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Laboring for Justice highlights the experiences of day laborers and advocates in the struggle against wage theft in Denver, Colorado.
Drawing on more than seven years of research that earned special recognition for its community engagement, this book analyzes the widespread problem of wage theft and its disproportionate impact on low-wage immigrant workers. Rebecca Galemba focuses on the plight of day laborers in Denver, Colorado—a quintessential purple state that has swung between some of the harshest and more welcoming policies around immigrant and labor rights. With collaborators and community partners, Galemba reveals how labor abuses like wage theft persist, and how advocates, attorneys, and workers struggle to redress and prevent those abuses using proactive policy, legal challenges, and direct action tactics. As more and more industries move away from secure, permanent employment and towards casualized labor practices, this book shines a light on wage theft as symptomatic of larger, systemic issues throughout the U.S. economy, and illustrates how workers can deploy effective strategies to endure and improve their position in the world amidst precarity through everyday forms of convivencia and resistance.
Applying a public anthropology approach that integrates the experiences of community partners, students, policy makers, and activists in the production of research, this book uses the pressing issue of wage theft to offer a methodologically rigorous, community-engaged, and pedagogically innovative approach to the study of immigration, labor, inequality, and social justice.
"Professor Galemba's book does a better job than any other of telling the real human story of wage theft, how it affects people and families, in particular immigrants and people of color, how it strains our bureaucracy, how it undermines our marketplace. Wage theft is more than just a statistic. This book tells the story." —David Seligman, Executive Director of Towards Justice
"The product of a decade-long commitment to politically engaged research, Laboring for Justice makes visible the complex systems of power that constrain the lives and livelihoods of undocumented laborers across the United States. Galemba and colleagues' deeply reflexive consideration of their methodology of convivir is a gift to all committed to the decolonization of ethnographic research and writing." —Angela Stuesse, author of Scratching Out a Living: Latinos, Race, and Work in the Deep South
"Laboring for Justice is a powerful anthropological exploration of systemic inequality and the entrenched structural forces surrounding day laborers in Colorado.... Taken together, both the substantive and the methodological contributions of this work make it a seminal piece of research in the field. Highly recommended." —M. Gatta, Choice
"Laboring for Justice is an important and provocative read. It advances a justice-oriented reframing of wage theft as simultaneously economic, legal, and political, and it offers one of the most candid and carefully theorized methodological accounts in labor anthropology." —Ritwika Basu, Exertions
1. Stealing Immigrant Work
2. Boomtown: Construction and Immigration in the Mile High City
3. "Dreaming for Friday": How Employers Steal Wages
4. "A Day Worked is a Day Paid": Preventing and Confronting Wage Theft
5. Failure to Pursue: The Legal Maze
6. God's Justice: Resignation and Reckoning
7. Authorship: Abbey Vogel, Diego Bleifuss Prados, Amy Czulada, Tamara Kuennen, Alexsis Sanchez, and Rebecca Galemba: The DAT: Justice and Direct Action
8. Conclusion: "Sí, se puede": Learning to Convivir Amidst Broader Indignities