(WPO1b) Work and Inequalities

This session explores issues of inequality in occupations and professions within North America and globally. Tags: Equality and Inequality, Work And Professions

Organizers: Vivian Shalla, University of Guelph, Tracey Adams, University of Western Ontario, Karen Hughes, University of Alberta; Chair: Vivian Shalla, University of Guelph

Presentations

Zainab Olayinka, University of Saskatchewan

The Labour Market Experiences of African Immigrants in Canada Through an Intersectional Lens

Despite being highly skilled and educated, African immigrants in Canada face notable challenges in securing fulfilling employment, as opposed to easily obtaining “survival jobs”. While conventional human capital theory attributes these differences in labor market outcomes to variations in education, training, and experience, sociological research suggests that factors such as race, gender, class, and ethnicity play a significant role. This study aims to explore the complex interplay of social identities shaping the employment experiences of African immigrants and investigate the individual strategies employed by both men and women to integrate into the labor market. Through a qualitative approach involving 31 in-depth interviews with African immigrants in Saskatoon, the research addresses the following questions: What are the lived experiences of African immigrants in the Canadian labor market, and in what ways are their experiences influenced by intersecting social locations? What strategies and negotiations do African immigrants engage in to facilitate their labour market integration? In the preliminary findings, it is evident that the labor market experiences of African immigrants are intricately influenced by a confluence of factors. An exclusive examination of singular aspects such as race, gender, ethnicity, or religion cannot fully describe these experiences. The nuanced impacts of these identities vary over time and space. Notably, within specific professions, the intersection of race and gender emerges as a facilitator for labor market integration. In comparison with women, the experiences of men appear to be less complex. However, even within this observation, variations emerge as certain factors, such as family structure, age of children, and adherence to religious practices, introduce additional layers of intricacy, with Black African married women with younger children and those wearing the hijab facing notable challenges.

Dana Sawchuk, Wilfrid Laurier University

Neoliberal no more? Understandings of job loss among older white-collar workers

The research presented is part of a larger project that investigates how job loss is interpreted by a group of white-collar workers, specifically those age 50 or older who became unemployed between 2007 and 2014. The study is situated against the backdrop of the 2008 Great Recession in the U.S., its long-term jobless recovery, and larger cultural ideas about individuals taking responsibility for themselves in the face of structural adversity. The data were collected from 62 in-depth, qualitative interviews conducted in 2013 and 2014 with workers residing within the greater metro region of Minneapolis/St. Paul. We used a life course theoretical framework that emphasizes how individuals’ age and life stage intersected with their experiences and understandings of America’s neoliberal culture. As such, we explored the implications of a momentous shift our interviewees experienced: when they entered the labour force in the post-war period, there was an unspoken contract between employer and employee such that loyal white-collar (and White) workers could reasonably expect financial security and career stability, often with a single, life-long employer. By contrast, when they were dismissed or downsized, they found themselves in the era of routine job losses, the “flexible worker,” and counsel for job seekers to operate as a “company of one” (Lane 2011). Within this context, we explored interviewees’ generational identities, reluctance to relocate to seek new employment, and positive reframing of seemingly devastating job losses. We discovered that while they sometimes recognized and resisted neoliberalism as a pervasive force that led to their unemployment, they often narrated their experiences in the neoliberal language of blessings, opportunities, and individual effort. The proposed paper is grounded in these findings but concentrates specifically on the follow-up research we conducted in 2023, which consisted of a survey that was completed by 25 of the original interviewees and interviews with six of these survey respondents. We briefly review their employment status and significant life events in the decade since their last interviews. Next, we turn to the qualitative data to explore the degree these workers (now in their 60s and 70s) continue to interpret their employment transitions and trajectories with a neoliberal lens. Certainly, some of the interviewees continued expressing disdain for or perceived conflict with the younger generation that permeated their earlier interviews, a division that serves to reinforce neoliberalism’s divide-and-conquer ethos. Others, however, expressed satisfaction with intergenerational workplace collaboration and provided advice for younger workers based on a clear-eyed assessment of the shortcomings of neoliberalism and the elites benefiting from them. While some survey respondents and interviewees did eventually relocate for employment opportunities, the vast majority continued to age in place. They thereby resisted one component of the neoliberal flexibility imperative that cultivates untethered workers ready to move anywhere despite significant material and emotional costs. Finally, interviewees continued to espouse a bright-sided optimism about their job losses. While such attitudes appear to encapsulate the positivity rhetoric of the neoliberal era, we argue that the post-material values that some interviewees also express deserve consideration. In tandem with other findings from our follow-up study, we conclude that an alternate reading of our respondents’ positions is possible. Rather than subsuming interviewees’ comments under a neoliberal narrative yet again, we emphasize the hope that springs from their recognition of our common insecurity (Taylor 2023) and their resistance to the economic priorities that undermine our well-being. As such, we assert that the experiences, hard-earned lessons, and wisdom of the elders we interviewed deserve attention in the move to build an alternate future.

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Non-presenting author: Annette Nierobisz, Carleton College

Joddi Alden, York University

Capitalism's Race: An Intersectional Examination of Gendered Commodification and Work in the Asia-Pacific

This paper examines gendered and racialized processes in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region deeply embedded within global capitalist systems that are particularly reliant on the commodification of women’s bodies via their work in two key industries: the fashion as well as the domestic worker industries. I argue that women’s bodies, and the social reproduction that they perform, are commodities that are critical in shoring up capitalism and its effects, both regionally and globally. It is important to pay attention not only to the macropolitics of large systems, but also to the micropolitics of specific regions in order to understand the nuances of how systems work; the lives of women are connected and interdependent, though they are not the same. Thus, by examining women’s lives in both the fashion as well as the domestic work industries, this paper will seek to identify the intersectional ways that women’s lives are all interconnected by the exploitative processes of capitalism. By doing this, we can create solidarity across our differences in order to conceive of a common struggle that seeks to destabilize the most exploitative effects of the global economy. I divide my argument into three main sections which trace the steps of commodification for women in both the domestic work and fashion industry through the concepts of capitalist conditions, exchange value, and social reproduction. Then, I briefly examine resistance techniques that stem from such practices. Finally, I discuss the implications of commodification and what this means for working women worldwide. I frame my argument by referring to several key researchers in the fields of capitalism, migration, and gender. In particular, Marx’s (1976) theories on capitalism, exchange value, commodification, and the extraction of surplus value from labourers will constitute a critical theoretical lens by which I will examine the fashion and domestic work industries in the Asia-Pacific region. Additionally, Glenn’s (2008, 1992) scholarship on gender, race, and domestic workers also features prominently in my research and will relate the ways that capitalism exploits these categories in order to produce ‘ideal’ labourers. Finally, writings by Constable (2007) as well as Parrenas (2015) on domestic work in Southeast Asia will help to show the ways that women’s working bodies are commodified in the service of capitalism. While I note that the cases I discuss in this essay are not exhaustive, they indicate broader patterns which provide insight into the global nature of capitalism and how imperialist activities are subsumed within the foundation of gendered and raced inequalities. Conclusively, intersectional processes of gender and race serve to commodify women who work in the fashion and domestic work industries in the Asia-Pacific (APAC). Through such commodification, the social reproduction and the consumption required by global capitalism is able to take place, effectively demonstrating how such processes flourish due to inequalities within society. While seemingly only a regional phenomenon, these systems within APAC are deeply interconnected to the health of capitalism in other markets across the globe. The global implications of regional processes thereby suggest how examining women who work in specific regions is critical to formulating methods of resistance to capitalist exploitation. By examining the regional similarities between women’s realities as workers and the ways that global capitalism is shored up by their activities, there is potential to destabilize oppressive practices at their root. Strategic, intersectional coalitions between women to support each other across work and its industries may help to shift the ways that women are commodified and controlled. While this is not a way to completely fracture global capitalism or lead to its demise, remembering that women’s lives are intimately interconnected across time and space can help lead to better organization, support, and activities of solidarity which can cut across the power relations that seek to endlessly exploit.

Man Xu, University of Toronto

Relational work and employee agency in informal work: Hui interpreters in China's informal trade brokerage economy

This research examines the exercise of agency by Hui Muslims who work as interpreters and brokers within China’s informal transnational trade economy. The extant literature on interactive service jobs has largely conceptualized the labor process in marketized and contractual terms, focusing mainly on how organizational rules and institutional process shape the labor process and employee’s agency. This perspective falls short in explaining the dynamics of power within informal work, where employers, workers and customers form interpersonal relationships and accomplish economic activities based on norms of trust and reciprocity. This chapter addresses this gap by investigating how interpersonal dynamics and moral codes influence work relationships and workers responses to inequalities in the informal trade sector. It examines three questions: how do interpreters negotiate the meaning and boundary of service relationships to navigate or improve their work conditions? How does an individual’s social location, such as ethno-religious identity and gender shape this negotiation? What do interpreters’ labor practices reveal about the production of social inequalities in informal work? Drawing on the theory of relational work, I argue that when labor relations are framed in terms of relational package, service workers’ interpretation of the meaning and boundaries of their relationships with other actors in the service encounters shape their response to unequal balance of power at work. The paper also reveals that individual’s labor strategies are motivated by various goals other than material interests, such as maintaining moral integrity and sustaining social relationships and status. The relational work in the labor process has complex implications for the producing of inequalities through informal work. On the one hand, the development of reciprocal ties between workers and other actors in the service encounters conceals exploitative and unequal power dynamics at work, by framing labor practices as gift giving or skill accumulation. On the other hand, the blurring of boundaries between work and personal ties creates intrinsic rewards for workers. Moreover, in informal work, social and moral codes of mutuality, reciprocity, respect and care become symbolic resources for workers to exert a degree of normative control over other economic actors in the service relationship. However, utilizing social ties to improve labor practices also serves to reproduce existing structures of inequality and entail subjective costs for the worker. Informal workers often rely on social networks and connections rather than formal regulations and benefits as their social safety net. The interpreters in this research strategically increased incomes and advanced their labor market positions through informal transactions that were disguised as gift-giving. While this relational work signifies the agency of workers to manage conditions of precarity, it also contributes to the perpetuation of precarious labor arrangement. Additionally, relational work involves psychological costs for the actors. Workers may experience self-estrangement or moral distress when their moral belief and social roles clash with interest-drive labor strategies. Taken together, the paper contributes to the theorization of worker agency in service jobs, by highlighting relational work as a crucial yet underexamined dimension of workers’ negotiation of power in the labor process. The relational perspective is valuable for understanding contemporary labor processes, which have become increasingly casualized and contingent around the globe.