Abstract: Rebecca Galemba focuses on the plight of day laborers in Denver, Colorado—a quintessential purple state that has swung between some of the harshest and more welcoming policies around immigrant and labor rights. In this talk based on her new book of the same name that was published earlier this year, Galemba reveals how labor abuses like wage theft persist, and how advocates, attorneys, and workers struggle to redress and prevent those abuses using proactive policy, legal challenges, and direct action tactics. As more and more industries move away from secure, permanent employment and towards casualized labor practices, Galemba shines a light on wage theft as symptomatic of larger, systemic issues throughout the U.S. economy, and illustrates how workers can deploy effective strategies to endure and improve their position in the world amidst precarity through everyday forms of convivencia and resistance.

Applying a public anthropology approach that integrates the experiences of community partners, students, policy makers, and activists in the production of research, Galemba uses the pressing issue of wage theft to offer a methodologically rigorous, community-engaged, and pedagogically innovative approach to the study of immigration, labor, inequality, and social justice.

Bio: Rebecca Galemba graduated from the Brown Anthropology PhD program as a PSTC trainee/affiliate in 2009. She is currently an Associate Professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver (DU) and Co-Director of the DU Center for Immigration Policy & Research. Her first book, Contraband Corridor: Making a Living at the Mexico-Guatemala Border (Stanford Press 2018), detailed the livelihood strategies of border residents and petty smugglers in the context of increasing border securitization and regional trade integration. Her recent book, Laboring for Justice: The Fight Against Wage Theft in an American City (Stanford Press 2023) examines the experiences of immigrant day laborers with wage theft and how workers, community organizations, students, and advocates are working to improve immigrant worker justice in Colorado. For the DU Just Wages Project—the larger collaborative project behind the book—Galemba received the 2022 Setha M. Low Award for Engaged Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association and the 2023 Kate Browne Creativity in Research Award from the Society for Economic Anthropology.