University of Chicago Press Union by Law – Filipino American Labor Activists, Rights Radicalism, and Racial Capitalism Capitalism (Chicago Series in Law and Society)

Starting in the early 1900s, many thousands of native Filipinos were conscripted as laborers in American West Coast agricultural fields and Alaska salmon canneries. There, they found themselves confined to exploitative low-wage jobs in racially segregated workplaces as well as subjected to vigilante violence and other forms of ethnic persecution.  In time, though, Filipino workers formed political organizations and affiliated with labor unions to represent their interests and to advance their struggles for class, race, and gender-based social justice. Union by Law analyzes the broader social and legal history of Filipino American workers’ rights-based struggles, culminating in the devastating landmark Supreme Court ruling, Wards Cove Packing Co. v. Atonio (1989). Organized chronologically, the book begins with the US invasion of the Philippines and the imposition of colonial rule at the dawn of the twentieth century. The narrative then follows the migration of Filipino workers to the United States, where they mobilized for many decades within and against the injustices of American racial capitalist empire that the Wards Cove majority willfully ignored in rejecting their longstanding claims. This racial innocence in turn rationalized judicial reconstruction of official civil rights law in ways that significantly increased the obstacles for all workers seeking remedies for institutionalized racism and sexism. A reclamation of a long legacy of racial capitalist domination over Filipinos and other low-wage or unpaid migrant workers, Union by Law also tells a story of noble aspirational struggles for human rights over several generations and of the many ways that law was mobilized both to enforce and to challenge race, class, and gender hierarchy at work. Review Can anti-discrimination litigation be a tool for social change? For many years, a contingent on the academic left contended that the answer is no . . . . A remarkable new book by Michael McCann and George Lovell offers a different view . . . . That is what makes Union by Law such a timely book. McCann and Lovell fully appreciate the limits of legal rights, and of anti-discrimination law in particular . . . . Yet the authors are not prepared to give up on legal rights mobilization. In their view, "law still provides one of the most important institutionalized sites . . . for subaltern group resistance to . . . hegemonic policies, practices, and relationships in both state and society." They note that "legions of leftist activists in and beyond the United States have embraced the liberal principle of egalitarian citizenship to challenge the proprietarian, profit-based principles of capitalism." Legal contests, they conclude, "often generate 'forums of protest' that can keep alive alternative ideas and ideals, inspire and hotwire mobilization for new forms of advocacy, keep pressure on dominant groups to reassess their interests in conceding changes that benefit marginalized people, and thus sometimes alter at least slightly the balance of power among social groups." That may not be much, but it is something to celebrate in the ongoing battle for social change . . . . Rather than simply writing off antidiscrimination law as inherently neoliberal, we should recognize the important though limited role it can play as one of many tools to achieve more radical ends. -- "Dissent" " Union by Law is a tour de force, a product of an immense amount of research and knowledge. It carefully and artfully follows the political and legal experience of Filipino Americans from initial US Colonization to union mobilization to Cold War-era violent struggle to the Wards Cove decision at the end of the 1980s. Throughout an illuminating and beautifully written historical narrative, the authors carefully delineate the ways in which law enveloped the lives of these immigrant laborers, both in confining and offering certain momentary opportunities. It is another terrific add