What Workers Want Depends: Legal Knowledge and the Desire for Workplace Change among Day Laborers

• Date: 01 October 2013
• Published date: 01 October 2013
• Author: Kelly E. Smith,Erin Hatton,Mary Nell Trautner
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lapo.12010

What Workers Want Depends: Legal

Knowledge and the Desire for Workplace

Change among Day Laborers

MARY NELL TRAUTNER, ERIN HATTON, and KELLY E. SMITH

In this article, we identify legal knowledge as a key differencebetween workers who

desire workplace change and those who do not. Based on surveys with 121 day

laborers, we find that not all day laborers are equally dissatisfied with their jobs,

despite uniformly difficult working conditions. Some day laborers do not want to

make any real changes to the day labor industry, while others desire a range of

industry changes, from higher wages to greater government regulation and union-

ization. A key difference between these workers is their knowledge of employment

law: Those who know the law are more likely to desire workplace change.

In their landmark study What Workers Want, Freeman and Rogers (2006,

1999) find that “the vast majority of” workers desire workplace change:

“Workers want . . . more say in the workplace decisions that affect their lives,

more involvement, more legal protection, and more union representation”

(1999, 182). If every worker who desired union representation had it,

Freeman and Rogers estimate, 58 percent of the workforce would be union-

ized, compared with the current rate of less than 12 percent. Freeman and

Rogers also argue that most workers strongly believe in the importance of job

security and a living wage—even though many workers do not have either

(see also Freeman 2007).

Yet not all workers desire these kinds of workplace changes. In Freeman

and Rogers’ (1999) study, for example, a substantial portion of workers

(66 percent) report feeling generally satisfied with their jobs. In addition, fully

We are grateful to Tim Bartley, Wade Roberts, and Karin Uhlich, who helped in developing the

survey and designing our study. Rebecca Sager, George Hobor, Stephan Scholz, and Irene

Alvarado assisted with data collection. We wish to thank Calvin Morrill, Anna Maria Marshall,

Jessica Collett, Robert Adelman, Editor Nancy Reichman, and the anonymous reviewers for

their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. Paul Durlak and Margaret Smith

provided valuable research assistance. Funding for this project was provided by the American

Sociological Association’s Sydney S. Spivack Program in Applied Social Research and Social

Policy, The Southwest Center for Economic Integrity, and the Center for Applied Sociology at

the University of Arizona.

Address correspondence to Mary Nell Trautner, University at Buffalo, SUNY—Department

of Sociology, 430 Park Hall Buffalo New York 14260, USA. Telephone: 716-645-8477; E-mail:

trautner@buffalo.edu.

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LAW & POLICY, Vol. 35, No. 4, October 2013 ISSN 0265–8240

© 2013 The Authors

Law & Policy © 2013 The University of Denver/Colorado Seminary

doi: 10.1111/lapo.12010

55 percent of nonunion workers say they want to remain nonunionized and

would vote against a union. Moreover, a small but substantial portion of

workers do not regard job security and above poverty-line wages as either

“essential” or “very important” for full-time workers (15 and 13 percent,

respectively) (Freeman 2007). What accounts for these differences? Why do

some workers desire such changes while others do not?

One answer, many scholars argue, is workers’ level of job satisfaction. Job

dissatisfaction is the most consistent correlate of prounionization attitudes

among workers (Abraham, Friedman, and Thomas 2008; Hammer and

Avgar 2007; Fiorito, Gallagher, and Greer 1986; Freeman and Medoff 1984;

Heneman and Sandver 1983; but see Martinez and Fiorito 2009). In fact, job

dissatisfaction is a better predictor of a prounion vote than employer threats

or workplace closings (Getman 2010). As Waldinger and Der-Martirosian

(2000, 57) observe, “unhappy workers are likely to want unions.” Yet varying

levels of job satisfaction do not fully explain differences between workers.

This is highlighted by the somewhat incongruous findings on job satisfaction

and unions: While dissatisfied workers are more likely to desire unionization,

unionized workers are more likely to be dissatisfied than nonunionized

workers (Hammer and Avgar 2007; Bryson, Cappellari, and Lucifora 2003;

Borjas 1979). As Hammer and Avgar (2007) point out, we do not yet under-

stand these findings: Are dissatisfied workers more likely to seek unionization

but then continue to feel dissatisfied? Or are undesirable jobs—which pre-

sumably create dissatisfied workers—more likely to be unionized, as Pfeffer

and Davis-Blake (1990) suggest? Or do unions somehow increase levels of

worker dissatisfaction, perhaps through their efforts to educate and mobilize

workers in order to improve workplace problems? In short, it remains unex-

plained why some workers are dissatisfied while others are not, and what

conditions lead to the desire for workplace change.

In this article, we begin to answer such questions by identifying workers’

legal knowledge as a key difference between workers who desire workplace

change and those who do not. As socio-legal scholars have found, inaccurate

or incomplete knowledge of the law can limit one’s willingness or ability to

assert their rights (Singh 2008; Tinkler 2008; Albiston 2005; Basok 1999).

Albiston (2005) argues, for example, that having basic information about

what is (and is not) legal is an important first step in workers’ desire and

capacity to improve negative conditions in the workplace and to take advan-

tage of legal protections (see also Felstiner, Abel, and Sarat 1981). Such

studies thus suggest that legal knowledge may be an essential component

of workers’ desire for workplace change.

We offer empirical evidence for this assertion with an examination of day

laborers’ legal knowledge and their desire for workplace change. Based on

surveys with 121 day labor workers in Tucson, Arizona, we find that not all

workers are equally dissatisfied with day labor, despite the notoriously harsh

conditions of their work. Some of the workers we interviewed, in fact, were

generally satisfied with day labor and did not express any desired changes.

320 LAW & POLICY October 2013

© 2013 The Authors

Law & Policy © 2013 The University of Denver/Colorado Seminary