Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T23:21:46.688Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Coercion and Contract at the Margins: Deportable Labor and the Laws of Employment Termination Under US Capitalism (1942–2015)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Gabrielle E. Clark
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In 1917, Congress created the status of temporary labor migrant. A new kind of restricted worker born from nineteenth-century free labor politics, employer and citizen worker demands under modern liberal capitalism, and state labor market regulation, temporary migrants have always had an employer-dependent legal status and been subject to deportation. Yet, since 1942, changing rights and legal processes have governed migrant employment termination across sectors. By drawing on employment cases from archival and unpublished files made available to me under FOIA, and court decisions, I compare the impact of laws of employment termination on deportable laborers beginning in 1942, when government agencies planned migration, and under privatized migration after 1964. From agriculture and war to today's service and knowledge economies, I demonstrate how employment rights have always shaped deportable workers' legal status. Yet, I also show how today's rights and legal processes, in contrast to the past, hardly mitigate employer control over migrants under contemporary capitalism.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 43 , Issue 3 , Summer 2018 , pp. 618 - 646
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

References

Abrego, Leisy, and Lakhani, Sarah M. 2015. Incomplete Inclusion: Legal Violence Against Immigrants in In-Between Statuses. Law & Policy 37 (4): 265–93.Google Scholar
Amin, Ash. 1995. Post-Fordism: A Reader. New York: Wiley Blackwell.Google Scholar
Anderson, Bridget. 2010. Migration, Immigration Controls, and the Fashioning of Precarious Workers. Work, Employment and Society 24 (2): 300–17.Google Scholar
Batzell, Rudi. 2014. Free Labour, Capitalism and the Anti-Slavery Origins of Chinese Exclusion in California in the 1870s. Past and Present 225 (1): 143–86.Google Scholar
Bird, Robert C., and Smythe, Donald J. 2008. The Structure of American Legal Institutions and the Diffusion of Wrongful-Discharge Laws, 1978–99. Law & Society Review 42 (4): 833–64.Google Scholar
Breen, William. 1997. Labor Market Politics and the Great War: The Department of Labor, the States, and the First US Employment Service 1907–1933. Kent, OH: Kent University Press.Google Scholar
Briggs, Vernon. 1983. Non-Immigrant Labor Policy in the United States. Journal of Economic Issues 17:609–30.Google Scholar
Calavita, Kitty. 1984. U.S. Immigration Law and the Control of Labor: 1820–1924. London: Academic Press, Inc.Google Scholar
Calavita, Kitty. 1992. Inside the State: The “Bracero” Program, Immigration, and the I.N.S. New York: Routledge Books.Google Scholar
Chin, Rita. 2009. The Guestworker Question in Postwar Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Clark, Gabrielle. 2015. “Humbug” or “Human Good”? E. P. Thompson, the Rule of Law, and Labor from The Making to Neoliberal American Capitalism. Journal of Social History 48 (4): 759–88.Google Scholar
Collomp, Catherine. 1999. Immigration, Labor Markets, and the State, a Comparative Approach: France and the United States, 1880–1930. Journal of American History 86 (1): 41–66.Google Scholar
Driscoll de Alvarado, Barbara. 2003. The 10% Solution: Bracero Program Savings' Account Controversy. ReVista Harvard Review of Latin America. http://revista.drclas.harvard.edu/book/10-solution (accessed July 1, 2015).Google Scholar
Estreicher, Samuel, and Lester, Gillian. 2007. Employment Law Stories. New York: Foundation Press.Google Scholar
Farmworker Justice. 2006. No Way to Treat a Guest: How the H-2A Agricultural Program Fails US and Foreign Workers. https://www.farmworkerjustice.org/sites/default/files/documents/7.2.a.6%20No%20Way%20To%20Treat%20A%20Guest%20H-2A%20Report.pdf (accessed July 10, 2015).Google Scholar
Feinman, Jay M. 1976. The Development of the Employment at Will Rule. American Journal of Legal History 26:118–35.Google Scholar
Fisk, Catherine, and Wishnie, Michael. 2005. The Story of Hoffman Plastic Compounds, Inc. v. NLRB: Labor Rights Without Remedies for Undocumented Immigrants. In Labor Law Stories, ed. Cooper, L. and Fisk, C. New York: Foundation Press.Google Scholar
Foner, Eric. 1994. The Meaning of Freedom in the Era of Emancipation. Journal of American History 81 (2): 435–60.Google Scholar
Forbath, William. 1989. Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Government Accountability Office (GAO). 2015. H-2A and H-2B Visa Programs Increased Protections Needed for Foreign Workers. http://www.gao.gov/assets/670/668875.pdf (accessed July 13, 2015).Google Scholar
Griffith, David. 2006. American Guestworkers: Jamaican and Mexicans in the Labor Market. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.Google Scholar
Hahamovitch Cindy. 2012. No Man's Land: Jamaican Workers and the Global History of Deportable Labor. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Hanieh, Adam. 2011. Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.Google Scholar
Holley, Michael. 2001. Disadvantaged by Design: How the Law Inhibits Agricultural Guest Workers from Enforcing Their Rights. Hofstra Labor and Employment Law Journal 18:573–621.Google Scholar
Jessop, Bob. 2007. State Power. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Kanstroom, Daniel. 2007. Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Kawar, Leila. 2015. Contesting Immigration Policy in Court: Legal Activism and its Radiating Effects in the United States and France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lakhani, Sarah M. 2013. Producing Immigrant Victims' “Right” to Legal Status and the Management of Legal Uncertainty. Law & Social Inquiry 38 (2): 442–73.Google Scholar
Lewis, Mary Dewhurst. 2006. The Boundaries of the Republic: Migrant Rights and the Limits of Universalism in France, 1918–1940. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Menz, Georg. 2009. The Political Economy of Managed Migration. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Moberly, Richard. 2007. Unfulfilled Expectations: An Empirical Analysis of Why Sarbones-Oxley Whistleblowers Rarely Win. William and Mary Law Review 49 (1): 65–155.Google Scholar
Montgomery, David. 1993. Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ness, Immanuel. 2012. Guestworkers and Resistance to US Corporate Despotism. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Northrup, David. 1995. Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism 1834–1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Orren, Karen. 1991. Belated Feudalism: Labor, the Law, and Liberal Development in the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Pound, Roscoe. 1910. Law in Books and Law in Action. American Law Review 44:12–36.Google Scholar
Raghunath, Raja. 2009. A Promise the Nation Cannot Keep: What Prevents the Application of the Thirteenth Amendment in Prison? William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal 18 (2): 395–444.Google Scholar
Scruggs, Otey M. 1960. Evolution of the Mexican Farm Labor Agreement of 1942. Agricultural History 34:140–49.Google Scholar
Semler, H. Michael. 1983. Overview: The H-2 Program. Aliens in the Orchard: The Admission of Foreign Contract Laborers for Temporary Work in US Agriculture. Tale Law & Policy Review 1 (2): 187–239.Google Scholar
Senate Judiciary Committee Report 1515. 1950. A Resolution to Make an Investigation into the Immigration Systems. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
Stanley, Amy Dru. 1992. Beggars Can't Be Choosers: Compulsion and Contract in Post-Bellum America. Journal of American History 78 (4): 1265–93.Google Scholar
Steinfeld, J. Robert. 1991. The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture,1350–1870. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Steinfeld, J. Robert. 2000. Changing Legal Conceptions of Free Labor. In Terms of Labor: Slavery, Serfdom, and Free Labor, ed. Engerman, Stanley L., 137–67. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Stumpf, Juliet. 2006. The Crimmigration Crisis: Immigrants, Crime, and Sovereign Power. American University Law Review 56 (2): 367–419.Google Scholar
Tomlins, Christopher. 2010. Freedom Bound: Labor, Law, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). 2013. Characteristics of H1B Specialty Occupation Workers. http://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/USCIS/Resources/Reports%20and%20Studies/H-1B/h1b-fy-12-characteristics.pdf (accessed July 1, 2015).Google Scholar
Vorenberg, Michael. 2001. Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar

Cases Cited

Adair v. United States. 208 U.S. 161 (1908).Google Scholar
Alphonso Myers v. Dutton Berry Farm, WL 4959622. Vt. Super (2006).Google Scholar
Franco Favela v. Wester, 153 N.C. App. 811 (2002).Google Scholar
Jimenez v. GLK Foods Inc., Decision and Orders Granting Motions for Class Certification, Case No. 12-C-209 E.D. Wis. (Jun 04, 2014).Google Scholar
Morgan v. United States, 304 U.S. 1 (1938)Google Scholar
Nieto-Santos v. Fletcher Farms, 743 F.2d 638 (1984).Google Scholar
Rowe v. Grapevine, 527 S.E.2d 814 (1999).Google Scholar
Shah v. Wilco Sys., F.Supp.2d (2000).Google Scholar
Sugar Cane Growers of Fla. Co-Op. Inc v. Pinnock, 735 So. 2d 530 (1999).Google Scholar
Van Heerden v. Total Petroleum, Inc., 942 F. Supp. 468 (1996).Google Scholar

Statutes Cited

The Immigration Act of 1917, Pub. L. 301, 64th Congress; February 5, 1917.Google Scholar
The Immigration Act of 1990, Pub. L. 101-649, 101st Congress; November 29, 1990.Google Scholar
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 Pub. L. 82-414, 82nd Congress; June 27, 1952.Google Scholar
The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), Pub. L. 99-603, 99th Congress; November 6, 1986.Google Scholar
The West Virginia Wage Payment and Collection Act, W. Va. Code § 21-5-4.Google Scholar