Jennifer Gordon

RETHINKING WORK AND CITIZENSHIP * Jennifer Gordon ** R.A. Lenhardt This Article advances a new approach to understanding the relationship between work and citizenship that comes out of research on African American and Latino immigrant low-wage workers. Media accounts typically portray African Americans and Latino immigrants as engaged in a pitched battle for jobs. Conventional wisdom suggests that the source of tension between these groups is labor competition or the racial prejudice of employers. While these explanations offer useful insights, they do not fully explain the intensity and longevity of the conflict. Nor has relevant legal scholarship offered a sufficient theoretical lens through which this conflict can be viewed. In the absence of such a theory, opportunities for solidarity building are lost and normative solutions in the context of immigration and antidiscrimination law reform are unsatisfying. This Article critiques existing theories of the link between work and citizenship for failing to attend to the realities of immigration, job differentiation within the uni- verse of low-wage work, and the extent to which a group’s race, formal citizenship status, and history affect its relationship to work. This Article fills this gap by arguing that citizenship—defined broadly as “belonging” in the broader community—provides an additional lens for understanding interactions between African American and Latino immigrant low-wage workers. This nuanced, context-based theory of citizenship, which is grounded in insights from Critical Race Theory, immigration scholarship, and constitutional law, reveals profound differences in the way that African Americans and Latino immigrant workers who appear to be similarly situated in the low-wage context conceive of and experience work, providing a more accurate window into the conflict between them. It also highlights important similarities and convergences * Associate Professor of Law, Fordham University School of Law. ** Associate Professor of Law, Fordham University School of Law. We would like to thank Frances Ansley, Devon Carbado, Sheila Foster, Kevin Johnson, Rachel Moran, Alison Nathan, Steven Pitts, Catherine Powell, Russell Robinson, Leticia Saucedo, Carolyn Shapiro, and Bejamin Zipursky for helpful comments and direction on this project. We are also grateful to the faculties of the CUNY School of Law, Fordham Law School, and the UCLA School of Law for the opportunity to workshop earlier drafts of this article. Finally, we are thankful for the excellent research assistance provided by Jane Chung, Tanya Kalivas, Grace Pickering, and Cheri Veit and for the editorial assistance provided by the UCLA Law Review staff, especially Rakhi Patel, Ann Roller, and Karen Wong. Our work on this project benefited greatly from the generous support provided by the Dean’s Office of the Fordham Law School. 1161 1162 55 UCLA LAW REVIEW 1161 (2008) in the paths to the workplace taken by these groups, pointing to unique opportunities for increased solidarity between low-wage African American and Latino immigrant workers on the job. INTRODUCTION..................................................................................................................1162 I. THE NATURE OF THE CONFLICT: EMERGING RESEARCH ON AFRICAN AMERICAN AND NEW LATINO IMMIGRANT WORKER INTERACTIONS ....................1170 II. STANDARD EXPLANATIONS FOR THE CONFLICT.......................................................1173 A. The Role of Employer Bias................................................................................1174 B. Existing Studies of Economic Competition......................................................1179 C. Toward a More Complex Understanding.........................................................1183 III. ANOTHER LENS: OUR THEORY OF WORK AS A PATHWAY TO CITIZENSHIP............1185 A. Citizenship as a Framework...............................................................................1185 B. Theories of Work and Citizenship....................................................................1191 C. Critique of Existing Theories of Work and Citizenship...................................1195 D. Our Theory: Work as a Pathway to Citizenship...............................................1199 IV. WORK AS A PATHWAY TO CITIZENSHIP: TWO PERSPECTIVES..................................1202 A. The African American Experience of Work as a Pathway to Citizenship......1202 B. The New Latino Immigrant Experience of Work as a Pathway to Citizenship.....................................................................................................1210 V. THE LENS APPLIED .....................................................................................................1220 A. Two Different Yardsticks for the Citizenship Value of Work..........................1220 B. Workers as Agents in Constructing Work-Related Citizenship: Conflict......1223 C. Workers as Agents in Constructing Work-Related Citizenship: Solidarity .......................................................................................1229 1. Emerging Examples of Solidarity Between African American and Latino Immigrant Low-Wage Workers..............................................1230 2. What Supports the Emergence of Solidarity in the Low-Wage Work Context? ..........................................................................................1232 CONCLUSION .....................................................................................................................1236 INTRODUCTION Imagine a poultry processing plant situated in the hills of eastern North Carolina. The suffocating reek of raw chicken emanates from every corner of the building. In one room, two workers, Irving Johnson and Dinora Sanchez, stand beside one another at a deboning conveyor belt, ankle-deep in refuse. Exhausted and aching with pain caused by the repetitiveness of their movements, they struggle to keep pace, aware that failing to do so could cost them their jobs. These individuals share a workspace and an urgent need for the meager wages paid for their hard labor. But they have two very different experiences of their work. Rethinking Work and Citizenship 1163 For Irving, one of the few African Americans left in the plant, the workplace is evidence of declining opportunities for Blacks and a reversal of civil rights gains. A day earlier, Irving tried to rally his fellow black and Latino workers to protest management’s speed-up of the deboning line. But the few Latinos who could communicate with him in English were reluctant to consider such action and refused to raise it with other Spanish-speaking workers. Such protests, though certainly risky, were not uncommon in the past, when Blacks comprised the majority of the plant’s workers. But they have become rarer in recent years. Indeed, management has sought to avoid permitting workers regular breaks, maintaining a reasonable pace of work, and paying a decent wage by replacing the African Americans and native-born whites who once were the industry’s principal employees with cheaper labor—people from places such as Guatemala and Ecuador who, desperate to avoid deportation, are willing to work faster, for longer hours, and at lower pay. Irving has come to the conclusion that the new Latino immigrants—whose language he does not speak and whose travails he is unaware of—are partially responsible for the decline in conditions. They are “rate busters” in his mind—individuals whose compromise lowers the bar for native-born workers. No matter what conditions these new workers accept, Irving will not “work cheap”1 or “be worked like a Mexican.”2 Just this weekend he remarked to his son, “We’re citizens, you know. That should mean something.” Irving needs the job, but he wants to work under conditions that are safe, 1. Barbara Ellen Smith, Racial/Ethnic Rivalry and Solidarity in the Delta, in ACROSS RACES AND NATIONS: BUILDING NEW COMMUNITIES IN THE U.S. SOUTH 51, 60 (Ctr. for Research on Women et al. eds., 2006). This narrative draws on work done by David G. Griffith on rural industry and Mexican immigration in North Carolina. See David C. Griffith, Rural Industry and Mexican Immigration and Settlement in North Carolina, in NEW DESTINATIONS: MEXICAN IMMIGRATION IN THE UNITED STATES 50, 50–75 (Rubén Hernández-León & Víctor Zúñiga eds., 2005). It also draws on other depictions of Black–Latino relationships in the changing poultry industry in the New South. See, e.g., LANCE COMPA, HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH, BLOOD, SWEAT, AND FEAR: WORKERS’ RIGHTS IN U.S. MEAT AND POULTRY PLANTS (2004); STEVE STRIFFLER, CHICKEN: THE DANGEROUS TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICA’S FAVORITE FOOD (2005); Evan Pérez & Corey Dade, Reversal of Fortune: An Immigration Raid Aids Blacks—for a Time, WALL ST. J., Jan. 17, 2007, at A1; Helen Marrow, Not Just Conflict: Intergroup Relations in a Southern Poultry Processing Plant 14 (2006) (unpublished manuscript) (on file with the authors). It further relies on new research by Barbara Ellen Smith, Helen Marrow, Jamie Winders, Angela Stuesse, Anita Grabowski, Laura Helton, and David Mandel-Anthony on these groups in low-wage workplaces throughout the South. See infra text accompanying note 18. 2. Smith, supra note 1, at 60. This quote and others like it from recent scholarship that we draw on in this Article reveal an ugly reality with which some readers might not want to be confronted. Statements from actual workers, however, are crucial to laying bare the precise nature of the conflict between

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