Race, Gender and Contemporary International Labor Migration Regimes: 21st-Century Coolies?(Elgar Studies in Labour Law)

Migrant workers around the world are subject to exploitative labor practices that give employers extraordinary bargaining power. This book brings together researchers, practitioners, and advocates who explore the many ways that contracted migrant workers are rendered vulnerable in the workplace. In this book, the term ‘21st-century coolie’ is deployed as a heuristic device that foregrounds the deeply unequal structures shaping the transnational flows of short-term, migrant workers. The term ‘coolie’ harkens back to the labor arrangements of earlier centuries that involved conscripted labor, indentured servitude, and contract labor across national borders. Like those of past centuries, today’s ‘coolies’ are subject to legal constraints inside and outside the employment relationship that force them into subjugated positions within the workplace. The chapters of this anthology situate contemporary global migration regimes in histories of colonization, uncover their racialized as well as gendered nature, and examine the role of nation-states in perpetuating conditions of extreme exploitation. The permeability, mutability, and durability of racial capitalism is revealed through an interdisciplinary and practice-oriented lens. Law and social science students in graduate courses on migration, labor, employment, employment discrimination, and race and the law will gain a deeper understanding of the issues facing migrant workers today, as will students in humanities, performance studies, narrative studies, and communication studies.

Table of Contents:
Contents: PART I MIGRANT WORKERS, GLOBAL RACIAL CAPITALISM AND UNFREEDOM 1 Introduction to Race, Gender and Contemporary International Labor Migration Regimes 2 Robyn Magalit Rodriguez 2 The narrative of ethno-racial labor competition and employee choice 21 Leticia Saucedo PART II THE RETURN OF THE BRACERO PROGRAM? H-VISA HOLDERS IN THE UNITED STATES 3 Bringing back the Bracero Program: the migration industry in the recruitment of H-2 visa workers 35 Rubén Hernández-León, Efrén Sandoval Hernández and Lidia Muñoz Paniagua 4 Delegating discrimination in the temporary worker visa programs 63 Jennifer J. Lee and Rachel Micah-Jones 5 Tech coolies: Indian scientists and engineers entering the United States on H-1B visas 89 Roli Varma PART III LEGAL AND ORGANIZING STRATEGIES FOR U.S. IMMIGRANT AND MIGRANT WORKERS 6 Workers with temporary protected status: the value and limits of delinking immigration and employment status 110 Shannon Gleeson and Kati Griffith 7 Garment worker organizing in Los Angeles 124 Mar Martinez and Mercedes Cortez 8 Emerging forms of organization for precarious migrant workers 130 Ken Wang PART IV DOMESTIC WORKERS AND THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION 9 Domestic workers and storytelling advocacy: competing visions of migrant worker organizing 152 Sujatha Fernandes 10 Aesthetics of precarity: racial performativity in the archive of migrant domestic work 174 Maria Eugenia López PART V THE COMPLEXITIES OF GLOBAL PROCESSES FOR WORKERS 11 Sustaining inequality: the incorporation of migrant remittances in the Philippine political economy 192 Suzy Lee Index

About the Author :
Edited by Leticia Saucedo, Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Law, University of California, Davis School of Law and Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, Professor of Asian American Studies and Founding Director, Bulosan Center for Filipino Studies, University of California, Davis, US