ABSTRACT
International migration has had a huge impact on the structure of labor markets throughout the world. The movement of people from poorer nations to richer ones in the search of greater economic opportunity has created a huge pool of workers, some with and others without formal immigration or legal status, who are willing and able to work under almost any conditions
for both their own and family survival and in order to send money back home to their extended families. The mobility of labor can be understood as “labor reserve for global capital” (Sassen, 1988, p. 36, as cited in Bauder, 2003). There is a large literature on this movement of people, but less on the way that they have organized themselves to contest the resulting working conditions. Internationally, migrant workers and their allies have created new forms of organizations and strategies to respond to their conditions through innovative means as well as the traditional union model, which has not been able to effectively organize these workers given the fragmented and unstable marketplace.
