Union by Law is a pioneering work of sociolegal scholarship that tells an interpretative history of nearly one century of struggles by Filipino American labor activists in the Pacific Northwest. Like Michael McCann's first book, Rights at Work: Pay Equity Reform and the Politics of Legal Mobilization, this one, written with George Lovell, sits in the canon of must-read studies on law and legal mobilization (Reference McCannMcCann, 1994). Union by Law, through its methodological praxis and analytical lens, challenges law and social movements scholars to make visible the role of law amidst the shifting logics of racial capitalism—to trace the ways that law globally co-constitutes the “hierarchical and ideological structures…[that secure] protection for unequal private property, exchange-based contractual relationships, and commodified differentiation of value regarding human and non-human resources” (15).
To date, most case studies on legal mobilization are temporally and spatially restricted to specific moments of legal contestation directed at defined policy issues. In sharp contrast, Union by Law is a transnational, subaltern re-telling of two generations of legal mobilization and rights activism leading up to the Supreme Court's tragic, watershed decision in Wards Cove Packing Company v. Atonio. Wards Cove, in McCann and Lovell's terms, symbolized “a civil rights massacre”: the neoliberalization of civil rights doctrine and ascendance of post-civil rights era, racist economic ideology beginning in the late 1980s (339). The case, brought by minority cannery workers and their allies, “killed” (in Robert Cover's theoretical sense) important civil rights precedent and normative rights visions for an equal and just workplace (Reference CoverCover, 1986). The official decision of the Court, the book uncovers, also strategically ignored widespread evidence of invidious racial and gender discrimination experienced by generations of Filipino, Indigenous, Asian, and Pacific Islander workers in the canneries of the Pacific Northwest. It is this violence and resistance to it—not just on the job, but also in the legal domain—that Union by Law centers. How, the book asks, did we get to Wards Cove, and what can we learn from generations of Filipino labor activists and their dynamic historical experiences and actions?
In five parts preceding the subaltern re-telling of Wards Cove, Union by Law draws together decades of original research, including archival research, oral histories, and interviews with activists, to demonstrate how “broadly and continuously law constituted the Filipino experience” and worker resistance from the post colony to the metropole (23). The complexity of the relationship between law and the Filipino immigrant workers' radical grassroots organizing and political contestation, McCann and Lovell convincingly insist, can only be understood in the context of the colonial history that produced the transnational migratory circuits of conscripted labor in the first place. In unusual yet vitally important historical Prologues to Parts I and II, Union by Law draws on a wide array of secondary scholarly studies of Filipino history as a window into the development of racializing labor processes. Why immigrant workers came to the United States in different moments—in response to colonialism, to family reunification law, or to Marco's overseas employment program—encouraged and discouraged radical collectivist politics in different moments.
With knowledge of these migratory histories as backdrop, the proceeding chapters generate a beautifully written, painstakingly researched narrative of labor resistance amidst shifting national and transnational politics. The first generation of labor militants in the 1930s endured and responded to white nativist groups, racist unions, and exploitative business interests through radical Left immigrant labor activism. As indebted contract workers who were “condemned to a status of rightlessness,” they slowly developed transnational support structures and resources to engage in rights activism and ultimately, union formation—transforming the terms of their employment and their working conditions. In contrast to what critical legal scholars might expect, their rights activism bolstered, rather than detracted from their class-based struggles. The first generation of Filipino workers, drawing on New Deal work laws and inspiration from the ILWU and the BSCP, built unions, went on strike and engaged in “civil rights unionism.” The core of their project was not just improved working conditions, but the realization of egalitarian rights and democratic socialism (153). They were anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, and antiracist.
The second generation of radical rights activists and militant unionists, however, faced expanded contestation over their legal visions and ideas. In the context of Cold War domestic politics and the post-war rise of President Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, the leftist Filipino activist protagonists of the 1970s faced a complacent and unresponsive union alongside Marcos apologists and supporters. In turn, they built new independent organizations patterned after the earlier unions and mobilized legal resources, culminating in Wards Cove. Though ambivalent—and even skeptical—about the law's promise to dismantle hierarchy, the activists saw Title VII (alongside persistent grassroots organizing) as a resource to leverage law in favor of subaltern workers' conceptual challenges to institutionalized racial and gendered inequality.
This long history of two generations of Filipino labor rights activists developed in Union by Law includes many multi-generational complex worker struggles and collective sociolegal praxis. Across time and space, activists took on dominant power structures in the United States and the Philippines and responded to the willful actions of state officials enforcing exploitation through law. In this sense, they were ardent internationalists—not merely interested in labor peace or improved wages, but more broadly in labor advocacy and rights activism as a means to achieve socialist democracy in the United States, in the Philippines, and around the world. And yet, these worker activists still engaged and leveraged the hegemonic ideals of US legal liberalism in attempt to reconstruct and transform their worlds.
Union by Law is a pioneering subaltern history of immigrant workers and their relationship to law and legal institutions in the 20th century. The book should fundamentally reshape how we do research on legal mobilization and social movements. Rather than analyzing discrete, bounded episodes of law and organizing, this pioneering study examines resistance across time and space in order to capture questions of differential power, to understand the development of nomoi and narratives, and to see clearly the long-term dynamics of racial hierarchy and global empire. Though unique in its narrative, lens, and methodology, the book confirms much of what sociolegal scholars like Stuart Scheingold and Michael McCann himself have long argued: law is variegated both for and against social justice; official law is repressive in most moments but can signal possibility in others (Reference McCannMcCann, 1994; Reference ScheingoldScheingold, 1974). In Union by Law, unfree, noncitizen Filipino labor activists struggled to expand and mobilize their rights and use law to refigure their worlds into a more radical vision, but the enforcement of neoliberal ideology amidst racial capitalist empire limited their contestation both within and against law, serving as a formidable constraint on the realization of a more just world.
