The New Politics (and Political Science) of Workers’ Rights?: A Review Article

In this article, I review Daniel J. Galvin's Alt-Labor and the New Politics of Workers' Rights and situate it within a renewed scholarly interest in the politics of work and labor in the American politics subfield. I argue the book highlights several strengths and weaknesses of the literature, including the book’s attention to how America's highly polarized and fragmented governing system structures the politics of workers’ rights. Galvin’s book, I argue, also helps push the literature forward by encouraging scholars to think more deeply about the shifting institutional location of worker power, new and varying forms of worker organizations, and a set of co-constitutive problems faced by marginalized workers on and off the job. I conclude by suggesting the new wave of labor literature in the American politics subfield has underexplored implications for the growing research on democratic backsliding in the United States.