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Precarious Claims tells the human story behind the bureaucratic process of fighting for justice in the U.S. workplace. The global economy has fueled vast concentrations of wealth that have driven a demand for cheap and flexible labor. Workplace violations such as wage theft, unsafe work environments, and discrimination are widespread in low-wage industries such as restaurants, retail, hospitality, and domestic work, where jobs are often held by immigrants and other vulnerable workers. Despite the challenges they face, these workers do seek justice. Why and how do they come forward,and what happens once they do? Based on extensive fieldwork in Northern California, Shannon Gleeson investigates the array of gatekeepers with whom workers must negotiate in the labor standards enforcement bureaucracy and, ultimately, the limited reach of formal legal protections. Gleeson also tracks how workplace injustices—and the arduous process of contesting them—have long-term effects on their everyday lives. Workers sometimes win, but their chances are precarious at best.

"In Conflicting Commitments, Shannon Gleeson goes beyond the debate over federal immigration policy to examine the complicated terrain of immigrant worker rights. Federal law requires that basic labor standards apply to all workers, yet this principle clashes with increasingly restrictive immigration laws and creates a confusing bureaucratic terrain for local policymakers and labor advocates. Gleeson examines this issue in two of the largest immigrant gateways in the country: San Jose, California, and Houston, Texas. Conflicting Commitments reveals two cities with very different approaches to addressing the exploitation of immigrant workers--both involving the strategic coordination of a range of bureaucratic brokers, but in strikingly different ways. Drawing on the real life accounts of ordinary workers, federal, state, and local government officials, community organizers, and consular staff, Gleeson argues that local political contexts matter for protecting undocumented workers in particular. Providing a rich description of the bureaucratic minefields of labor law, and the explosive politics of immigrant rights, Gleeson shows how the lessons learned from San Jose and Houston can inform models for upholding labor and human rights in the United States"--Publisher's Web site

This article examines the factors that shape low‐wage workers' decision to mobilize their legal rights following a workplace violation. I discuss the diverse mechanisms of employer retaliation, including the role of employer sanctions, the role of community social networks, and the myriad challenges that claimants face in navigating the labor standards enforcement bureaucracy. I demonstrate how, although unauthorized status is formally not a barrier for accessing many key benefits in California, the structural position of unauthorized workers place them at a particular disadvantage, significantly so for subcontracted and seasonal workers. These data are based on a of survey of 453 claimants who have sought assistance from a nonprofit legal aid clinic for low‐wage workers in the San Francisco Bay Area, and in‐depth follow‐up interviews with a representative subsample of 90 respondents, 12–30 months later. Five years of participant observation at a legal aid clinic focused on workers' compensation claims, and interviews with 24 injured workers, also inform these findings.

This article applies the tenets of bureaucratic incorporation theory to an investigation of bureaucratic decision making in labor standards enforcement agencies (LSEAs), as they relate to undocumented workers. Drawing on 25 semistructured interviews with high-level officials in San Jose and Houston, I find that bureaucrats in both cities routinely evade the issue of immigration status during the claims-making process, and directly challenge employers' attempts to use the undocumented status of their workers to deflect liability. Respondents offer three institutionalized narratives for this approach: (1) to deter employer demand for undocumented labor, (2) the conviction that the protection of undocumented workers is essential to the agency's ability to regulate industry standards for all workers, and (3) to clearly demarcate the agency's jurisdictional boundaries to preserve institutional autonomy and scarce resources. Within this context, enforcing the rights of undocumented workers becomes simply an institutional means to an end.

This article examines how labor advocates in Houston, Texas, have moved beyond traditional union organizing and individual lawyering to create a wide menu of claims‐making options for low‐wage Latino immigrant workers. I examine four such moments of immigrant worker advocacy: shepherding workers through the federal bureaucracy for workplace protections, legitimating new local institutions for claims‐making, deploying direct action to force employers into compliance, and lastly lobbying for municipal policy change to strengthen penalties for wage theft. Each of these options relies on a coalition that brokers the relationship between aggrieved workers and the bureaucracies entrusted with enforcing their rights. These strategic alliances, I argue, are tenuous and at times antagonistic, but exceedingly necessary in a hostile political context such as Houston. Although they are dynamic and subject to change, these partnerships endure in the short run by defining member organizations' mutual needs for material resources and symbolic legitimacy.

Introduction : enforcing rights across borders / Shannon Gleeson and Xóchitl Bada -- Mexican migrant civil society : propositions for discussion / Jonathan Fox and Gaspar Rivera-Salgado -- pt.1. North America -- Global governance and the protection of migrant workers' rights in North America : in search of a theoretical framework / José Ma. Serna de la Garza -- The North American agreement on labor cooperation and the challenges to protecting low-wage migrant workers / Xóchitl Bada and Shannon Gleeson -- pt. 2. Mexico -- Mexican migrant federalism and transnational rights advocacy / Adriana Sletza Ortega Ramírez -- Rebuilding justice we can all trust : the plight of migrant victims / Ana Lorena Delgadillo, Alma García, and Rodolfo Córdova Alcaraz -- With dual citizenship comes double exclusion: US-Mexican children and their struggle to access rights in Mexico / Mónica Jacobo-Suárez -- pt. 3. Canada -- Transnational labor solidarity versus state-managed coercion : UFCW Canada, Mexico, and the seasonal agricultural workers program / Andrea Galvez, Pablo Godoy, and Paul Meinema -- Assembling noncitizen access to education in a sanctuary city : the place of public school administrator bordering practices / Patricia Landolt and Luin Goldring -- pt. 4. United states -- Indigenous Maya families from Yucatán in San Francisco : hemispheric mobility and pedagogies of diaspora / Patricia Baquedano-López -- Binational health week : a social mobilization program to improve Latino migrant health / Liliana Osorio, Hilda Dávila, and Xóchitl Castañeda -- American in every way, except for their papers : how Mexico supports migrants' access to membership in the United States / Alexandra Délano Alonso -- Epilogue: theorizing state-society relations in a multiscalar context / Shannon Gleeson and Xóchitl Bada