Power Through Problem Solving: Latino Immigrants and the Inconsistencies of Economic Restructuring

Abstract

Employment restructuring is a transformative process that brings about significant changes in how work is organised and experienced. Scholars who study restructuring in industries that employ large numbers of immigrant workers, including construction, food processing, or janitorial services, often point to the undermining effects of this transformation on industry wage standards, working conditions, and training supports. But often missing from these accounts is a recognition that restructuring is uneven and incomplete at best and often produces shortcomings and limitations that continue to frustrate and perplex immigrant and native-born workers alike. Drawing on a multi-year study of construction workers in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, we find Latino immigrants are far from passive inheritors of the problems of restructuring that they and others encounter during their daily work. Rather, they respond to these challenges with innovative and lasting solutions, developing new work structures and routines that support industry skill development, knowledge sharing, and quality standards. Equally important, their native-born supervisors and co-workers have learned to value these solutions and ultimately have stepped in as influential allies, helping immigrant workers leverage these contributions to secure improved working conditions and higher compensation levels. These exchanges have tethered immigrant and non-immigrant workers together and in ways that challenge standard narratives of native dominance and immigrant exploitation. The result is intensified interdependency and ultimately the creation of an enduring relational resource for promoting worker rights and also for guiding further immigrant advocacy.

Regulating informality: Worker centers and collective action in day‐labor markets

“… Lowe and Iskander (, p. 2) question the type of transformation narrative presented here, focusing instead on the unevenness of workforce‐system change within the US construction sector: “employment restructuring is less a wholesale replacement of one set of practices (and people) with another. Rather, it unfolds unevenly as a work in progress—one that is shaped and even contested by the various industry actors … that encounter and enact restructuring in their daily work life.” This point is well taken.…”

Paid domestic work, globalization, and informality

“…Informality in domestic work is therefore built on different premises than informality in the business world, in which profit maximizing provides the main basis for labor relations. So instead of approaching the analysis from the outside looking in (i.e., how households applied or bypassed legal labor norms), we look inside out focusing on the microstructures of control and cooperation shaping employer–domestic employee everyday interactions (re)producing informality (Lowe & Iskander, this issue). To do so, we use an economic‐sociological lens.…”

Room for Manoeuvre: Rethinking the Intersections Between Migration and the Informal Economy in Post‐Industrial Economies

“…Recent research has shown how migrants employed in the informal economy in the global north have sought to develop informal strategies of labour market and workplace regulation that create work structures and routines that effectively support skill development, knowledge sharing, and the promotion of quality work standards in sectors of the labour market where informalisation is high (Martin, ; Visser & Cordero‐Guzman, ; Melendez et al , , ). As Lowe and Iskander () and Guarnizo () show in their contributions, such strategies have the capacity to shape pathways migrant workers utilise to experience economic mobility and challenge workplace standards that counter the dominant perspective that informalisation serves as a mechanism for employers to exert greater control and discipline over migrant workers. Such strategies can, at times, tether migrant workers and employers together in ways that create a form of interdependency and internal mechanisms that have the potential to improve worker rights and mobility (for both migrant and “native” born workers) in the informal economy.…”

“…Scott () articulates how the use of informal employment practices by employers in low‐wage sectors of the labour market contributes to the embedding of migrants in informal employment, but this process is driven by demand‐side factors that are shaped by capital interests in the context of the specific developmental ethos of the nation state. Lowe and Iskander () identify and analyse informal strategies by workers and employers in the construction industry that depart from institutionally prescribed and sanctioned mechanisms. They show how these informal practices help promote occupational mobility for migrants within the informal economy, while countering the dominant perception of the relationship between migrant workers and employers as one of exploitation and marginalisation.…”

“…One example as Visser (a) explores is the rescaling of policymaking that has been generated through policy activity by subnational levels of government with the intent to influence—positively or negatively—rights and opportunities afforded to migrants. Another example, as illustrated by Lowe and Iskander () are attempts by migrant workers to create informal skill training opportunities in semi‐formal jobs. We distinguish these in turn from room for manoeuvre that come from social processes that lie outside the formal labour market and state.…”