Gatekeeping, Brokerage, and the Process of Claiming Immigrant Worker Rights

• In Event: 506 - Section on International Migration Paper Session. Immigrant Workers and Professionals in Precarious Jobs

Abstract

This paper examines the opportunities and pitfalls workers encounter while navigating the bureaucracy of workplace rights, and the many institutional gatekeepers they must traverse throughout the claim process. Through interviews with 115 workers (including 78 foreign-born), I highlight especially the challenges that language and immigration legal status play. To begin, I discuss the various actors that workers encounter when demanding change. Workplace actors (i.e., complicated hierarchies of managers and supervisors, human resource departments, co-workers, and in some cases, unions), government enforcement bureaucrats (i.e., frontline staff, commissioners, and judges), private sector ancillaries (i.e., insurers, doctors, and interpreters), and especially attorneys (both pro bono and for-profit), each stand guard at various stages in the bureaucratic route that claimants attempt to traverse. I focus on the barriers workers face in each of these arenas and highlight the challenges workers themselves recount about the process. I next walk readers through the decisions workers make when considering whether and how to fight their way through the system and when to walk away. I end by comparing workers’ lay conception of justice—usually shaped by the claims process—to the tenets outlined by the formal law.

Author

• Shannon Marie Gleeson, Cornell University