Book by:

Harald Bauder
Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006

Review by:
Marion Traub-Werner
Department of Geography
University of Minnesota

 Labor Movement is a wide-ranging study of immigrants in labor markets, illustrating how varied social processes coalesce to systematically undermine the livelihood opportunities for immigrant workers.  Through interviews and analysis of survey data, Bauder effectively shows how the devaluation of immigrant labor is integral to the segmentation of the labor market, a process that not only benefits employers, he argues, but also bolsters the relatively more privileged position of non-immigrant workers.  The publication is well timed. In the US and Canada, it is clearer than ever that immigration crystallizes the very paradoxes of neoliberal economies.  The apparent deregulation of labor markets, associated with declining union density and the roll back of labor protections, is tightly coupled with immigration policies and proposals that multiply juridical categories of labor.  This “roll out” neoliberalism underwrites the proliferation of categories of unfree labor in the form of guest-worker and workfare programs, in addition to crippling underemployment amongst the economically poor, women, immigrants and people of color (Peck and Tickell 2002).