relatively impoverished or politically unstable Latin American countries, and a mounting willingness to exploit the labour of these immigrants in manners both illegal and unconscionable. She makes clear that traditional forms of organizing workers have had very limited success in the underground economy, both on Long Island and elsewhere in the US. Owing to the mobility of the various "workshops," which include landscaping jobs, employment on various construction sites, janitorial work with mobile "maid" or cleaning services, etc., and the fact that many workers have to move from one "industry" to another on a seasonal basis, it can be extremely difficult to bring such workers together. Add to this the reluctance of government officials to enforce existing workplace legislation — and their misplaced uncertainty as to whether or not such legislation actually applies to "undocumented" workers (it does) — and the situation of these workers becomes even more untenable. This is then compounded by the difficulties — and to be frank, sometimes the lack of union interest — associated with organizing highly mobile workers into unions. Factor in the growing wave of anti-foreign sentiment in the US (particularly pronounced after 11 September 2001, but already well established in the early 1990s) and the reality that many of these workers view themselves as mere "sojourners" in the country with no long-term stake in addressing the working conditions of themselves or their compatriots in the US, and one can begin to see how easily this group of workers can be exploited by employers.

This then, was the context in which the Workplace Project began its work. As Gordon put it so succinctly, if the project was to succeed, "it would have to figure out how to bring together a group of disparate newcomers, in competition with each other for jobs that operated below the radar of the government and unions alike, all urgently in need of whatever money they could earn and many desperately afraid of detection by the government." (66)

Clearly, this was no simple task. But Gordon, who already had experience working with refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala, some basic knowledge of extant immigrant worker centres in different parts of the US, a newly completed law degree, and a small seed grant from the Echoing Green Foundation, had a plan. Her goal was to help create a self-sustaining organization that would eventually be run by the people it was meant to serve. Affiliating herself with an already established Central American community organization on Long Island, she spent the better part of a year making community contacts and studying the local situation. Realizing that information on workers' rights was in short supply in this community, Gordon first began organizing and offering what she called the "Workers Course" to provide such basic information. Buoyed by the success of this, she then organized a "bare-bones" legal clinic for immigrant workers. The work that went on here and in the contacts made during the various sessions of the Workers Course revealed just how horrific the working conditions were for so many of these immigrants. Indeed, it soon became clear that even the limited victories won by the legal clinic on behalf of its clients, victories that all too often had no lasting impact on the larger community, only served to underline that "real change would come only when workers built the power to muster a systemic response to systemic abuse." (80) So now the plan was updated: a new organizer, an immigrant from El Salvador, was brought in; graduates of the Workers Course were formed into a directing committee; and the Workplace Project was set up on its own as an independent worker centre; a centre where the bywords were outreach and flexibility.

It is interesting to note how far Gordon removes herself from the centre of this narrative. As the Workplace Project moved into the realm of action, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, the motivating ideas and strategies for organizing so disparate a group of peoples all seemed to be generated internally — as Gordon had originally intended. The word "I" is hardly ever seen, it is always what "they" did — or better yet, it is the story of a named individual, surrounded by her or his compatriots, coming up with the new ideas and strategies: in effect, it is grassroots democracy at its best.

But lest readers be swept away by the seeming success story that was the Workplace Project, the author devotes four full chapters to the very difficult and complicated component parts of organizing on this model (a word Gordon would actually reject as she claims that what was done on Long Island cannot be replicated, as virtually every tactic was situation specific, and that there was not really a "model"). In one chapter Gordon explains precisely how and why immigrants got involved with the project, and not just as clients, but as leaders. She also tackles the matter of "navigating the relationship between law and organizing," (149) a relationship that Gordon sees as being particularly problematic when the workers' centre is focused not only upon teaching people about their individual rights as workers but also on helping them come together to take collective actions. The two do not always meld easily. For this reason, in one way or another, two full chapters are devoted to this relationship: one on "rights talk and collective action," the other on the role that can be played by a legal clinic in helping to "serve collective rights even as it vindicates individual rights." (185) Perhaps most intriguing of all though, is Gordon's chapter on "Non-Citizen Citizenship." This details the tortuous path which some of the immigrant activists followed in order to have laws changed at the state level, most notably the campaign to have the "Unpaid Wages Prohibition Act" passed. It also explains — with suitable cynicism — the exact political factors which allowed such a victory to be won in the New York state legislature of the 1990s.

At the end of the day this book is not a how-to guide for social activists. But it is a reminder that positive change is possible. All that is required is commitment, hard work, flexibility, and a willingness to embrace real democracy. Gordon reminds her readers that, while victory is not inevitable, it is also the case that people still have the power, if they chose to exercise that power, to make the world a better place via collective action. One can only hope that many, many people will read and embrace this book.


Jim Mochoruk University of North Dakota

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.