Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the
Dream By Janice Fine. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2006. 316p. $49.95 cloth, $21.95 paper.
The notion that immigrants need institutions of support as they try
to make it in the U.S. economy is certainly nothing new. At the turn
of the century, Jane Addams and the Settlement House Movement,
beginning in Chicago with Hull House, made it their mission to
provide the types of support that would ease immigrants' transition
into American life. Janice Fine's Worker Centers is
essentially a primer for activists on the role of worker centers as
institutions designed to provide support to low-wage workers,
especially immigrant workers in metropolitan areas. Defining worker
centers as community-based mediating institutions that provide
support to low-wage workers, Fine considers the effectiveness of
these centers in improving the lives of low-wage workers. She also
raises an even larger question: Just what institutional mechanisms
are necessary for integrating low-wage immigrants into American
civil society so that they can derive the benefits of ongoing
economic representation and political action?