The manufacturing of job displacement : how racial capitalism drives immigrant and gender inequality in the labor market

The employer-driven push to systematically replace Black workers with unauthorized immigrants In The Manufacturing of Job Displacement , Laura López-Sanders argues that the walls of American businesses hide a system of illegal practices and behaviors that lead to racial inequality in the labor market. Drawing on extensive research in South Carolina manufacturing facilities, nearly 300 interviews, and her own experience working at both the “bottom” of the labor market (e.g., cleaning toilets and on assembly-line jobs) and in mid-level supervisory positions, López-Sanders provides a behind-the-scenes accounting of daily factory life. She uncovers preferential hiring practices that fly in the face of civil rights legislation barring employment discrimination, including orchestrated actions of employers to systematically replace Black workers with Hispanic unauthorized immigrants. López-Sanders argues against the predominant view that worker displacement occurs primarily because of hiring biases or social networks. Instead, she shows that employers intervene strategically, relying on subcontractors, agencies, and intermediaries to shift the race and gender in an organization. They also use vulnerable and tractable immigrant labor to impose and justify untenable standards that drive native-born workers out of their jobs and create vacancies to be filled by additional immigrant workers. The Manufacturing of Job Displacement sheds new light on a classic question about ethnic succession and segmentation in the labor market and reorients the ongoing debates about the economic impact of immigration. "Using rich ethnographic detail, the book illustrates how employers manipulate the labor market using race, gender, class, and legal status, to make labor conditions precarious. The book urges a thorough analysis of the historically prevailing intersecting categories of difference and vulnerability to understand labor market inequality in the 21st century"-- Provided by publisher Cover Title Page Copyright Contents Introduction 1. Racialized Hiring 2. Enlisting Subcontractors and Intermediaries 3. Creating Job Vacancies 4. Shifting the Labor Queue by Race and Gender 5. Show Me Your Papers! 6. Racialized Shocks and Out-Group Boundaries Conclusion Acknowledgments Timeline Methods Appendix Notes References Index About the Author