Professor Ruben Garcia Argues Minimum Wage Is a Tool for Fighting Structural Racism in New Book
Professor Ruben J. Garcia, Ralph Denton Professor of Law and Director, Workplace Law Program, recently published Critical Wage Theory - Why Wage Justice is Racial Justice. Published by the University of California Press, Professor Garcia states his new book is at the confluence of his interest in critical race theory and labor and employment law. “I felt as if those two worlds for me never met in the middle or were in conversation with one another. With my background in each, I wanted to see how both were relevant today in the real world.”
Professor Garcia hopes the first takeaway that people have from his work is that there is a significant intersection between the people who are suffering from wage theft and their racial, immigrant, and ethnic backgrounds. “The data bears this theory, and so, we have again the low-wage workers that do the hardest, less-safe, lowest-paid jobs,” he says. “The message of the book is that in terms of public policy, we need to care about how the laws can be improved for the lowest wage workers and to provide more racial and wage justice.”
His passion for this area of expertise began when he was in law school: “I was very fortunate to study with some of the great critical race theorists—Kimberlé Crenshaw, Laura Gómez, Cheryl Harris,” Professor Garcia shares. “Afterwards, I was a labor law attorney, and these are strong parts of my identity as a scholar, practitioner, and teacher. My work as a lawyer in Southern California showed me these things happening in real-time; my background and what I see in the world is why I wrote the book.”
Professor Garcia says that traditionally critical race theory has been applied to intersections of discrimination law, and that with his work, he tried to bring it to other types of labor and employment law. He shares that a journal at the University of Minnesota Law School hopes to host a symposium on themes in the book and real-world applications in the spring. “This may be the first book to try to theorize about the connections between CRT and living wage struggles, but this has been going on for a long time. These struggles have a long history in racial justice terms, and I’m describing what’s happening and supporting economic struggles as far as racial justice is concerned.”