Section Awards 2007
Distinguished Scholarly Monograph
Steven McKay - Satanic Mills or Silicon Islands? The Politics of High-Tech Production in the Philippines (Cornell/ILR Press, 2006).
This superlative study of transnational electronics production in the Philippines shows how and why the globalization of production in high-tech industries fails to bring First World working conditions to developing countries. But neither does globalization simply involve a homogenizing "race to the bottom.” Instead, this carefully researched book shows that “flexible accumulation” encompasses a wide variety of complex and locally-sensitive production regimes that secure worker commitment in new and different ways. McKay brilliantly reconstructs Michael Burawoy’s classic “production politics” framework, pro-viding novel theoretical ideas that will find audiences in a variety of sociological subfields, while at the same time providing riveting new empirical insights necessary for understanding labor’s possibilities and challenges in the global economy. Methodologically, the book is exemplary for its rigorous comparative design, for its success in linking shop-floor processes to their external context, and for the quality of its rich and detailed ethnographic, interview, and statistical data. This book makes a crucial contribution to the contemporary study of labor and labor movements and will be read by sociologists in this and related fields for decades to come.
Honorable mention
Ruth Milkman - L.A. Story: Immigrant Workers and the Future of the US Labor Movement (Russell Sage, 2006).
This wonderful book capitalizes on Los Angeles’s role as bellwether for national trends, offering an incisively intertwined analysis of recent shifts in U.S. workforce composition, change in the
American labor movement, and economic restructuring. Its surprising historical narrative shows how legacies forged by former AFL unions in the 1930s now convey advantages over former CIO affiliates, allowing the former to better weather the challenges of a deregulated, deindustrialized and casualized employment system by mobilizing immigrant workers. Deft comparisons of successful and unsuccessful union campaigns show compellingly that, to succeed, bottom-up, immigrant-worker organizing must be complemented by extensive legal, research, and financial resources and leadership commitment by established unions. Along the way, Milkman debunks many facile clichés–immigrants are unorganizable; immigration leads to union decline; global off-shoring undermines workers’ collective capacity. This book is extraordinarily rich in a wide range of empirical data: aggregate statistics, vivid first-person interviews, and industry history. Written with great clarity and insight, this book is an exemplary piece of scholarship.
Distinguished Student Paper
Cesar Rodriguez-Garavito - “Sewing Resistance: Transnational Organizing, Anti-Sweatshop Activism, and Labor Rights in the US-Caribbean Basin Apparel Industry (1990-2005).”
The author provides an excellent synthesis of current work on transnational labor activism, framing, and dynamics of contention, and then analyzes antisweatshop Transnational Advocacy Net-works (TANs), using both ethnographic research and a data set the author compiled of 93 campaigns. It analyzes the tensions between unions and NGOs, and offers new insight into the growing efforts to build a transnational labor movement.
Honorable mention
Denise Roca-Servat - “The Case of Latino Construction Workers in Arizona: Implementing a Comprehensive Union Organizing Campaign.”
This is a participantobservation study of the “Justice for Roofers” union organizing campaign in Arizona, a case study situated in the larger literature on labor organizing among undocumented immigrants.
Steven McKay - Satanic Mills or Silicon Islands? The Politics of High-Tech Production in the Philippines (Cornell/ILR Press, 2006).
This superlative study of transnational electronics production in the Philippines shows how and why the globalization of production in high-tech industries fails to bring First World working conditions to developing countries. But neither does globalization simply involve a homogenizing "race to the bottom.” Instead, this carefully researched book shows that “flexible accumulation” encompasses a wide variety of complex and locally-sensitive production regimes that secure worker commitment in new and different ways. McKay brilliantly reconstructs Michael Burawoy’s classic “production politics” framework, pro-viding novel theoretical ideas that will find audiences in a variety of sociological subfields, while at the same time providing riveting new empirical insights necessary for understanding labor’s possibilities and challenges in the global economy. Methodologically, the book is exemplary for its rigorous comparative design, for its success in linking shop-floor processes to their external context, and for the quality of its rich and detailed ethnographic, interview, and statistical data. This book makes a crucial contribution to the contemporary study of labor and labor movements and will be read by sociologists in this and related fields for decades to come.
Honorable mention
Ruth Milkman - L.A. Story: Immigrant Workers and the Future of the US Labor Movement (Russell Sage, 2006).
This wonderful book capitalizes on Los Angeles’s role as bellwether for national trends, offering an incisively intertwined analysis of recent shifts in U.S. workforce composition, change in the
American labor movement, and economic restructuring. Its surprising historical narrative shows how legacies forged by former AFL unions in the 1930s now convey advantages over former CIO affiliates, allowing the former to better weather the challenges of a deregulated, deindustrialized and casualized employment system by mobilizing immigrant workers. Deft comparisons of successful and unsuccessful union campaigns show compellingly that, to succeed, bottom-up, immigrant-worker organizing must be complemented by extensive legal, research, and financial resources and leadership commitment by established unions. Along the way, Milkman debunks many facile clichés–immigrants are unorganizable; immigration leads to union decline; global off-shoring undermines workers’ collective capacity. This book is extraordinarily rich in a wide range of empirical data: aggregate statistics, vivid first-person interviews, and industry history. Written with great clarity and insight, this book is an exemplary piece of scholarship.
Distinguished Student Paper
Cesar Rodriguez-Garavito - “Sewing Resistance: Transnational Organizing, Anti-Sweatshop Activism, and Labor Rights in the US-Caribbean Basin Apparel Industry (1990-2005).”
The author provides an excellent synthesis of current work on transnational labor activism, framing, and dynamics of contention, and then analyzes antisweatshop Transnational Advocacy Net-works (TANs), using both ethnographic research and a data set the author compiled of 93 campaigns. It analyzes the tensions between unions and NGOs, and offers new insight into the growing efforts to build a transnational labor movement.
Honorable mention
Denise Roca-Servat - “The Case of Latino Construction Workers in Arizona: Implementing a Comprehensive Union Organizing Campaign.”
This is a participantobservation study of the “Justice for Roofers” union organizing campaign in Arizona, a case study situated in the larger literature on labor organizing among undocumented immigrants.