The UCLA Asian American Studies Center, Los Angeles, announced December 20 the publication of the new issue of AAPI Nexus: Asian Americans & Pacific Islanders, Policy, Practice and Community (3:2, 2005). Scholars, researchers, practitioners, and government officials within this volume examine racial discrimination in employment against Asian Americans, workers' rights, and economic parity in the global labor market.
Guest Editor, Deborah Woo, and Senior Editor, Paul Ong, aim for this issue (the first of two) on AAPI work and employment to "produce the knowledge that will help generate new policies and practices to better serve the cause of greater workforce equity and social justice."
Karin Mak, a New Voices Fellow at Sweatshop Watch, and Grace Meng, a former Liman Fellow at the Asian Law Caucus and current law practitioner focuses on immigration law in New York, in their practitioner's essay, outline some ideas for improving programs that focus on workplace development. They propose renovations that are geared specifically toward immigrants. In particular, Mak and Meng are concerned about Chinese garment workers in California who are displaced by the global policy of lifting quotas on garment imports. Other articles deal directly with employment discrimination against Asian Americans and Asian immigrants and propose various ways to aid them. The second practitioner's essay by Stuart J. Ishimaru, chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, searches for reasons why Asian Americans file comparatively fewer employment discrimination charges than do other minority groups and calls for more research that would explore the sociological factors in Asian Americans' perceptions and experiences of discrimination.
Don Mar, Professor of Economics at San Francisco State University, questions whether AAPIs have achieved economic parity with non-Hispanic whites in the labor market, by analyzing information about labor market participation, employment in management positions, self-employment, earnings and gender differences.
Julian Chun-chung Chow, Associate Professor in the School of Social Welfare at UC Berkeley, Kathy Lemonosterling, MSW, a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Social Welfare at UC Berkeley, and Qingwen Xu, Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Social Work at Boston College, argue that for Asian immigrants and refugees, there is a problematic mismatch, in terms of employment skills, between their country of origin and the U.S., in terms of welfare-to-work programs. The authors call for the renovation of such programs with special consideration of the API population's needs.