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Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 May 2007

Oren M. Levin-Waldman
Affiliation:
Metropolitan College of New York

Extract

Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream By Janice Fine. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. 316p. $49.95 cloth, $21.95 paper.

The notion that immigrants need institutions of support as they try to make it in the U.S. economy is certainly nothing new. At the turn of the century, Jane Addams and the Settlement House Movement, beginning in Chicago with Hull House, made it their mission to provide the types of support that would ease immigrants' transition into American life. Janice Fine's Worker Centers is essentially a primer for activists on the role of worker centers as institutions designed to provide support to low-wage workers, especially immigrant workers in metropolitan areas. Defining worker centers as community-based mediating institutions that provide support to low-wage workers, Fine considers the effectiveness of these centers in improving the lives of low-wage workers. She also raises an even larger question: Just what institutional mechanisms are necessary for integrating low-wage immigrants into American civil society so that they can derive the benefits of ongoing economic representation and political action?

Type
BOOK REVIEWS: AMERICAN POLITICS
Copyright
© 2007 American Political Science Association

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