The Role of Undocumented Immigrant Status for Worker Claims Making and the Need for Community Organizing

Undocumented workers justify not making claims on workplace protections. One of the common reasons is the “ever present fear of deportation” which inhibits any formal confrontation (Gleeson,p. 561). Most individuals, regardless of nativity, for the most part are reluctant to engage in claims making. Community organizing around the challenges associated with low-wage work and the vulnerability of immigrant workers is important because there have been “a short of investigators, inordinate processing times, and ineffective employer penalties as additional obstacles for would-be worker claimants” (Gleeson, p. 562). Immigrant workers often lack the knowledge needed about the laws governing working in America which could be tied to the “pragmatic and short term understanding of their working life in the United States” which is tied to their temporary working conditions and their willingness to endure them as a result (Gleeson, p. 561). Illegal status shapes the purpose, the future, and the voice that undocumented workers may believe they have a right to, which is not directly correlated to the extent of the rights offered to them. Undocumented status has been tied to being a master class in the sense that it “shapes and individual’s relationship with to the law,” tying itself directly to the relationship undocumented workers have toward the existing rights that they “enjoy” (Gleeson, p. 563). The low wage workforce is susceptible to “unlivable wages, lack of job security, wrongful terminations, lack of benefits and unsafe working conditions,”but these should not be reasons why immigrant workers are reluctant to engage in claims making (Gleeson, p. 566). There is also a reluctance from migrant workers to report their abusive workplace as they might refer back to the work conditions in their home country in order to evaluate their current position and look toward their return to their native country as an aspiration for why they should succumb to their potential mobility. Employers target immigrant workers because they view them as workforce that is willing to withstand substandard working conditions, there is a need for this to change and for immigrants to feel empowered to speak out against injustice (Gleeson, p. 567).