How the Other Half Works: Immigration and the Social Organization of Labor

How the Other Half Works solves the riddle of America's contemporary immigration puzzle: why an increasingly high-tech society has use for so many immigrants who lack the basic skills that today's economy seems to demand. In clear and engaging style, Waldinger and Lichter isolate the key factors that explain the presence of unskilled immigrants in our midst. Focusing on Los Angeles, the capital of today's immigrant America, this hard-hitting book elucidates the other side of the new economy, showing that hiring is finding not so much "one's own kind" but rather the "right kind" to fit the demeaning, but indispensable, jobs many American workers disdain.

Table of Contents:
Dedication Terms used in this book Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: What Empoyers Want Chapter 3: Doing the Job: Skills and the Social Organization of Work Chapter 4: The Language of Work Chapter 5: Network, Bureaucracy, Exclusion Chapter 6: Ethnic Networks and Social Closure Chapter 7: Bringing the Boss Back In: Selection and Hiring Decisions Chapter 8: Whom Employers Want Chapter 9: Us and them Chapter 10: Diversity and Conflict Chapter 11: Black/Immigrant Competition Chapter 12: How the other half works Appendix: the Local and economic context The six industries Conclusions

About the Author :
Roger Waldinger is Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is author of Still the Promised City? African-Americans and New Immigrants in Post-industrial New York (1996), which won the Robert Park Award of the American Sociological Association, editor of Strangers at the Gates: New Immigrants in Urban America (California, 2001), and author of several other publications. Michael I. Lichter is Assistant Professor of Sociology, State University of New York at Buffalo.

Review :
"Waldinger and Lichter offer a lucid and penetrating look at the micro-social structure of hiring, firing, and earning in the modern, post-industrial economy. This book should be required reading for people who glibly use the term 'free market."'-Douglas S. Massey, Dorothy Swaine Thomas Professor of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania "In this masterpiece of field research into the social processes that structure America's economy, Waldinger and Lichter unveil the most original and powerful theory ever advanced to explain how "unskilled" immigrants have come to work at remarkably high rates while inner city blacks continue to languish. Like Wilson's When Work Disappears and Massey and Denton's American Apartheid, How the Other Half Works will set the stage for a new era of poverty research. In its focus on Los Angeles as the quintessential suburban metropolis and as an exemplar of multi-ethnic America, it may also one day be seen as the founding text in a new LA School of Urban Sociology."-Mitchell Duneier, author of Sidewalk and Slim's Table