Kathleen C. Schwartzman

Lettuce, Segmented Labor Markets, and the Immigration Discourse

It would seem to be ridiculously obvious that industries in the South employed an African American labor force. However, the hegemony of the immigration discourse—“they take jobs that nobody wants”—indicates the need to reiterate some historical facts. Do immigrants take jobs that nobody wants? The author reviews the assumptions of media reports and advocacy groups regarding labor market niches of immigrants. They portray a labor force that is immutably segmented into a primary and secondary sector. This notion is inconsistent with (a) early work theorizing a shifting labor market frontier, (b) earlier empirical work analyzing fluctuating boundaries, and (c) the contemporary labor market that exhibits decreasing segmentation. The author examines the poultry industry in five Southeastern states from 1980 to 2000. Although those jobs fit the profile of the secondary sector (that “nobody wants”), a decade earlier they were occupied by African Americans. We must revise the immigration debate.

The Role of Labor Struggle in the Shifting Ethnic Composition of Labor Markets

One dominant theme of the current immigration debate is that immigrants (and particularly the undocumented) fill jobs that nobody wants. While it is sometimes recognized that immigrants fill occupations previously occupied by African Americans, commentators seldom acknowledge that in some cases, this substitution is a response to rising labor conflict. The article presents quantitative and qualitative evidence that allows the rejection of the conventional wisdom (jobs that nobody wants) and advances an alternative hypothesis: immigrant hiring was a management strategy to deal with rising native labor agitation. I use the case of poultry processing in the southeastern United States to elaborate this argument.

Scratching Out a Living: Latinos, Race, and Work in the Deep SouthScratching Out a Living: Latinos, Race, and Work in the Deep South, by StuesseAngela. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016. 336 pp.

incorporating healthy foods and activities into family life, and scheduling medical appointments. Given research that shows that many women prefer to avoid contentious politics, how commercial social movements are understood as political or apolitical by individual participants themselves and the extent to which they are connected to participation in more contentious forms of political life would be a welcome next development that extends this clearly written and important book.