Abstract
Industrial relations (IR) scholarship is built on years of systemic bias—bias against the adoption of research questions, methodological approaches, data collection, and analytical focus that take as fundamental the role of race in constructing the labor markets, work and conditions, and experiences of work for all workers. A Racial Reckoning in Industrial Relations describes itself as a “blueprint and a call to action” (p. 5) to all IR scholars and challenges us to reckon with the racial injustice in our own field, which not only severely limits our ability to address and theorize questions of race in industrial relations but also leads to a poverty of IR theory as a body of knowledge. Essays in this collection bring back into view the theorizations, lessons, and histories written by scholars of color that have been hidden, obscured, and intentionally erased from the IR canon.
This reckoning has long been needed, and co-editors Tamara Lee, Sheri Davis-Faulkner, Naomi Williams, and Maite Tapia provide an excellent and generous step toward a radical rethinking of how we conduct IR scholarship, challenging us to widen the questions we address and the theory we draw upon, and refusing to sever the development of theory from knowledge produced through movement building. They also challenge us to use our theory to contribute to movements for social justice and reparations. The collection effectively practices this by bringing academic contributions together with those of activists, artists, and movement leaders and by centering the contributions of those marginalized because of their race whose voices historically have been erased from our discipline. Collectively, the contributions make a powerful argument for how IR scholarship is enriched through engagement with questions and theories of race and racial oppression and that these must be central to the development of a critical IR.
The Black Lives Matter movement provides much of the energy, momentum, and urgency for this book and for many of its contributors. The COVID-19 pandemic features heavily as a lens through which to evaluate the state of race relations at work. We are reminded of the disproportionate exposure of workers of color to the health risk, job insecurity, and poverty brought by the pandemic as a specific result of racial segregation in work and occupations. We are also reminded of the need for theories and concepts to adequately study this.
The greatest strength of the collection is to demonstrate how the adoption of theoretical resources from Critical Race Theory (CRT) could reshape the kind of IR knowledge we produce. Sheri Davis-Faulkner’s chapter systematically maps out key concepts from CRT and thinks through how they can be applied to studies of work and IR. Several essays use the conceptual framework of racial capitalism, drawing on the work of Cedric Robinson (in particular, essays by Sanjay Pinto, Salil Sapre, and Maite Tapia), to situate race and racial oppression as central to the development and structures of capitalism. They show how the racialized effects of capitalism are not incidental, but how racialized capitalism is key to understanding occupational segregation and the devaluing of racialized workers, in addition to creating and limiting the forms that resistance takes.
Several essays emphasize narrative strategies, such as counter-narrative, storytelling, and giving voice to the marginalized, many of which were inspired by Mari Matsuda and her essay, “Looking to the Bottom” (Harvard Civil Right–Civil Liberties Law Review 22(2), 1987). These strategies have been developed in recognition that experiences of discrimination and oppression provide essential understandings and context for theorizing systems of labor relations rooted in sexism and racism. Relatedly, while there has been some adoption of intersectionality in IR, essays in this collection demonstrate specifically the need to give voice to women workers of color if we hope to understand the ways in which labor markets and employers, but also labor unions, are historically sexist and racist. Sheri Davis-Faulkner provides a powerful comparison between two studies of race, gender, and labor—one seemingly scientific and the other written by women of color that is historically and politically contextualized. The two studies arrive at very different conclusions about the existence and extent of racism at work. The comparison stands as an important illustration of the need for scholars of color to bring relevant questions, context, and shared experience to the study of racialized labor.
In scope, most of the contributions develop understandings of racism and the racial dynamics in IR that are informed by US experiences and theorizations, which is perhaps not surprising given the development of key theories that inform the essays. For example, CRT has been informed primarily by the history of slavery and racial capitalism in the United States. Less present, although certainly not absent, are dynamics of post-colonial migration, the global division of labor, indigenous struggles in colonial-settler states, and the politics of communalism, which shape labor markets and relations in much of the rest of the world. To be clear, I am not saying that CRT theorizations arising out of US scholarship are necessarily particular to the United States and its history and context, nor that the presence of structural racism differs and cannot inform scholarship elsewhere—the essays in this book clearly demonstrate otherwise. Rather than raising this observation as a criticism of this collection or to detract from the advances it makes in outlining a way forward for critical industrial relations, it instead points to the need for this reckoning to expand into the racialized IR landscapes across global, national, and local contexts.
As a call to action, this volume inspired me to think about my own area of study in technology and the future of work and to ask what shape these debates would take if questions of race and racial oppression were central to the kinds of research being undertaken and the knowledge being produced? Discussions of platform work likely would have to engage much more seriously with the question of how low-paid, racialized, and feminized labor, often marginalized from the labor market, has provided the conditions within which the platform model of labor arbitrage and contractual mis-categorization has been able to proliferate. In the automation debate, the need to historicize current discussions, and to think about whose history comes to bear on our understanding, may caution IR scholars to look more closely at the struggles by black workers against automation in the postwar era, which were a major concern of the civil rights movement; or to how the segregation of black workers into the lowest-paid, most precarious jobs in the auto industry exposed them to dangerous and deadly forms of automation in the 1970s.
This collection is challenging and inspiring but, as stated at the start of this review, it is also a work of generosity. It speaks through the shortcomings of IR scholarship to suggest concrete ways forward theoretically and methodologically, suggesting how to bring critical race perspectives into our research. Whether that is about centering race in the questions we ask and the research we design; reading and citing the work of scholars of color; or learning from the life experiences of the most marginalized, this book is a rich source of strategies and ideas to apply to our research, our pedagogical practice, and our own engagement in labor relations.