Immigrant Workers, Precarious Work, and the US Labor Movement

Milkman, Ruth

doi:10.1080/14747731.2011.576857

Cited by 88 publications

(105 citation statements)

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“…Rosenfeld and Kleykamp (2012) have similarly argued with more recent data that black workers disproportionately benefited from union wage premiums, especially in industries where managers have had greater latitude in wage--setting. In a similar vein, Milkman's (2006) study of the SEIU's Justice for Janitors mobilization in Los Angeles had employment security as a goal alongside higher pay.…”

Section: Unions and Managerial Discretionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Unions have been less able to negotiate large wage and benefit increases in recent decades. Yet partly because they can promise fewer such rewards to their members, unions have increasingly tried to sell themselves as advocates for other employee rights guaranteed by other legislation, such as non--discrimination (Geoghegan 1991;Nelson 2001;Clawson 2003;Milkman 2006). Thus while some mechanisms in which union relations resemble diversity programs-such as encouraging rule--bound criteria for job assignment and promotionhave become weaker, others-such as creating intra--organizational entities that monitor compliance with obligations-have grown stronger.…”

Section: Unions and Managerial Discretionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is possible therefore to make several predictions about the effects of unionization on workforce composition, given the findings of previous research. First, Leonard's (1985) longitudinal analysis of establishment composition, the historical study of union--membership patterns (Rosenfeld and Kleykamp 2009;Rosenfeld and Kleykamp 2012), and multiple case studies (Halpern 1997;Nelson 2001;Milkman 2006) all suggest that unionizing an establishment should limit managerial discretion in hiring, pay, and promotion, and thus make establishments more representative of their larger labor--market areas over time. Second, the findings in Leonard (1985) and Kalev (2009) It is a sad irony that, in the same period when unions have grown more diverse and inclusive, their influence has shrunk.…”

Section: Unions and Managerial Discretionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Union contracts typically limit employers' discretion over hiring, discipline, promotion and termination (Leonard 1985), exactly the reasons why many firms and executives oppose unionization. While the relationship between labor unions and minorities has historically been complicated (Botsch 1980;Nelson 2001), unions remain among the most integrated institutions in American society, and minorities frequently express support for unions because they reduce employers' arbitrary authority (Freeman and Rogers 1999;Milkman 2006;Rosenfeld and Kleykamp 2012). Studies of diversity policies typically control for the presence of unions in firms, precisely because unions are theorized to have similar effects on the formalization of employment (Dobbin and Sutton 1998).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Control of Managerial Discretion: Evidence from Unionization’s Impact on Employment Segregation

Ferguson

2015

American Journal of Sociology

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Does limiting managers' discretion limit organizations' scope for discrimination? Social--psychological research argues that it limits opportunities to exercise cognitive biases. Organizational research has found that formal personnel practices that establish accountability for workplace diversity have increased women and minority representation in management. However, drawing causal inferences from such studies is complicated because adopting such policies may be endogenous to the firm's wish to hire and promote women and minorities. This study uses unionization elections to conduct a regression--discontinuity test from which stronger causal inferences can be made. I find that while unionization is associated with more representative workplaces and more women and minorities in management, these effects disappear close to the discontinuity threshold. Most of the effects of unionization on workforce diversity may be attributable to the unobserved drivers of selection into unionization. This has similar implications for the causal effects of diversity policies adopted by managers. Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Emilio Castilla, Roberto Fernandez, Aruna Ranganathan, Susan Silbey, Jesper Sørensen, and seminar participants at Stanford GSB, Berkeley--Haas, MIT--Sloan, INSEAD, and the 30 th EGOS Colloquium for comments on the manuscript. Sheldon Friedman, Alfonso Nevárez, and Gordon Pavy at the NLRB and Bliss Cartwright and Ronald Edwards at the EEOC gave invaluable support with the data. Direct correspondence to John--Paul Ferguson, Stanford Graduate School of Business. Email: jpferg@stanford.edu. suggests that it does. This work situates much employment discrimination not in the conscious actions of bigoted managers but in the unconscious impact of cognitive biases, deployed through personnel policies that fail to take such biases into account. As one classic review of the subject summarized, "We cannot rid work organizations of discrimination until we recognize both that much employment discrimination originates in automatic cognitive processes, and that it occurs because of work organizations' personnel practices" (Reskin 2000, p. 321).This social--psychological approach to discrimination reinforces an older organizational perspective on the subject. Organizational research has long emphasized the existence of informal social structures within formal organizations (Mayo 1984;Dalton 1959;Scott and Davis 2006) and recognized that, in the absence of formal structures, informal processes like ascriptive homophily will shape organizational careers and rewards. This is why, in his unromantic defense of complex organizations, Perrow (1986, p. 6) emphasizes the importance of rules that limit managers' discretion in "Purging Particularism":Particularism means that criteria irrelevant for efficient production (e.g., only relatives of the boss have a chance at top positions), in contrast to universalistic criteria (e.g., competence is all that counts), are used to choose employees. The criteria of eff...

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Section: Unions and Managerial Discretionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Unions and Managerial Discretionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Unions and Managerial Discretionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Control of Managerial Discretion: Evidence from Unionization’s Impact on Employment Segregation

Ferguson

2015

American Journal of Sociology

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“…Ils sont parfois ouverts à tous les travailleurs d'une zone géographique mais souvent marqués par une communauté ethnique donnée (ce qui revient au même dans les zones urbaines ségréguées). N'étant pas officiellement reconnus comme représentatifs des travailleurs qu'ils organisent auprès des employeurs, ils doivent recourir à des méthodes de pression inventives relevant d'un « syndicalisme informel » (Chauvin, 2009) tout en travaillant parfois avec des syndicats qui financent leurs campagnes (Milkman 2011 ;Hocquelet 2014).…”

Section: Résumé De L'articleunclassified

La rue, l’agence et le centre de travailleurs

Chauvin

2016

socsoc

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Cet article analyse le système d’allocation des emplois dans le travail journalier aux États-Unis, dont la main-d’oeuvre est fréquemment composée de migrants hispaniques sans papiers. À partir de cinq études de cas, il compare l’embauche informelle réalisée sur des parkings ou devant des grandes surfaces, d’une part au travail journalier formel en agence commerciale, d’autre part à l’embauche par l’intermédiaire de centres associatifs autogérés. L’examen des modes alternatifs d’allocation proposés par les intermédiaires associatifs montre que ceux-ci, soumis aux mêmes contraintes que les intermédiaires commerciaux, reproduisent des traits observés chez ces derniers, tout en fournissant néanmoins des services cruciaux aux journaliers et en constituant une base solide de leur mobilisation juridique et politique, que ce soit pour leur droit à chercher des emplois sur un lieu public, pour la récupération de salaires non versés, ou pour les réformes permettant de régulariser leur statut migratoire.

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Immigrant‐Based Collective Action

Mora¹,

Rodríguez²,

Zermeño³

et al. 2022

The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements

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The “immigrant spring” of 2006 dramatically placed social movements by excluded social groups on the national stage in the United States. The protest campaign against House Bill 4437 resisted the increasing criminalization of immigrants with mass marches, resulting in some of the largest demonstrations in US history. In addition, the 2006 campaign reached many smaller cities and towns with scant history of collective action. Such large‐scale mobilizations and contemporary immigrant struggles offer social movement scholarship occasions to enhance current theories and concepts.

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Immigrant Workers, Precarious Work, and the US Labor Movement

Cited by 88 publications

References 10 publications

The Control of Managerial Discretion: Evidence from Unionization’s Impact on Employment Segregation

The Control of Managerial Discretion: Evidence from Unionization’s Impact on Employment Segregation

La rue, l’agence et le centre de travailleurs

Immigrant‐Based Collective Action

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