The making of the ‘precarious’: examining Indian immigrant IT workers in Canada and their transnational networks with body shops in India

Abstract

Since the 1990s, temporary staffing agencies have been playing a key role in managing and supplying a ready pool of skilled workers to the global IT market. Yet, such agencies often regulate their workforce to maintain flexible, low-cost and accommodating workers. Due to continuing racial and gendered barriers, many immigrant Indian IT professionals living in Canada are increasingly depending on many such India-based staffing agencies (body shops) to get into IT employment globally. Such associations I argue are turning the workers into a self-regulated and precarious workforce subjected to severe regulations and flexible work patterns of the agencies.

Theorising decolonisation in the context of lifelong learning and transnational migration: anti-colonial and anti-racist perspectives

“…Branker (2017) and Pendakur (2005) noted negative labour market outcomes for Caribbean and Afghan immigrants in Canada. Maitra's previous paper (Maitra, 2015b) reported similar challenges faced by highly skilled South Asian immigrants in Canada. Despite being well qualified, many South Asian immigrants faced what can be described as the 'triple glass effect' while trying to translate their skills into appropriate opportunities in Canada.…”

“…The government plans to boost the immigration programme further, to reflect 13% increase in immigration by 2020. Even though skilled immigrants bring significant human capital resources to Canada, a number of studies demonstrate that highly educated immigrant professionals experience deskilling and devaluation of their prior learning and work experiences after immigrating to Canada (Branker, 2017;Mojab, 1999;Guo, 2009Guo, , 2015aGuo, , 2015bMaitra, 2013Maitra, , 2015aMaitra, , 2015b. In a Vancouver based study with immigrants from the People's Republic of China, scholars found that most recent Chinese immigrants came to Canada with post-secondary education (72.5%).…”

“…Within this deeply racialised and patriarchal framework, immigrant communities, especially women immigrants of colour are valued for their labour inputs but simultaneously devalued as potential citizen-subjects of the Canadian-nation state (Bannerji, 2003). Furthermore, racialisation remains central to the operation of a hierarchical skills regime with skin colour rather than qualifications as its basis for discrimination (Guo, 2015b;Maitra, 2015aMaitra, , 2015b. It is the 'colour' of the skill associated with immigrants' skin colour rather than the skill itself which causes the deskilling and devaluation (Guo, 2015b).…”

“…Racialised immigrants, brought into the settler nation, despite being highly educated, face increased barriers to their labour market integration. Such barriers typically include lack of opportunities for learning as well as devaluation and denigration of their prior learning and credentialism leading to their unemployment and underemployment, and downward social mobility (Guo, 2009Maitra, 2015aMaitra, , 2015b. To put into colonial contexts, particular representations of the 'native other' are naturalised, their knowledge delegitimised and thereby considered deficient and inferior (Giroux, 1997;Memmi, 2000).…”

Revisioning curriculum in the age of transnational mobility: Towards a transnational and transcultural framework

“…Culture has thus been considered as unitary, static, and territorialized, "reproducing the image of the social world divided into bounded, culturally specific units, typical of nationalist thinking" (Wimmer & Schiller, 2002, p. 305). These forms of imagining national cultures as bounded categories have in turn reified certain dominant power relations and hierarchies of race or ethnicity as natural corollaries of national cultures rather than as historical effects of inequality and often violence (Maitra, 2015).…”