The Industrial-Organizational Psychologist 25 The Marginalized Workforce: How I-O Psychology Can Make a Difference

Many individuals, including immigrants, young employees, and contingent workers, often experience some form of exclusion from the organizations and the societies in which they work. These workers have also largely escaped the notice of industrial-organizational (I-O) psychologists. For example, of the 83 articles appearing in a leading journal in our field in 2007, only three studied employees who were not white collar. We are not doing enough currently to understand the work lives of marginalized workers, to integrate these individu-als into our research and theory, or to reach them in practice. In this article, we hope to begin a dialogue within our discipline about how we may better appre-ciate the experiences of these workers, assist them with the challenges they face, and integrate attention to their work lives into what we do as I-O psychologists