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Foreign workers holding H‐1B visas gained recourse to federal employment rights under the Immigration & Nationality Act (INA) for the very first time when Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1990 (IMMACT90). This paper examines H‐1B employment rights enforcement under the INA as it has intersected with broader features of the American legal system: what political scientists call judicial retrenchment and the quasi‐judicial state. I first show how H‐1B rights, already limited by the domestic politics that shaped the IMMACT, became subject to judicial retrenchment when the federal courts confined H‐1B disputes under the INA to the quasi‐judicial state at the Department of Labor (DOL). I then use published data on DOL investigation outcomes, published and unpublished administrative case records, and judicial cases reviewing agency action to examine the extent to which and how H‐1B workers can use the quasi‐judicial state to solve workplace problems. My empirical findings contribute to a new understanding of the relationship between rights retrenchment, the judiciary, and the rise of alternatives to court in immigration and employment law and point to possible fine‐grained changes for future immigration reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coerced work on parole occurs when people are required to work under the threat of criminal legal repercussions. In the face of barriers to "good" work for people after prison, coercion helps to funnel parolees into positions at the bottom of the labor market. Parolee workers in these positions experience issues common to precarious, low‐wage work (low pay, hazardous working conditions, and labor law violations), as well as heightened vulnerability to predatory employers and exposure to parole‐prohibited activities. Because of the threat‐backed requirements to work, however, parolees must choose to either accept this "bad" work or face potential sanctions. Using mixed‐methods, including a novel form of respondent‐driven sampling I call "Hybrid‐RDS," this article documents the prevalence of coerced work for people on parole in Los Angeles County, identifies the mechanisms through which coercive work operates, and illustrates the problematic employment conditions of coerced work after prison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines legal segmentation in five Latin American countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Uruguay) by drawing on the employment regulation typology developed by Dingeldey et al. (2022), based on three functions – standard‐setting, privileging and equalizing. The author distinguishes between three factors of inequality and precarity: lack of coverage (namely of self‐employed workers), discrimination and the circumvention of standards. Lack of enforcement, together with an unfavourable economic environment, results in informality. The analysis identifies different forms and levels of protection under standard and non‐standard employment, as well as compensatory rules and other regulations seeking to eliminate inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]