Abstract
Despite the salience of racism and other “isms” woven into the fabric of US society, there is a dearth of industrial relations (IR) scholarship that engages critical race and intersectional theory (CRT/I) to deeply understand how structural racism and other social identity-based systems of oppression govern labor and employment systems. The authors call for the incorporation of CRT/I into IR to address the erasure of vital counter-narratives and to expand our empirical cases for labor and employment research. Focusing on leading scholarship on worker organizing, the authors confront white dominance in our research questions, methodologies, and analyses to illustrate how traditional “color-blind” and meritocracy-based IR theories lead to the exclusion of relevant knowledge. In an era of heightened public discourse and worker uprisings in response to deep-rooted systemic inequities, critical industrial relations research is vital to the field’s relevance and its expertise in explaining the nature and consequences of contemporary labor contestations and their impact on the future of the labor movement.
Keywords
A philosophical problem is the “product of the unconscious adoption of assumptions built into the vocabulary in which the problem [is] stated—assumptions which [must] be questioned before the problem itself [can be] taken seriously.”
The field of industrial relations (IR) has a philosophical problem: the dominance of white and privileged-group narratives in the questions we ask, the theory we build, the research we publish, and the manner in which we explain labor and employment phenomena. While the real world of industrial relations is embedded in identity-conscious social systems of oppression, such as white supremacy and patriarchy, our leading scholarship routinely uses identity-neutral theoretical frames. These frames disregard or simplify social identity as a descriptive independent variable that is not central to structural conditions. These assumptions built into prevailing IR approaches lead scholars to ignore or downplay structural inequity when we formulate fundamental research questions, such as: what is the labor problem, who is the working class, or what is the future of work. Further, it obscures the complexities of labor and employment realities faced by marginalized groups. The result is a canon of knowledge that defaults to white and privileged-group narratives as the standard lens through which we understand all workers and workplace issues.
Moreover, even when industrial relations research directly accounts for social identities, it fails to take into account the interactions between identity and systemic oppression. Consequently, our existing frameworks are vulnerable to the philosophical trap of assuming race to be easily measurable, extricable, and severable from racism embedded in the social systems that we study. What results is the simplification of race and other social identities as variables in our models for understanding its impact in the world of work.
To remedy these serious conceptual omissions in IR theory, we need a paradigm shift that incorporates rich, socio-structural conceptualizations of worker identities and systemic oppression. We call for the incorporation of critical race theory and intersectionality (CRT/I) into IR theory to cultivate a body of critical scholarship that avoids “whitewashing” knowledge, oversimplifying racial and other identity constructs, and under-theorizing identity-based systems of oppression. In making the case for critical industrial relations research, we do not seek to devalue existing scholarship. Rather, we are launching a serious and long overdue discussion about bias—whether conscious or unconscious—in the way we build theory to explain an increasingly diverse and inequitable society. 1
Our goal is to develop more inclusive theories and empirical research. This shift is a necessary step toward theoretical justice—reparations, in a way, for systemic bias that sustains oppressive hierarchies and distorts employment realities. It is beyond the scope of this article to examine the literature in every subfield of IR. Hence, here we focus on worker-organizing scholarship over the past three decades to illustrate our argument.
We propose two main implications for the development of critical IR theory. First, integrating CRT/I frameworks and methods would create the potential for richer research that more profoundly accounts for deeply embedded systemic inequity and the complexities of social identity in the world of work. Second, it allows us to expand the scope of empirical cases and embrace important counter-narratives for the development and advancement of IR theory.
Identity-Conscious Research: Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality
We are two African Americans, a Chicano, and an Asian American. We are two women and two men. We . . . work at the margins of institutions dominated by white men. The identity that defines us, that brings our work together and sets it apart from that of most of our colleagues, is more complex than the categories of race and gender imposed upon us by a world that is racist and patriarchal. Mari J. Matsuda, Charles R. Lawrence III, Richard Delgado, and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (1993: 2)
The social justice activism and writings of Black, Indigenous, and other women of color have been critical to introducing social identity and a focus on inequity into our understanding of workers’ struggles. They rejected singular, predominantly class-based theoretical frames in favor of contextualized socio-structural analyses (i.e., engaging the socially constructed identities of actors as part of a deeper race, gender, and class analysis, rather than treating identity simply as a descriptor). Their contribution remains a key component in the critical study of the world of work, particularly in the United States.
For example, a century ago, sociologist and Black liberation activist Anna Julia Cooper argued in A Voice from the South that “the only true measure” ([1892] 1988: xxviii) of the condition of the working class as a whole was a conceptualization that took into account the overlapping oppressions faced by the most marginalized groups. Similarly, mid-20th century Black feminist scholar Claudia Jones employed an identity-conscious lens for understanding worker struggle, asserting that the “triply-oppressed status of [Black] women is a barometer of the status of all women and that the fight for the full, economic, political and social equality of the [Black] woman is in the vital self-interest of white workers, in the vital interest of the fight to realize equality for all women” (Jones 1949: 30; see also Boyce Davies 2007).
It was not until 1981 that Angela Davis, in Women, Race & Class, examined the experiences of Black women during enslavement and showed that even our understandings of privileged identities must be rooted in an understanding of converging oppressions. Specifically, she writes that “racism and sexism frequently converge—and the condition of white women workers is often tied to the oppressive predicament of women of color. Thus, the wages received by white women domestics have always been fixed by the racist criteria used to calculate the wages of Black women servants” (Davis 1981: 57). Similarly, the Combahee River Collective—a group of Black, lesbian, feminist scholar/activists—rejected identity-neutral frameworks for understanding working-class conditions, and instead focused deeply on race, gender, sexual orientation, and other social identities in analyzing the interlocking systemic oppressions that govern a wide range of social phenomena (Combahee River Collective [1978] 1997).
Advances in Legal Scholarship
In the 1980s, critical race theory (CRT) emerged in the literature of legal scholars. The majority of these scholars were women of color who had experienced alienation and marginalization under legal theory and praxis within overwhelmingly white and male institutions (e.g., Bell 1980; Matsuda 1987; Austin 1989; Crenshaw 1989; Delgado 1989; Williams 1991). Viewing the law as a “support system for inequalities” (Kim and Khoshgozaran 2017) rather than a tool for justice, the foundational CRT scholars developed a race-conscious theoretical intervention to confront conscious and unconscious racial bias in legal scholarship and policymaking. By doing so, they demonstrated how and why laws, including anti-discrimination legislation, continue to reproduce the structures and practices of white supremacy (see, for example, Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller, and Thomas 1995).
CRT is based on five core tenets. First, racism in US society is normalized—that is, it is the “usual way society does business, the common, everyday experience of most people of color in this country” (Delgado and Stefancic 2001: 7). Second, historical contextualization is important—that is, the understanding throughout history of white racial domination or supremacy and how it restructures itself to protect its privileges (Harris 1993). Third, racial justice (and, thus, racial neutrality) will occur only when the interests of dominant groups converge with those of the vulnerable groups (Bell 1980). Bell’s concept of interest convergence is meant to be critical, or as he states, “The interest of blacks in achieving racial equality will be accommodated only when it converges with the interests of whites” (1980: 523). Fourth, storytelling and the use of counter-narratives is critical for considering alternatives to the often ethnocentric way stories are told and considered “truth” (Ladson-Billings 2013). Finally, ideas of liberalism, meritocracy, and color-blindness—or the idea that society is fair and equal, and individuals will succeed or fail based on their own merits—must be critiqued (Zamudio, Russell, Rios, and Bridgeman 2011). Thus, CRT identifies the centrality of race for social theory, is dedicated to race-conscious conceptualizations of social justice, challenges color-blind and “melting pot” theoretical approaches, and requires an explicit socio-structural analysis of the phenomenon under study.
As an extension of CRT, the concept of intersectionality moves the study of (un)conscious bias beyond considerations of race alone (Mastuda 1991) to consider the amplified oppression that occurs when multiple systems of social identity-based oppression operate simultaneously. Scholars have used intersectionality (as an addendum to CRT, henceforth referred to as CRT/I) as an analytical tool (Crenshaw 1989), a methodology (McBride, Hebson, and Holgate 2014; Mooney 2016; Tapia and Alberti 2018), and a paradigm (Hancock 2007).
The concept of intersectionality first emerged in research on labor and employment law. In her pathbreaking work on systemic oppression in employment law, Kimberlé Crenshaw, a Black feminist and critical legal theorist, coined the term “intersectionality” (1989) in her analysis of failed Title VII claims against General Motors (GM). Employing what we refer to in this article as a socio-structural examination of the court’s legal theory, Crenshaw illustrated the limitations of traditional single, privileged-identity theoretical approaches to understanding workplace injustice. By challenging the prevailing presumptions of employment law theory, she demonstrated “false realities” under existing anti-discrimination law; these are constructed, subjective realities in which a society’s laws and institutions are viewed as neutral and objective—although they are not.
Specifically, Crenshaw conducted a systematic review of the court’s denial of Black women plaintiffs’ sex discrimination claims (because GM had hired white women) and race discrimination claims (because GM had hired Black men). Through this analysis, she found that despite the theoretical presumption of protection from discrimination because of the existence of Title VII, empirically, Black women face unacknowledged structural obstacles to filing Title VII claims. Through her intersectional lens, she also illuminated the distortions in theory and practice that occur when scholars ignore existing systems of oppression in their study of social phenomena and when scholars fail to address (un)conscious bias despite explicit study of social identity. Explaining the harm that occurs when theoretical frameworks default to privileged-group narratives, Crenshaw asserted: Focus on otherwise-privileged group members creates a distorted analysis of racism and sexism because the operative conceptions of race and sex become grounded in experiences that actually represent only a subset of a much more complex phenomenon. . . . Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated. Thus, for feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse to embrace the experiences and concerns of Black women, the entire framework that has been used as a basis for translating “women’s experience” or “the Black experience” into concrete policy demands must be rethought and recast. (1989: 140)
Advances in Other Social Sciences
Outside of law, other social science disciplines have engaged CRT/I to reckon with problematic theoretical paradigms and to confront systemic bias in those frameworks. In a seminal article from 1995, for example, Gloria Ladson-Billings and William F. Tate IV showed that race is under-theorized within top scholarship in the field of education. The authors challenged presumptions of neutrality, objectivity, color-blindness, and meritocracy with regards to education scholarship generally, and more specifically with respect to knowledge of school inequities. They demonstrated that even though racism is “endemic and deeply ingrained in American life” (1995: 55), most scholars had treated race only as an unquestioned variable until their article challenged conventional thinking and led to a major shift in assumptions in the field of education.
In social movement studies, Callie Watkins Liu examined award-winning research and found that a consistent lack of CRT/I analysis in that literature not only restricts comprehensive understanding but also potentially harms the subjects within theoretical reach (2018). She critiqued the overwhelming whiteness and maleness of the award winners, and perhaps most important, their lack of deep socio-structural analysis, which erases the experiences, power, and agency of marginalized groups. 2 And in organization studies, Victor Ray developed a theory of racialized organizations to account for implicit “whiteness” in organizational theory. He urged scholars to “abandon the notion that organizational formations, hierarchies, and processes are race-neutral” and to start with the assumption that “discrimination, racial sorting, and an unequal distribution of resources are not anomalous but rather foundational organizational norms” (Ray 2019: 46).
The field of labor history has undergone several “reckonings” on identity since its patriarchal and economistic roots in John R. Commons et al.’s defining History of Labor (1918–1935). In their chronology of labor history through 2009, Donna Haverty-Stacke and Daniel Walkowitz argued that “the New Social History of the 1960s represented a conscious break with the ‘old’ Commons historiographic tradition, [r]eflecting the new population of white ethnics who entered higher education in the 1960s and the social ferment of the decade” (2010: 3). This important theoretical shift included leading scholarship by historians such as David Montgomery who “sought to re-explore the past ‘from the bottom up’ by empowering the voices ‘from below’” (quoted in Hill 1996: 3). Although this research represented an important advance, it still characterized race as subsidiary to class identity (Hill 1996).
The growth of identity politics—including the rise of feminist theory in the 1970s and the social construction of race in the 1980s—further marginalized the concept of class as the core distinguishing feature of workers’ identity. By the 1990s, however, mostly male historians mounted a “full throated” opposition to critical theory. Haverty-Stacke and Walkowitz (2010) described this patriarchal camp of scholars as “challenged (and threatened may not be too strong a word)” by the field’s turn toward gendered history (p. 6). They cited as an example Bryan Palmer’s audacious cry that “(c)ritical theory is no substitute for historical materialism; language is not life” to exemplify the concern that racialized and gendered history would “undercut the materialist paradigms of class analysis” (p. 6). The founding of the Labor and Working Class History Association (LAWCHA) in 1999, however, turned the field’s focus to “[h]ow workers understand themselves as workers—their identity or consciousness” (p. 8).
Indeed, labor historians have brought to light the “story of exclusions” (Frader and Rose 1996: 10) by showing how white male or white working-class narratives have dominated historical accounts. To disrupt the white dominance found in labor history, historians looked to “the analytical power of gender to disrupt conventional understandings of worker identity, class formation, proletarization” (Boris and Janssens 1999: 1), as well as race, ethnicity, and other categories of analysis. In doing so, many labor historians began to expressly acknowledge colonial and imperial legacies in their historical and gender narratives of class formation and working-class experiences (Boris and Janssens 1999; Ruiz and DuBois 2000).
Although labor historians have made some progress, other IR scholars have made only limited use of CRT/I to identify counter-narratives and to reckon with systemic bias and structural inequity.
3
In making this claim, we look to whether the author engages in an analytical approach consistent with the basic tenets of CRT/I, and not to whether the author uses the specific language of critical race theory or intersectionality. Until very recently, articles in the leading US IR journals (ILR Review and Industrial Relations) have not mentioned critical race theory or intersectionality; nor have most of the well-known CRT/I scholars who address labor and employment issues, such as Crenshaw, been cited. Notably, in the recently published ILR Review article that engages critical race and intersectional theory, sociologists Erin A. Cech and William R. Rothwell mirrored our call to re-evaluate prior understandings of workplace inequality with what is essentially a CRT/I lens: Consistent with our predictions, we find that informal workplace inequalities are intersectional: LGBT status beliefs are racialized and gendered in ways that exaggerate these processes for LGBT-identifying women and people of color. This finding suggests the role intersectionality plays in LGBT status inequalities and underscores the importance of investigating ways LGBT status may moderate the gender and race workplace inequalities documented in prior scholarship. (2020: 27; emphasis added)
“Intersectionality” is gaining some traction in those journals that consider IR within a broader sociological framework (e.g., Work, Employment and Society and Work & Occupations). Some scholars have lamented the absence of intersectionality in IR research (McBride et al. 2014); others have focused on how to incorporate intersectionality in IR research (Mooney 2016; Tapia and Alberti 2018). Still others have emphasized the importance of its use when examining, for example, labor market experiences of Muslim women in the UK (Khattab and Hussein 2017), women managers in Finland and Scotland (Jyrkinen and McKie 2012), and young workers in the UK (Zuccotti and O’Reilly 2018). These studies tend to focus on “intersectionality” as a stand-alone concept, however, thereby ignoring its origins and ignoring generations of Black critical race theorizing.
In sum, although not prevalent in IR literature, outside scholars of labor and employment have long recognized the importance of identity in examining the conditions, laws, and institutions governing the working class. Further, understanding the relationship between identity and systems of oppression is critical even in those instances in which race is not of direct concern to the researcher. Central fields of study important to IR knowledge (e.g., education, feminist studies, labor history, social movements, organizational studies) have engaged CRT/I in initiating paradigmatic reckonings. CRT/I’s deep, socio-structural approach to social identity yields “a more honest account of reality” (Atwood and López 2014: 1148). It does so through a consideration of existing power structures, with an emphasis on the pervasiveness of institutional racism within society as well as the multiple systems of identity-based oppression. As gatekeepers of knowledge production, scholars have the power to affect future scholarship on social phenomena and the “real life” social power structures within society at large. The incorporation of CRT/I reflects therefore a theoretical commitment to social justice in knowledge production.
Critical Industrial Relations: Theoretical and Methodological Considerations
In the context of the mass mobilizations since 2012 (ongoing at the time of writing) by Black and marginalized workers in “supra-union” movements such as the Fight for $15 (Tapia, Lee, and Filipovitch 2017), the Women’s March, and the Movement for Black Lives, the time is beyond ripe for IR to join other social sciences in confronting systemic bias in our scholarship. To advance this paradigmatic shift, we suggest a set of preliminary theoretical and methodological considerations for the development of critical industrial relations in which scholars engage CRT/I in the formation of the questions we ask, the methodologies we employ, the data sets we select, and the analyses we construct.
Adoption of CRT/I Tenets
An economics that recognizes race, racialization, and racism can be used to address these issues. A theory that ignores these issues is an institutional foundation of racism. (Pouncy 2002: 852)
As a foundational step in developing critical industrial relations, IR scholars should ground their labor and employment expertise in the basic tenets of CRT/I. Specifically, we should as a matter of course acknowledge that racism is an ever-present system of oppression. We should resist our tendency to ignore or downplay racial and other social identities when undertaking our research (e.g., the future of work, union revitalization, and worker mobilization). We should ensure that our theoretical frameworks center narratives other than the white working class as the measure of worker interests broadly. If, however, IR scholars opt out of deep socio-structural contextualization, they need to be more explicit and transparent about limitations on the generalizability of their analyses of what workers want, what unions do, and the state of working-class conditions.
As an interdisciplinary field, we should also confront racism in our academic discipline. For example, Sadie Alexander, the first African American with a PhD in economics (1921) in the United States, wrote about the oppression and struggle of Black workers and the interconnection between racial and economic justice. But because she was Black, she was not allowed to work as an economist at the time and up until today her work has not been fully included or examined in the field of (labor) economics. (For a discussion of her work, see Banks 2008.) By contrast, labor economist Phyllis Wallace did gain tenure at MIT—a first—and she rose to become the first Black female president of the Industrial Relations Research Association (IRRA). She pioneered studies on race and gender discrimination in the labor market during the 1960s and ‘70s (Anderson and Wallace 1975; Wallace 1980). As president of the IRRA, she “focus[ed] on moving her colleagues to expand their view of industrial relations research, encouraging labor economists, trade unionists, and corporate human relations specialists to deconstruct the barriers to advancement of minorities and women in internal labor market” (Malveaux 1994: 96). Yet Wallace’s approach has not spread widely through the academy.
Additionally, it is crucial that IR scholars confront and critique presumptions of meritocracy, color-blindness, or liberalism in our theories by challenging traditional reliance on primarily economic class-based understandings of workers, their representatives, and their struggles. Acceptance of CRT/I tenets would push the field to more deeply account for the impact of long legacies of racism and exclusion in trade unions specifically, and the labor movement generally. This perspective would provide us with an alternative starting point for analyses of worker organizing. For example, when a comparative labor scholar asserts “there was no cross-sector labor movement prior to the 1820s” (Carlson 2018: 129), simply engaging with the basic tenets of CRT/I would lead them to contextualize the origins of the labor movement through other narratives; it would lead to more critical consideration of slave rebellions, for instance, as early forms of labor protest. In this way, challenging white-dominant frameworks and identity erasures in our narratives provides a more socio-structural framework for understanding contemporary Black worker mobilizations (Ortiz 2005) for social justice.
Finally, given that CRT/I started in law, most of the work has been done from a qualitative or even legal narrative perspective. We do not have space here to set forth or enter the debate over critical quantitative methodologies (see Sablan 2019 for a full outline of the debates; Gómez 2012 on the complexity of race variables; Carbado and Roithmayr 2014 on tensions at the intersections of CRT and social science), though we encourage IR scholars to enter those debates on quantitative research methodologies. 4
Explicit and Transparent Identity Conceptualization
Some social scientists have recently urged the creation of an explicitly race-conscious social science . . . [focusing] on the social processes that make race a salient social category to replace the more conventional construction of race as a one-dimensional and naturalized independent variable. (Carbado and Roithmayr 2014: 157)
When IR scholars bring CRT/I into their research, it shifts their research from an identity-neutral to a race-conscious approach because it requires more explicit and transparent conceptualization of race and racism. That is, qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-method research should explicitly address how race (and/or other identity variables) is defined in data sets and in the interpretation of those data, being transparent about the limitations of those conceptualizations. As a start, an initial challenge for IR scholars is to question more critically the conceptualizations of race in the data or data sets that our IR field traditionally employs, and in the analysis of that data. As Gómez (2012) explains: Scholars who include race as a facet of their studies (whether a major or minor facet) should deliberately conceptualize race and also consider how race was conceptualized (expressly or implicitly) by researchers who created the data set they are using. . . . We should not assume that what “race” means is obvious or that there is consensus about a particular conception of race. In fact, we should make the opposite assumption: what ‘race’ means is highly contested in popular culture, politics, law, and science. . . . Research that fails to expressly define race implicitly endorses a notion of race as a micro-level characteristic that is both fixed and biologically rooted—a position that fits uncomfortably with a full-bodied conception of race as socially constructed. (pp. 239–40)
As an example of potential limitations inherent in data sets lacking racial conceptualization, we bring focus to strike data. The Bureau of Labor Statics (BLS) data on strikes provides a good example of the limitations inherent in publicly available data sets as it records strikes or lockouts only if they involve 1,000 employees or more and last one full shift or more (BLS 2020). And within IR, scholars consider a strike only to be when workers collectively withdraw their labor to force their employer to meet their demands (van der Velden, Dribbusch, Lyddon, and Vandaele 2007). This generally accepted definition of a strike within the field of IR is likely to lead users of that data to engage in analyses that obscure the agency and power of BIPoC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) worker mobilizations and negate traditional and cultural ways in which Black and Brown communities engage in the withholding of labor. Two recent examples include mobilizations that have taken place during COVID-19 in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, in which mass protests forced businesses to close, and those led by professional athletes in solidarity with racial justice movements. Bringing a racial critique of facially neutral data sets has resulted in the emergence of recent debates in which some commentators argue that the work stoppages that fall outside of those definitions should be considered strikes (see Elk 2020; or, for opposite view, see Brooks 2020).
Intra-Categorical and Inter-Categorical Research Design
We highlight the importance of adopting an intra-categorical and inter-categorical research design (McCall 2005) to account for the complex situational nature of race and social identities. Such an adoption would lead researchers to pay attention to different experiences of subgroups within the same category or the differences within the group, that is, intra-categorical (Gómez 2012: 238–39). For example, rather than classifying migrant workers as a single, homogenous group, researchers would acknowledge their distinct backgrounds, migration status, and so on, as this affects, for example, mobilization efforts.
Researchers also need to question the relationships between the categories of differences, or inter-categorical, otherwise they risk analyzing their work in a hegemonic way. The conventional wisdom is to see the dominant racial category as the norm against which other differences are compared without questioning why these experiences are the norm. For example, accounts of gender or feminism often implicitly revolve around white women or white feminism. The strategies of white feminists are then assumed to be the norm or the normal against which the strategies of Black feminists are compared, even though the latter are fighting against white supremacy in addition to patriarchy. As a result, Black women’s intersectional experiences are likely to be erased, and their strategies might be misinterpreted as divisive, confrontational, or angry polemic.
As an example of how researchers might incorporate these types of structural conditions in research design and methodology, we bring focus to the Black Futures Lab (BFL), a project from Alicia Garza, formerly of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and one of the original founders of Black Lives Matter. BFL’s research design and methodologies confront traditional biases in data collection and replace them with identity-conscious approaches that address the complexities of Black intersectional experiences—for example, being Black and transgender.
Structural racism throughout the economy—from hiring, to pay, benefits, lending, housing, and beyond—impacts the daily lives of Black . . . respondents and contributes to economic hardship for respondents of all genders. Yet for trans- and cisgender women, racial discrimination is compounded by the impact of sexism. Transgender and gender non-conforming/non-binary respondents must contend with often virulent transphobia. The overlapping forms of discrimination are best understood through the lens of intersectionality, a term pioneered by Black feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe how multiple forms of exclusion and oppression shape people’s lives. (BFL 2019: 11)
Comprising a team of Black scholars and a research network of people of color, BFL created a survey instrument that it describes as “the largest survey of Black people conducted in the United States since Reconstruction.” It “provides an accurate reflection of the diversity of our communities, of the diversity of issues that Black communities care about most, and of the innovative ideas and vision for how to transform our country” (BFL 2020). In BFL’s first report, researchers provided a clear rejection of traditional survey methods in favor of the oversampling of marginalized identities in order to account for structural and systemic inequity in our existing research tools: It was important to the Black Futures Lab not to conduct a traditional probabilistic survey sample, as traditional methods can exclude important information about communities that are under-represented. The Black Futures Lab was intentional about oversampling communities where rich information about their experiences, the challenges they face, or their vision for the future is not often available. This is especially vital in the case of the transgender population: While researchers estimate that approximately 0.8 percent of Black adults in the United States identify as transgender, a full 3.5 percent of Black Census respondents identify as transgender, including respondents who identify as gender non-conforming and non-binary. (BFL 2019: 3)
IR scholars should similarly engage more explicitly with the CRT/I literature, frameworks, and methodologies in our study of social phenomena (e.g., unions, worker organizing), laws (e.g., local and federal statutes for unionization and collective bargaining), and systems (e.g., labor market) that have deeply embedded discriminatory practices and structures. Doing so would allow us to better understand what workers want and why they mobilize.
“Ask the Other Question”
To engage in the deeper, socio-structural analysis of data, CRT/I scholar Mari Matsuda urged scholars to “ask the other question” to account for the dimensions of structural discrimination that are less visible (1991: 1189). That is to say that scholars should broaden their analysis and look beyond their “target” subjects (McBride et al. 2014) to understand the systems of discrimination and domination at work, or as Matsuda explained: “When I see something that looks racist, I ask, ‘Where is the patriarchy in this?’” (1991: 1189). As an example, when IR scholars examine worker-organizing campaigns—even if interview subjects do not mention race or it is not the intent of the researcher to study race explicitly—it remains important for scholars to “ask the other question” when analyzing data because systems of racial oppression exist regardless of whether we opt to explicitly account for them in our research design.
Diverse, Equitable, and Inclusive Research Teams
To confront white dominant narratives and theoretical frameworks, we encourage IR scholars to form diverse and inclusive research teams and theoretical coalitions with researchers from marginalized identity groups. Matsuda (1991) succinctly described the benefits of working in collaboration with scholars from communities closest to intersectional structural oppression: It is no accident that women of color, grounded as they are in both feminist and anti-racist struggle, are doing the most exciting theoretical work on race-gender intersections. It is no accident that gay and lesbian scholars are advancing social construction theory and the analysis of sexuality in subordination. In raising this I do not mean that we cannot speak of subordination second-hand. Rather, I wish to encourage us to do this, and to suggest that we can do this most intelligently in coalition, listening with special care to those who are actively involved in knowing and ending the systems of domination that touch their lives. (p. 1191)
One of the strengths of the field of IR is that it is both multi- and interdisciplinary. The field can widen its comparative advantage in depth and complexity by purposefully creating identity-conscious research teams to ensure diversity in theoretical, methodological, and analytical perspectives. Doing so should reflect the full range of inclusive narratives and lived experiences of the communities our knowledge informs (see, e.g., Solórzano and Yosso 2002; Carbado 2011).
To conclude, the steps we urge here are not exhaustive, and our goal is not to establish a full “how to” for the critical study of industrial relations. Rather, we are presenting a starting point for engaging CRT/I and its extensive literature of theories and methodologies to confront (un)conscious bias in our research questions and approaches.
Opportunities for CRT/I to Shape Research on Worker Organizing
In this section, we engage CRT/I with leading scholarship on worker organizing. We demonstrate how grounding IR research within CRT/I presents an opportunity for scholars to challenge prevailing color-blind and singular, class-centered theories of worker organizing. It would also help scholars account for structural racism and other forms of systemic subordination that stratify workers in their workplaces, organizations, and movements. We chose to explore the worker-organizing scholarship because the literature is focused on important labor topics but broad enough to include studies of union decline and revitalization as well as different forms of representation.
First, we apply basic tenets of CRT/I to the worker-organizing scholarship that explicitly engages social identity in some way. A small but growing camp of IR scholars, whom we join, have started to take note of the importance of non-class social identities. This has led to calls for greater consideration of race, gender, ethnicity, and other social identities in understanding worker organizing (Holgate 2005; Pearson, Anitha, and McDowell 2010; Alberti, Holgate, and Tapia 2013; Doellgast, Lillie, and Pulignano 2017; Tapia et al. 2017). While we find this trend encouraging, a deep socio-structural analysis goes beyond the mere engagement of identity in research designs. It is about how one studies social identity—from the literature that informs the research; through the framing of the research question, design, and methodology; to the lens through which scholars analyze data.
For instance, Piore and Safford (2006) argued that the New Deal system of collective bargaining and trade unions has collapsed and has been replaced by an individual employment rights regime. They asserted that this has occurred in part because of political mobilization by “new identity groups” (p. 305) to push for employment rights laws instead of traditional economic mobilization through trade unions. Without CRT/I, this stands as an important contribution to our understanding of union decline. With CRT/I, the authors would have more deeply accounted for the legacies of racism and more explicitly grounded their conceptualization of race and racial policy (i.e., Title VII) in relevant counter-narratives and structural conditions. More specifically, when the authors describe the 18th-century US industrial model focusing on a male breadwinner and a stay-at-home woman, they fail to recognize, and therefore erase, the conditions of Black enslaved populations or the important intersectional experiences of Black women—who have always had to work outside their home. This historical exclusion results in the (un)conscious ascription of norms and rules of the dominant groups to everyone else (Watkins Liu 2018).
Furthermore, Piore and Safford talked about a shift over time. They stated that workers’ mobilization during the New Deal system was based on economic identities rooted in class but from the 1970s it shifted to social identities rooted in race, sex, ethnicity, and so forth. Discussing economic or class identities as extricable from social identities ignores “the historical development of working-class identity as racial identity” (Hill 1996: 189). Using CRT/I as an analytical tool in this case may have led the researchers to explicitly confront white-dominant conceptualizations of class and could have led them to alternative, more socio-structural, explanations of worker mobilization. More specifically, to what extent is the authors’ analysis of “class” identity actually based on the benefits and interests of a mostly white working class? And to what extent are the political mobilizations “new,” from the counter-narratives of Black and other marginalized workers for whom such political and social mobilizations had long been a part of their tactical repertoires?
Additionally, if Piore and Safford had engaged CRT/I to account for the complexity of race and social identity through either intra-categorical or inter-categorical research design or by “asking the other question,” they may have considered deeper socio-structural, identity-based variances, leading to alternative explanations. For example, was the political mobilization of distinct “identity groups” affected by most unions’ refusal to support the civil rights movement and their intentional exclusion of people of color, preferring their status quo of white domination? What about the impact of racist union practices that remained in place when Black workers joined the CIO during the New Deal era (Hill 1996)? How can we better understand worker mobilization when we acknowledge that some labor leaders tried to weaken the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and to lessen union liability for race or gender discrimination under the Title VII Act when the 1964 Civil Rights Act was enacted (Deslippe 2000)?
In another example of how CRT/I might affect IR scholars’ approach to social identity in worker organizing, we highlight the important work on union revitalization by Isaac, McDonald, and Lukasik (2006). They argued that the feminist wave, the civil rights movement, and the anti-war movement stimulated labor militancy—especially within the public sector. Despite a clear consideration of identity-based movements, the authors only briefly mention the impact of race, without elaboration or socio-cultural analysis, to inform their conceptualization of the feminist wave. Because CRT/I stresses the importance of counter-narratives, it provides analytical and methodological tools to account for the experiences of subgroups. A deeper understanding and identification of inter- and intra-group variation might affect our final analysis and conclusions: Are there any differences across race, gender, or other social identities, and how does this affect their mobilization or their relationship with the trade unions? Addressing, or at the very least, considering socio-structural considerations guards against false assumptions due to identity erasure—erasure that can occur when, unintentionally, we obscure the voice or agency of marginalized identity groups by assuming or treating identity groups as homogenous.
In this case, CRT/I would have provided a mechanism for Isaac and colleagues to at the very least acknowledge the important differences between white and Black feminisms over multiple waves, from Sojourner Truth’s suffrage-era “Ain’t I a Woman” construction to the Combahee River Collective’s intersectional critiques of white feminism. Moreover, it would push researchers to consider the impact of deep-seated racism, as well as acknowledge the dominance of white feminist perspectives as the norm in feminist theory and practice (in other words, taking on McCall’s intra-categorical approach).
Further, a CRT/I approach would have generated important “other questions” for analytical consideration, such as the differences in means of worker power and conditions for labor militancy across groups and the likely differences in strategies employed by Black women to fight for social and economic change as compared to white women engaged by white-led trade unions. For people of color, mass disruption or massive civil disobedience has long been an important tactic in delegitimizing the ideologies and institutions that maintain white supremacy in capitalist systems (Robinson 1983). This type of disruptive protest—from the Memphis Black sanitation workers’“I Am a Man” campaign of the 1960s to the more contemporary Fight for $15’s coalition with the Black Lives Matter movement—is likely to be a salient priority for people of color in their fights for political, social, and economic change. This is again very different from the potential institutional channels available to other dominant groups (Robinson 1983). At the same time, this might then also partly explain why these movements were more likely to influence militancy or union recognition strikes in the public sector (given the prevalence of Black workers) than in the private sector.
Other notable research on worker organizing that directly engages social identity includes Ruth Milkman’s important scholarship on labor and gender (for a compilation, see Milkman 2016) and labor and migrant workers (2006). Her work has been especially significant in pushing IR scholars to pay attention to the relationships between class and gender or class and migration status. On the one hand, (white feminist) scholars have referred to Milkman as an “intersectional” scholar (e.g., Rubery 2017). In L.A. Story, for example, Milkman has centered her research around the agency of low-wage Latino immigrants—emphasizing the importance of their migrant identity in explaining the success of worker-organizing campaigns. On the other hand, in the same book Milkman also emphasized the need for top-down union leadership and states, “That the former AFL unions rather than their CIO counterparts have assumed center stage in these efforts to organize immigrants of color belies the old stereotype that paints the former as reflexively hostile toward racial and ethnic minorities” (2006: 25). A CRT/I lens would lead us to a more critical assessment of the motivations of the AFL unions. In other words, returning to Bell’s interest convergence thesis, did the campaign mainly occur because it was in the AFL’s economic interests or was the AFL truly committed to issues of racial justice and diversity. If the latter, did we see, for example, an influx in diverse leadership within the union?
Whereas scholars have discussed identity, for example, in demonstrating the importance of unions in providing economic benefits to minority populations such as migrants, Hispanics, or African Americans (Lichtenstein 2002; Milkman 2006; Rosenfeld and Kleykamp 2009), a CRT/I framework would provide a more profound socio-structural assessment of trade unions and the labor market. Indeed, even though unions admitted Black workers in their ranks, they often remained and still remain in subordinate positions (Hill 1996), or, as Oluo (2019) stated about the labor movement, it “‘move[s] everybody forward’ but in the exact same place, with the exact same hierarchy, and the exact same oppressions” (p. 11). CRT/I would thus lead us to critically assess what “success” looks like or what “justice” looks like—success and justice for whom and in what form?
Social identity has also been discussed as an important variable in existing theories of union revitalization that emphasizes the importance of forming coalitions between unions and civil society groups as a way to gain power (e.g., Clawson 2003; Tattersall 2010; Yu 2014). Scholars in this camp have pointed out that many labor-community coalitions—while generally considered positive in terms of the organizations’ coalition building and mobilizing capacity (Tattersall 2010; Tapia 2019)—are typical examples of organizations that, like unions traditionally, intentionally choose not to engage in a deeper class, race, and gender analysis (Sen 2003).
The incorporation of CRT/I could help this group of worker-organizing scholars to more deeply examine the extent to which these identity-based structures or coalitions with civil society groups are built to benefit the dominant groups or not. CRT/I theory would lead us to further examine whether racial justice only occurs because it advances whites’ interests—again, referring to Bell’s interest convergence—or, because there is an actual intent to build truly equitable coalition structures and processes. Put another way, engaging CRT/I could help us re-evaluate the sustainability of interest convergence as a renewal or revitalization strategy.
CRT/I can also be engaged to develop critical study of other strands of worker-organizing literature such as John Kelly’s mobilization theory, which many scholars draw on to understand processes of collectivism by unions (for a review see Holgate, Simms, and Tapia 2018). Mobilization theory lays out the conditions under which individuals will engage in collective action, emphasizing the importance of workers’ perceived injustice at the workplace. To a certain extent, this scholarship focuses on workers’ shared economic class identity or, more broadly, shared economic interests within the workplace as the primary way to organize workers and build worker solidarity (Hyman 1975; Kelly 1998; Umney 2018). This consensus approach tends to downplay or ignore the importance of social identity and presupposes a hierarchy of worker interests that elevates class or economic interest over other conditions. Indeed, by treating all workers implicitly as a homogenous working class, scholars necessarily obscure the interlocking forms of oppression workers face based on their race, gender, ethnicity, or other non-class social identities and the importance of such structural oppression to workers and their mobilization. CRT/I, of course, was developed to prevent these problematic assumptions that can lead to the establishment of false realities of worker-organizing conditions.
Similarly, basic principles of CRT/I challenge the prevailing theories in the union revitalization literature (Frege and Kelly 2004; Gumbrell-McCormick and Hyman 2013; Ibsen and Tapia 2017). Researchers often leave uncontested an assumption of trade unions as inclusive and equitable organizations of social justice. Because these conceptualizations tend to lack deep consideration or acknowledgment of past and present systems of identity-based inequities within unions and the labor movement, we consider resulting theory to be generally identity-neutral, and thus in tension with the basic tenets of CRT/I.
Critical research on union revitalization and worker organizing would recognize unions as race- and identity-conscious entities, usually set up by white majorities, with rules (laws, policies, normative practices) that—although presumed to be color-blind—are infused with racial biases (see, for example, Flynn, Holmberg, Warren, and Wong 2016). In acknowledging that racism is ever present and that whiteness restructures itself in institutions to preserve its privileges, critical worker-organizing scholars might then view unions as racialized structures (Ray 2019) or even “inequality regimes” (Acker 2006). Like most organizations, unions harbor processes that inherently produce inequality by systemically creating disparities over the power and control of the goals, resources, and outcomes of the organizations.
Similarly, Stephen Silvia’s award-winning article from 2018 described in detail the failed union organizing attempts at the Volkswagen (VW) plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. His analysis focused primarily on how exogenous interference, VW’s dependence on state subsidies, the lack of community support, and a particular pre-agreement were likely to dissuade workers from voting for the union. Standing alone, this is an important contribution to our understanding of union organizing failures. At the same time, however, this is an example of identity-neutral research in worker organizing.
To illustrate, applying the basic tenets of CRT/I would have allowed Silvia to deal with alternative explanations of the VW failure—for example, whether racial and gender divides undermined worker solidarity. Such an approach would be especially valuable in a case study set in Tennessee, which has a long and storied racial history plagued by racialized violence pre- and post-lawful segregation. Tennessee is a state where the workforce is 56% white (non-Hispanic), but the poverty rates of Black and Hispanic residents is 31% and 37%, respectively, which is well over double the poverty rate of white residents (15%) (World Population Review 2020). Indeed, an important fact not mentioned by Silvia is that although the plant was approximately 90% white and male, workers hired by a third-party supplier were more likely to be Black. This resulted not only in a two-tiered system with lower wages for the workers hired by a third party, but amplified racial disparity in which the core workers were mostly white and the workers hired by a third party were mostly Black. 5
Furthermore, Silvia’s research allows us to demonstrate the benefit of another of our critical industrial relations interventions: Ask the other question. Regardless of whether it is a researcher’s intent to study race directly—and regardless of whether a subject or set of data mentions race—it remains important for scholars to “ask the other question” when analyzing data because of the continued existence and impact of systemic racial oppression. If Silvia’s same research question had been conducted from a critical industrial relations lens, the following questions would have been critical for his data analysis: Why was the workforce in the plant overwhelmingly white, given that Chattanooga consists of a 35% Black population, and why were so few Black people hired directly by the company? From IR scholarship, we know empirically that Black workers are likely to be discriminated against during the hiring process (Moss and Tilly 2001), but at the same time, we know that Black workers are more likely to vote for a union (BLS 2018). Was there a specific racial history in the union, and how do non-white workers feel about union leadership? In what ways did the amplified poverty rates of Black and Hispanic workers in Tennessee affect worker mobilization?
Generating new non-color-blind hypotheses and asking these “other questions” inherent in a CRT/I approach opens the theoretical opportunity for a deeper, socio-structural understanding of the obstacles to union organizing, and perhaps more important, a more historically contextualized accounting for the effect of racialized institutions and institutionalized racism on union organizing in the US South. Only very recently have any union revitalization scholars highlighted institutional bias in union strategies; and when they have done so, the result has been to question identity-neutral, union-centered research in our understanding of worker organizing. For example, Alberti and Però (2018) examined campaigns by migrant workers and found empirical evidence of union resistance to migrant workers’ innovative organizing strategies and to migrant workers assuming union leadership positions. The unions’ identity-conscious approach led migrant workers to undertake independent grassroots mobilizations outside the main union structures. The authors ultimately suggest, as CRT/I would have provided at the onset, that researchers center the agency, experiences, and narratives of precarious, non-standard actors—such as migrant workers—in the understanding of worker organizing. We have made similar arguments for centering the importance of workers’ overlapping social identities in our previous work (Tapia et al. 2017) on “supra-union” mobilizations and intersectional organizing strategies in low-wage sectors where unions have been reluctant in some cases to organize majority migrant workers.
In a final example of how CRT/I can be a useful analytical tool for the critical study of worker organizing, we consider Ferguson’s (2016) examination of National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) representation cases. He convincingly demonstrated that racially diverse bargaining units are more likely than homogenous bargaining units to withdraw a union petition before an election is held. Based on this finding he explained that employers are more likely to commit unfair labor practices (ULPs) when the bargaining unit is more racially diverse and are thus able to sow divisions among workers based on their race and ethnicity or engage in divide-and-rule tactics. Such labor fragmentation arguments, common in IR literature, have extensive empirical support (Fantasia and Voss 2004) but often fail to recognize the primacy of race as a fundamental organizing principle within the working class itself. In this case, this presumption leads Ferguson to attribute the failure of NLRB elections almost exclusively to manipulation by employers rather than racism (intentional and systemic) within unions themselves. Stated another way, the study appears to treat race as a subsidiary feature of class development or as an impediment to a unified working class rather than central within the development of the American social order (Hill 1996).
In sum, with our call for the development of critical industrial relations, we seek to ground important IR scholarship in CRT/I approaches to move our top scholarship toward even deeper understandings of the complexities of intersectional identity and a fuller accounting for structural inequity in the phenomena we study.
Implications
The implications of the development of a field of critical industrial relations are twofold: 1) it would restore theoretical justice to IR knowledge by making social identity intrinsic—rather than optional—to the study of labor and employment phenomena, and 2) it would expand the population of relevant empirical cases for labor and employment research.
First, it is important to understand that the adoption of the basic tenets of CRT/I would render the theoretical consideration of social identity no longer an optional research design and analytical apparatus in the study of labor and employment. The growing incorporation of CRT/I in certain pockets of IR scholarship is an encouraging start, but for our knowledge to be a just reflection of the realities of industrial relations, IR scholarship must go further. That is to say that ridding our canon of (un)conscious bias in our philosophical assumptions urges IR scholars to acknowledge that identity-based discrimination permeates organizations and institutions at all levels (macro, meso, and micro) even when they choose to ignore its presence in their research design. Thus, if scholars decline to study social identity directly as a variable at any particular level of analysis, they should then clearly and explicitly acknowledge that they have not accounted for interlocking systems of oppression in their research. To fail to do so inherently perpetuates structural inequity in our bodies of research.
Second, critical studies in industrial relations would allow IR scholars to broaden the universe of relevant case studies. For example, in the study of worker organizing, IR scholars might more routinely study identity-based movements such as the Movement for Black Lives and the Women’s March. Failure to do so is a missed opportunity for understanding key strategies for union revitalization, as it would leave IR scholarship theoretically blind to the saliency of social identity in the contemporary mass mobilization of workers and in the framing of worker interests. Indeed, with CRT/I, IR scholars have the power to apply an intersectional lens to capitalism and expand the study of IR to broader US movements for racial and gender justice. This expansion is important in our efforts not only to understand the implications of those movements for unionization but also to acknowledge that economic, social, and racial justice elements are often linked to one another. For example, a better alternative to traditional melting-pot approaches to union solidarity building may become clear, and strategies that build solidarity by confronting, rather than shying from, identity politics, might prove more successful in stemming union decline long-term.
Conclusions
Why has academic IR fallen on hard times? Will IR institutes and IR programs stage a comeback, or will they ultimately fade from the academic scene? What can be done to improve the prospects for the field? Successfully answering these questions requires, I believe, a thorough understanding of the field’s history and, in particular, the events and decisions that brought industrial relations to its current state. (Kaufman 1993: xv)
In the 1990s, Bruce Kaufman published a comprehensive treatise on the field of industrial relations, from its origins, institutionalization, and golden age through its decline and prospects for the future. In exploring IR’s past, present, and future, Kaufman never mentioned the relevance of race or other socially constructed identity, except for in a footnote. Now 100 years into the institutionalization of the field of industrial relations, and more than 25 years since Kaufman considered its origins and evolutions, we call for a reckoning in IR theory.
Indeed, as we complete the centennial of the field of industrial relations, we are still confronting fundamental questions such as “what do workers want?” with prevailing narratives focused primarily on white starting points and the salient interests of the most privileged members and organizations of the working class. In contemplating the future of work, it is more common to focus on the decline of traditional unions and the automation of professional work, rather than the rise of Black Lives Matter and the normalization of the prison industrial complex. In understanding inequity, IR scholars tend to fixate on workers’ interests in wages and hours, rather than their existential need for basic humanity. This includes not being swept up in an immigration raid or murdered by police during a routine traffic stop on the way to a Fight for $15 rally. If Sojourner Truth read our literary canon, she might wonder “Ain’t I a Worker?” and we would be hard-pressed to explain why IR research rarely mentions the legacies of Jim Crow or the racism of women’s suffrage. Yet it appears to suggest that with a trade union, an injury to one is an injury to all, despite the continued existence of post-unionization racialized and gendered wage gaps.
In effect, the field of IR has created a body of knowledge whose class-centered vocabulary (workers) speaks only to the conditions of marginalized workers on specialized occasion, despite the fact that inequity permeates and is at work in every system we study. To put it bluntly, we are engaged in “separate, but equal” knowledge production. Indeed, it is a radical analogy to a dark period in US society—a long-held, normalized societal framework that was resistant to change, vigorously defended, and generally accepted as the controlling narrative. That being said, developing a canon of critical industrial relations is an opportunity for IR scholars to more fully incorporate the counter-narratives of non-privileged identities of workers in our analysis as well as acknowledge the historically contextualized nature of our labor market institutions. In a #WomensMarch, #BlackLivesMatter, and #MeToo era marked by increasing public awareness of the disproportionate social, political, and economic violence against working women, communities of color, immigrants, religious minorities, the disabled, and LGBTQIA communities, applying CRT/I furthers our understanding of how to build internal solidarity and a labor movement that acknowledges and addresses the amplified oppression of workers in marginalized and intersecting identities.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We thank Sheri Davis, Naomi Williams, Kate Griffith, Adrienne Eaton, and Cedric de Leon for their support and excellent suggestions on earlier drafts, as well as the participants of the 2018 Michigan State University Human Resources & Labor Relations (MSU HRLR) speaker series and the 2018 and 2019 Labor and Employment Relations Association (LERA) conference where we presented parts of this article.
For information regarding the data and/or computer programs used for this study, please address correspondence to
1
We use the term paradigm to refer to a holistic framework under which to understand social phenomena, a way of viewing the world (Kuhn 1962). Grounding IR research within CRT/I frameworks would be a paradigmatic shift within the field of IR or a new approach to conducting empirical research rather than content specialization. We use the term theory in a more narrow sense or as a “systematic set of interrelated statements intended to explain some aspect of social life” (
: 615).
2
“Erasure” is standard lexicon within critical race discourse and refers to the “practice of collective indifference that renders certain people and groups invisible” (Sehgal 2016) or the preference to reinforce the existing order by telling a single story ().
3
For example, a broad search on worker organizing in the leading IR journals (ILR Review, Industrial Relations, BJIR, and the JIR) identified 256 articles—without year restrictions—with just 21 of the 256 articles mentioning social identity in a very broad sense (through the Web of Science we used the following search code TS= (“worker organi*” OR revital* OR campaign OR mobili*) AND WC=Industrial Relations & Labor OR SO=(BRITISH JOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS OR ILR REVIEW OR JOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS OR INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS).
4
For a more extensive summary of concerns of quantitative measurements of race, see critique of quantitative political science methodologies. Lee argues that traditional multivariate statistical models assume a lack of complexity, for example, with regard to the interaction between racial self-identification and other independent variables and its influence on dependent variables.
5
September 24, 2018, interview and email correspondence with Abe Walker, a PhD student affiliated with the City University of New York (CUNY) who conducted more than two years of research at the VW plant.