Abstract
In the past few decades, scholarship on immigrant workers has produced two contrasting images that remain theoretically unresolved. In the 1970s and 1980s, low-wage immigrant workers were viewed as target earners whose attachment to jobs in the US was seen as temporary. By contrast, recent scholarship has depicted immigrant workers as a potent social force whose quest for dignity and full societal membership is seen as having galvanized a moribund labour movement. This study draws from the lived experience of low-wage immigrant workers to examine how they relate to their socio-economic circumstances, and what, if anything, motivates their resistance to the status quo. Analysing interview data from immigrant workers in janitorial and nursing assistant occupations in the US, I delineate how workers construct dignity by reframing the meaning of work, transferring aspirations for social mobility to their children, and resisting stereotypes of immigrant workers to generate dignified collective identities. I conclude with a discussion that aims to shed light on the contrasting and contentious views of immigrant workers and their position in the American labour movement.
Keywords
As of 2013, immigrants comprised approximately 41.3 million, or 13%, of the US population, and approximately a quarter of all employed immigrants were in service occupations (Migration Policy Institute, 2015). In 2010, 47.6% of immigrants and their children in the US were living in or near poverty compared to 31.1% of the native population (Center for Immigration Studies, 2015). The persistence of poverty among low-wage immigrant workers and their children (Haller et al., 2011) and recent efforts on the part of unions and civic organizations to draw on immigrant grievances in mobilizing against economic inequality (Bronfenbrenner and Warren, 2007; Fine, 2005; Martin, 2008; Milkman, 2006) prompt a renewed examination of immigrant workers’ own understandings of their economic and social circumstances. In the past few decades, scholarship on immigrant workers has produced two contrasting images that remain theoretically unresolved. In the 1970s and 1980s low-wage immigrant workers were viewed as target earners whose attachment to jobs in the US was seen as temporary. The intention to sojourn was seen as the reason why immigrant workers willingly endured working conditions that the average ‘American’ would find unacceptable, and why their attitudes towards American institutions that could lift them out of such conditions, such as unions and schools, were necessarily instrumental (Gans, 1962; Piore, 1979). By contrast, recent scholarship has depicted immigrant workers as a potent social force whose quest for dignity and full societal membership is seen as having galvanized a moribund labour movement in the US (Fine, 2006; Milkman, 2006) and in Europe (Holgate et al., 2012; Perrett et al., 2012). Citing the importance of social identity groups such as immigrants, Piore and Safford (2006) went so far as to propose that the employment relations framework in the US had shifted from one based on collective bargaining to one drawing on identity-based individual rights. In light of the contrasting scholarly understandings of immigrant workers and their dispositions, this study draws from the lived experience of low-wage immigrant workers to examine how they relate to their socio-economic circumstances, and what, if anything, motivates their resistance to the status quo. Theoretically, I draw from recent developments in the dignity-of-work literature to understand how immigrant workers use moral reasoning to construct dignity out of their menial work and reframe their collective identity.
In the next section, I review the sharply divergent views of immigrant workers in the scholarly literature and introduce moral reasoning as an alternative framework in which to understand immigrant workers’ dispositions towards work and collective action. I then report findings from fieldwork. Analysing interview data from immigrant workers in janitorial and nursing assistant occupations in the US, I delineate how workers construct dignity by reframing the meaning of work, transferring aspirations for social mobility to their children, and resisting stereotypes of immigrant workers to generate dignified collective identities. I conclude with a discussion that aims to shed light on the contrasting and contentious views of immigrant workers and their position in the American labour movement. In addition, theoretical insights on moral reasoning are offered that go beyond the personal realm of ethics and morality.
Contrasting scholarly views of low-wage immigrant workers
Low-wage or ‘low-skilled’ immigration has been explained variously in terms of wage differentials (Borjas et al., 1992; Harris and Todaro, 1970), social networks (Massey, 1990), family responses to economic and social risk (Stark, 1984), and dependent development (Portes and Walton, 1981). Most scholars today agree that immigration transforms labour markets and societies in both sending and receiving communities through self-reinforcing mechanisms that result in ‘cumulative causation’, that is, initial migration causes successive waves of migration, changing the conditions in both home and host countries (Massey et al., 1993). In his seminal work on the subject, Piore (1979) found immigrant workers to be target earners, primarily because their aspirations were to return home once they had saved enough to realize goals that were defined within the social context of their home countries, such as buying a house or starting a business. This thesis on the motivation of immigrant workers was pivotal in explaining how they endured conditions that the average non-migrant worker considered beneath one’s dignity to perform. Because work was only an economic necessity, migrant workers were able to separate their identities from it (Piore, 1979: 52–57). It was therefore assumed that first-generation immigrants were rarely candidates for mobilization in the labour movement – in fact, immigrant workers were favoured by employers as strike breakers (Olzak, 1989). When inevitably some migrant workers could not return home and settled in the host country, scholars found that the communities they formed had value structures that privileged fulfilling family obligations and ties to the homeland over work, which was not a source of self-fulfilment (Gans, 1962; Piore, 1979: 59–65; Putnam, 2007). Owing to these particular values, social scientists argued that these communities remained separated from educational and workplace institutions in the host society designed to assist families in achieving social mobility (Gans, 1962; Piore, 1979). Piore (1979) emphasized that it was the children of immigrants who revolt against structural inequality and not the immigrants themselves.
The view of immigrant workers as target earners who view work and institutions such as unions only instrumentally seems incommensurate with the increasing interest among labour scholars in immigrant workers as the harbingers of new worker organizing (Adler et al., 2014; Milkman, 2006). Particularly in the US and UK, where market-based power building and the mobilization of public opinion have been dominant mechanisms for containing employer violations rather than the regulatory mechanisms available in more corporatist settings (Connolly et al., 2014), immigrant workers, including children of immigrants but primarily first-generation immigrants, have been credited as the drivers of social movement unionism (Milkman, 2006) and innovative community–union alliances (Fine, 2005). Together with other identity groups including women, gender and sexuality-based groups and racial minorities groups, and the disabled, immigrant workers are seen as providing the basis for a shift in the institutional foundations of employment relations from collective bargaining institutions to individual rights (Piore and Safford, 2006). How does one reconcile the view of immigrants as a collective force for social change with theories of immigrant workers as target earners? A starting point may be to broaden our conceptualization of collectivism to include collective identities and narratives based on the personal and social in addition to the traditionally class-based and workplace-based notions of collectivism (McBride and Martinez-Lucio, 2011). However, to date the literature on social movement unionism and community unionism has failed to address how personal experiences can be the basis of broader alternative political narratives (McBride and Martinez-Lucio, 2011; Yu, 2014). There is a need, then, to better understand how today’s immigrant workers relate to their work, how they cope with status downgrading, and under what conditions they may take action against the status quo. The literature reviewed thus far, however, has inserted immigrant workers into broad theoretical frameworks – what is missing is an examination that builds on the lived experience of immigrant workers and the process by which they construct meaning and dignity. The literature on moral reasoning and dignity of work provides a framework for such an endeavour.
Alternative theoretical framework: Moral reasoning in the construction of dignity
A growing line of work has argued that workers are proactive in constructing dignity at work through interactional, relational, and social processes (Hodson, 2001). Scholars have maintained, for example, that workers in stigmatized occupations cope by constructing positive identities for themselves (Dutton et al., 2010), by ideologically reframing societal views about their occupation, and by confronting and discounting negative views about their occupation (Ashforth and Kreiner, 1999; Ashforth et al., 2007). Sayer (2005a) defined dignity in terms of self-command and autonomy, as well as being empowered to flourish as human beings. At a basic level, dignity comes from being in control of oneself, and having the ability to shield oneself and one’s life from someone else’s command (Sayer, 2007: 568). Workers derive dignity from being self-reliant and free from dependence on welfare (Sennett and Cobb, 1973: 266), as well as from being regarded as trustworthy and competent in their job (Hodson, 2001; Lamont, 2000). Hodson (1996: 722) argued that workers foster strategies for dignity ‘in the face of work organizations that violate workers’ interests, limit their prerogatives, or otherwise undermine their autonomy’, which include carving out spaces for autonomy, gaining recognition from peers, and nurturing social relationships at the workplace (Hodson, 2001; Otis, 2008). The ‘dignity of work’ literature, then, provides a foundation for examining how immigrant workers may salvage self-worth despite performing low-wage and socially stigmatized work. However, much of the earlier literature on dignity at work did not directly address social disadvantage, which cannot be resolved through workplace-based strategies alone.
Recent efforts to understand reactions to stigma have broadened the scope of attention to include non-work references for identity and dignity (Lamont and Mizrachi, 2011). In her seminal work, Lamont (1992, 2000) drew attention to moral boundary drawing, where social groups distinguished themselves from others in terms of moral differences, claiming virtues for themselves that other groups did not possess. In particular, Lamont's (1992) interviews with working- class men revealed that they invoked self-reliance and self-discipline as moral codes that helped construct dignity, defining their self-worth in terms other than economic success against which they did not measure up favourably. Comparing reactions to stigma from groups around the world, Lamont and Mizrachi (2011: 368) point out that moral responses to stigma typically involve the formation of collective identities through realizations that one is stigmatized not because of one’s personal failings, but because of one’s membership in a social category. ‘Everyday morality’ (Lamont, 2000; Sayer, 2005a, 2005b) – practical and moral boundaries individuals draw to judge right from wrong – was used by members of stigmatized groups in constructing ongoing responses to stigma.
The ‘dignity’ literature has had difficulty, however, reconciling moral values drawn from low-status group membership with aspirations for social mobility. Sayer (2005b) argued that aspirations for social mobility can sometimes undermine the ‘moral advantage’ that members of the working class believe they possess. For example, Lehmann (2009) found that working-class university students believed they had moral advantage over other university students in the form of greater self-reliance, a stronger work ethic, and an appreciation of the opportunities that a university education provided, but they ultimately expected these advantages to facilitate social mobility. Hence, they lacked class consciousness. Scholars pointed out that many members of disadvantaged groups are conscious of historical discrimination, yet believe fundamentally in the American dream, thus exhibiting a dual consciousness (Welburn and Pittman, 2012). As the foregoing discussion about immigrant workers indicates, however, extending the notion of dual consciousness to immigrant workers is problematic. Studies mapping the educational, occupational, and geographic mobility of immigrants have shown that social mobility remains elusive, not only for first-generation immigrants but increasingly for children of immigrants (Haller et al., 2011; Mahler, 1995; Park, 1997; Portes and Zhou, 1993; Waldinger, 1996). This prompts a closer examination of the relationship between morality and collective consciousness among immigrant workers.
Method
Context: Low-wage immigrant workers in office cleaning and healthcare
Two groups of low-wage immigrant workers are studied here, the first group consisting of janitorial workers who cleaned office buildings, and the second group Haitian nursing assistants. All respondents were first-generation immigrants in the US. Office cleaning work consisted of vacuuming, emptying trash, dusting, cleaning toilets, and any other work required by the employer. Most janitorial workers worked in the evenings after office workers had vacated the buildings, and hence were ‘invisible’ to customers. A majority of them worked part-time in office cleaning and had other jobs during the day, such as restaurant work and domestic cleaning. Nursing assistants provide most of the direct care to patients – which includes bathing, feeding, and walking the patients – in long-term care facilities, such as nursing homes and rehabilitation centres (Wilson et al., 2002). Although they are held liable for the quality of care, nursing assistants do not control their job (Foner, 1994; Rodriquez, 2011). Many interviewees were fearful of becoming involved in medical accidents and being found liable. Physical injury, such as back pain from lifting and moving patients, was common. And despite the theoretical possibility of nursing assistant jobs leading to registered nursing jobs through career ladders (Fitzgerald, 2006), the social context in which immigrant nursing assistants worked, frequently heading single-income households and responsible for sending remittances back to the homeland, made career advancement elusive. Interviewees referred to their job as a ‘domestic job’ that consisted of ‘cleaning and feeding’ patients and handling their bodily fluids, which suggested they believed their work was socially tainted.
The socio-economic circumstances of immigrant workers were greatly impacted by their mode of immigration as well as residency status in the US. The vast majority of janitors interviewed were from Mexico and Central American countries, including El Salvador and Nicaragua. Most Mexican workers had crossed the border illegally under extremely dangerous conditions and remained undocumented for years. Many Central American workers also journeyed to Mexico and crossed the border to the US; upon arrival, those who were eligible applied for asylum. While asylum application visas allowed Central Americans to work in the US, they could not leave the US without losing eligibility; many thus remained separated from families they had left back home. Most Haitian nursing assistants had achieved citizenship or residency status through asylum, and a few had pending applications. Hourly wage levels of janitorial workers varied between $9 and $13 at the time of the study depending on geographic area and seniority; the average hourly wage of nursing assistants in Massachusetts, where interviews with migrant nursing assistants were based, was $11.33 (Massachusetts Health Care Task Force, 2002).
Janitorial workers in this study were unionized, ensuring relatively high pay compared to non-unionized janitors, as well as benefits such as annual and sick leave and health insurance. Nursing assistants in this study were interviewed during a nascent organizing campaign for unionization. Importantly, ideas and practices leading to collective action and unionization were available to both groups at the time of the study, making it possible for the author to examine attitudes towards and reflections on collective action.
Data and analysis
The data come from two separate studies carried out by the author. The first study interviewed 18 Haitian nursing assistants in the Greater Boston area during 2003–2004. The second study interviewed 37 janitorial workers who cleaned office buildings in four urban areas of the USA, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington DC, and Houston during 2006 as part of a six-month fieldwork project for a doctoral dissertation. Interviews lasted between 30 minutes and 2 hours and were centred on workers’ migration and work histories, and experiences at work and reflections thereof. They were carried out by the author in English in the case of nursing assistants and in Spanish in that of janitorial workers. Approximately two-thirds of the interviews were recorded and transcribed; handwritten notes were taken for the rest of the interviews due to situational requirements – such as background noise in a busy coffee shop – or by interviewee request. These notes were augmented by memory and transferred digitally within 24 hours. Interviews typically took place near respondents’ workplaces before or after work, or at workers’ residences. The author was introduced to the workers as a PhD student at the time studying immigrant workers’ perceptions and union organizing practices.
Despite the different national origins, occupations, and varying states of documented status in the US, I decided to pool data from the two groups as (i) initial analysis treating them separately did not render meaningful differences in understanding workers’ reactions; (ii) the meaning attached to work by both groups was similar in that workers felt work, whether in cleaning or in nursing assistantship, demeaned them because it was entry-level and represented a downgrade from their social status back home; and (iii) both groups worked in ‘ethnic niches’ characterized by a high concentration of co-ethnics in one occupation due to recruitment through social networks (Waldinger, 1996), and reported being ‘stuck’ in these niches which they initially viewed as temporary.
Data analysis followed an iterative process. Theoretical concepts from the foregoing discussion drawing on immigrant settlement processes (Piore, 1979; Putnam, 2007), dignity at work (Hodson, 2001), and moral reasoning (Lamont and Mizrachi, 2011) were used to code the interviews and combined with insights from the data generated through open coding (Miles and Huberman, 1994). Empirical insights subsequently helped refine the theoretical concepts as well as impart that dignity was gained over time through a process of moral reasoning. Hence, workers’ efforts to cope with low-status work were connected to reframing the value of work. Similarly, transferring aspirations for social mobility to children yet realizing that their children, too, were unlikely to benefit from institutional support were connected with reflections on structural inequality. The qualitative software NVivo was used to organize data and codes sequentially as well as hierarchically in relation to other codes to arrive at the three analytical sub-headings in which the empirical findings are presented later: reframing the value of work, reframing mobility, and reframing collective identity. Quotes from interviews are presented in the following sections with unique and random identifiers: J1–J37 for janitorial workers, NA1–NA18 for nursing assistants.
Immigrant experiences of undignified work
Although the workers studied here appeared to willingly perform jobs non-immigrants were unlikely to accept, they remained deeply ambivalent about their work as it represented social downgrading. The shame immigrant workers expressed and the constant reflection on whether the decision to immigrate was ‘worth it’ belied theoretical depictions of immigrant workers as ‘target earners’. Immigrant workers reported being taken back by the unreasonable times, speed, and physical force that their jobs required, poor remuneration, and ill treatment from employers. For example, janitors suffered long-term health effects of night-time work. As one worker recounted, ‘Just to work when there’s sunlight is important for me. You know, one doesn’t really live when one works at night’ (J4). Janitors also protested about ‘speed ups’ where they were required to clean increasingly larger areas within the time limit and were threatened with job loss if they failed to deliver: ‘There’s practically no time to do anything, even to get a sip of water. At work they tell us if you’re not capable, well, there’s others who want to work’ (J29). Nursing assistants, on the other hand, suffered from back and leg pains from lifting patients. They also feared for their own health and safety as they felt exposed to patients’ illnesses and unknown diseases.
Wages, weighted in terms of the social costs of separation from loved ones, did not measure up to expectations: What did surprise me was that the pay here was not as I expected. I thought it would be more. What I am never going to get used to is being far away from my family, because I’d always been close to them, my parents. (J30)
Lack of progression on the job and management’s unwillingness to recognize tenure and seniority were experienced as a challenge to self-worth. Middle-class Haitian Americans, in particular, expressed deep shame, associating their work with that of ‘domestics’. As one respondent stated starkly, ‘This is a domestic job. You keep cleaning people, feeding people. Hey, there is no future, there is no career in there’ (NA6). I came across the secrecy with which Haitian nursing assistants treated their occupation through interviews with community leaders who explained why their community members found it difficult to talk openly about what they do. As a clergyman at a Haitian church elaborated, ‘Quite a few of them have had better jobs back in Haiti, and some of them will tell you they are nurses. Until you know they are CNAs [Certified Nursing Assistants]’. Coping with the challenges of undignified work involved several moral reasoning processes which are presented next.
Reframing the value of work
One way in which immigrant workers coped with aggravated conditions at work was by reframing the meaning of work. Instead of discussing work in terms of its objective conditions, they talked about the meaning of work for themselves and for their families in the context of broader risks they had taken on while emigrating. Hence work was assessed in terms of social benefits rather than monetary gain. Careers and occupations were not seen as individual choices but as by-products of structural conditions that compelled them to leave bleak and sometimes dangerous realities in their countries of origin. For someone who is poor and who doesn’t have a career because their parents also couldn’t give them a career. You can’t have a well paid job. That is what makes one separate [from the family], make the decision to go far away. (J9)
Co-ethnic networks facilitating the recruitment process acted as an additional impediment to exercising one’s own preferences. As one worker remarked, ‘The easiest job to find was the cleaning job because there already were our people who had these jobs’ (J19). In light of even less remunerative jobs where employment was casual and no benefits were paid, the current work was seen as ‘a job that would allow me to be treated as a person’ (J31), in the words of a janitorial worker. ‘This was a stable job if nothing else’ (J16). As a mother of two from El Salvador who was sending money to her children back in her home country stated, ‘If I had not come here, my kids would not have been able to get an education’ (J9). Challenges on the job were assessed in light of past experiences in countries of origin, rendering both positive and negative evaluations. Social backgrounds and previous work experiences became reference points that helped workers make sense of their current work situation. Anticipatory socialization also primed migrants’ expectations of jobs in the US: Before I came here, they told me about the system over here – I started getting used to it, a little bit. They told me when you come here, do not expect a decent job, like working in an office. It’s not like that over here. (NA15)
Some workers cited ‘no difficulty’ with their current job, mentioning that they had grown up farming, driving tractors, and also had had diverse city jobs such as working in night clubs. On the other hand, workers who experienced significant status downgrading had difficulty reconciling reality, as evidenced by their use of the present tense in describing the occupations they had left behind: ‘I am a doctor in my country, so for me the change has been very difficult’ (emphasis added; J31).
Many sought to build on and develop carers’ identities based on their roles as parents, guardians, and providers, which emphasized the morality of responsibility for loved ones and proved more conducive to feelings of self-worth. One single mother drew her pride from being able to provide for her four children, something she felt many two-parent households failed to do: I feel very honored and proud of what I have been able to do here. I have provided for my four kids, given them breast, food and health care thanks to what the union has been able to do. This is more than sometimes what two parents have been able to do. (J1)
The value of work, immigrants said, derived from the fact that it provided stability and safety for their families. Many immigrants had risked physical danger and considered economic success a luxury next to safety and peace of mind: ‘I’ve always said that poverty isn’t money, poverty is spiritual. It wouldn’t do much to have money if my children were in trouble’ (J15). A typical statement about what they had achieved emphasized stability over economic success: ‘I haven’t obtained economic success but I’ve obtained peace and stability. The majority of us maintain the status quo; there are few who can surge ahead’ (J16). Workers also tried to find meaning in helping others: ‘This is a good vocation, you know, helping people’ (NA12). But accepting stability in lieu of more tangible success occurred only over time and required reminding themselves of the ethics of ‘honest’ work. Workers resisted the social stigma attached to their occupations by reminding themselves they were working for their families. By recasting their views about the ‘ethical’ nature of work, workers changed their self-image – in one worker’s words, from ‘inferior’ to ‘normal’: I felt bad. I came from working in a place where I had my own office, with a secretary and then going to being a regular janitor. There were three months that I couldn’t stand it. I wanted to go back but I had my daughter here, my wife here. And at the end of the day, I thought well, this is a job with dignity, an honest job. Why should I be ashamed if this is an honest job. So, analyzing I said no, this is an ethical question. […] And I thought why do I feel inferior? Something that I am doing to earn my health insurance. This serves me to maintain my family. I also don’t have to feel superior or inferior. I need to be how I am, normal, how I am. (J7)
Workers based their sense of achievement on small victories in self-development, such as overcoming personal difficulties and attaining respect. For example, workers couched productive work as an opportunity for self-realization, given that many were unemployed in their countries of origin. Some said the harsh reality of adjusting to life in the US had helped cure an addiction. Hardships were framed as ‘experiences’, as in ‘I have gained a lot of experience and I do not regret to work as a janitor’ (J7). Many unionized janitors found self-validation through union work. Having a unionized job vindicated the workers in the face of constant threats from employers to fire or deport them, and elevated the job in their eyes. The union induced learning, built leadership, and enabled a community of workers with ‘human warmth’, in the words of a janitor. Many janitors sacrificed personal time and energy to participate in protests, attend meetings, and help train other members. Self-development, however, was often sacrificed for family, and some workers confided being conflicted about this trade-off. A janitor in his 30s who indicated that his relationship with his job has ‘always been a struggle’ explained that ‘if it wasn’t for them [family], I would have gone on to study more while young’ (J4).
Reframing mobility
The elusiveness of achieving social mobility, whether this was conceived as returning to one’s home country or staying in the US, became painfully apparent to workers over time. Many workers paradoxically described the ‘American dream’ as earning enough money in the US to return to their countries of origin and buy property or set up a business, just as Piore (1979) exposited. However, each year spent working in low-wage jobs in the US set them farther apart from their dream and they subsequently sought to reorient their aspirations. The following quote is typical of many interviewees’ narratives describing a process of settling and satisficing once they realized the ‘dream’ was out of reach: I was three years in university and I stopped because of the economic condition in the country and because I was a single mom. My parents were poor. I went to work as waitress for about 5 years in a restaurant before coming here to realize the American dream. I thought I’d earn some money to buy a house in El Salvador and some more to start a business and continue to study. But when I came here I did a full time during the day in a restaurant, working 12 hours and then a part-time [job] in the evening. Sometimes I’d work 16 hours a day. […] The dream was to go back. In six years I married and stopped being undocumented since my husband was a citizen. Later I too became citizen. (emphasis added; J32)
Many respondents described themselves as being in limbo as low earnings delayed returning to home countries and/or sponsoring their children to join them in the US. If not a physical impossibility, returning became an impossibility in their minds from being unable to fulfil the economic goals they had set for themselves: ‘I can’t buy a house since my wages are too low. […] If I can’t buy a house here I’d rather go back to [home town] but if I remain a janitor I can’t do that, how would I go back’ (J4). Respondents in this study had, moreover, paid exorbitant fees to brokers who helped them cross borders, and many were still in debt: ‘We have nothing, everything is against us, just like when we started, even worse, because at least when we started we didn’t have great debts, and now, one has invested in establishing oneself here’ (J6).
Settlement, and achieving citizenship as in the case of the preceding respondent, focused immigrants’ attention on what they could realistically achieve in America. Dreams, then, were reduced to ‘getting one’s share’: My way of thinking has changed now since I have economic stability and stability of papers. […] I don’t have the American dream but yes, I stayed. And I had wanted to go back and have a business and buy a house and continue studying. I think about continuing studies but I needed to have kids since I am getting older. […] Thank God and thank the United States, too. Because if one doesn’t go astray here one gets one’s share from work. (J28)
Narratives about work focused on work as a ‘stable job, nothing else’, instead of as a vehicle for realizing one's dream. Some workers eventually became disengaged and disidentified from work. A nursing assistant who used to be irate with injustices in his workplace described how he eventually stopped caring: When I started working there, I used to be angry at people all the time. […] I realize that I get [sic] used to the system, and I grew up. You know, a workplace is not a boxing ring, you just go there and you do what you are told, and you get out of there. (NA3)
Although some younger respondents had not given up on achieving social mobility (‘Well, one wants social mobility because I don’t want to work my entire life as a janitor’ – J4), many respondents turned their hopes towards their children. Workers talked about aspirations for their children specifically in terms of having them avoid their parents’ trajectories, including staying in school, but most importantly entering a different occupation. One nursing assistant noted what several others did, that she tells her children ‘Go to school. Have a profession. I don’t want my children to be nursing assistants. They could do more, they could do better. Some of them did better’ (NA2). Moral reasoning helped workers accept short-term and long-term evaluations of work and life – in the short run, workers satisfied themselves with stability in lieu of progress and mobility, and in the long run, they reconciled with the inability to achieve the American dream by redefining the relevant unit as the family and deferring to their children.
Nevertheless, at the same time, workers questioned whether the environment their jobs were able to provide for their children was conducive to success. They constantly worried that the stability they had achieved was fragile, believing that their jobs and health were the only things separating them from economic insecurity and physical danger. As one nursing assistant, whose husband was ill and feared he would soon be unemployed, stated, ‘With out of work [sic], we will suffer too much. Especially Black children, they will put their nose where they are not supposed to, sometimes criminal’ (NA11). Despite the fact that providing for their children and their education were the primary reasons workers were separated from them, separation was also blamed for increased criminal activity among immigrant children. As one respondent pointed out, ‘The separation of the family unit leads to problems to do with the gangas or maras [gangs], not just that but many other factors. The lack of models for the youth is a problem’ (J33). Fear that their children would never overcome the disadvantages of their surroundings prompted some parents to become involved in school and union activities. One young Mexican American mother of two who was involved in a campaign for preserving bilingual education in Los Angeles pointed out that she dropped out of school and became a janitor because she could not follow the classes taught in English when she first arrived. She believed the same could happen to her children if public funding for bilingual teaching was ceased. I came here when I was about fifteen and because I lived that life I don’t want my son to live it too. […] and for the same thing that I lived I don’t want my children, out of desperation and out of not knowing the language, to drop out of school. (J10)
Reframing collective identity
As workers reoriented their aspirations to settling in the US, they became more aware of how immigrants were seen in the US and sought to respond to negative stereotypes towards immigrants. Citing their own experiences, workers explained immigration not as a product of opportunistic individual decisions, but of structural inequality, both within their countries of origin as well as between wealthy and poor countries. In their view, the US state was complicit in generating mass emigration by supporting corrupt autocratic regimes and exacerbating inequality in developing countries. In response to Americans’ accusations that immigrants undeservingly benefited from social security systems and were slow to assimilate, workers maintained that governments in both host and origin countries benefited from immigrants, who contributed to their home countries by sending monetary remittances, and to host countries through productive work and taxes. Workers criticized their home country governments (‘Instead of generating conditions for further exodus, they should generate conditions that prevent us from leaving’; J31), and called out the flawed logic of proponents of anti-immigration in the US: ‘the government benefits more from those who are undocumented because they pay taxes and we are very important. Those who are a burden are those on welfare who do not work’ (J1). Workers identified the hypocrisy of anti-immigration debates in a country historically built on immigration: ‘we are not the first ones to immigrate to this country; no one can say to certain groups that these are the immigrants if they too were immigrants one day’ (J34). A recurrent theme in legitimizing the collective identity of immigrants was the morality of work itself – an oft-heard statement was, ‘We came to work. Not to beg’ (J16). Workers strived to build a positive collective identity by emphasizing the work ethic of immigrants and portraying themselves as ‘very hard working’ and willing to work at pay levels that ‘the American’ would not accept.
Reframing collective identity involved recasting the conventional explanation of immigrants’ lack of progress in terms of the systematic denial of citizenship and lack of access to educational institutions. It meant recounting how, despite benefiting from millions of undocumented immigrants toiling in sub-standard conditions, America denied these workers access to institutions that could provide a path out of low-wage jobs. Thus, while acknowledging US jobs provided an ‘opportunity’ to escape from the difficult lives they led in their countries of origin, workers remained critical and suspicious of the American system: Sometimes I feel like I hate America, because those people are so selfish. You apply for green card, they don’t give it to you. You want to go to school, they say if you don’t have a green card you cannot go. But on the other side, I like it, because you have the opportunity and you have the freedom. (NA17)
Workers attributed their undocumented status as the source of their vulnerability to exploitation and the reason for their position at the ‘bottom’ of American society: It’s because we are immigrants and without documents that [employers] are putting so much [work] load on us. You know in the story of the immigrant there’s a saying that I’ll never get out of the very bottom because that’s my destiny, because we have no documents to fight with. (J35)
Constructing dignity at work for immigrant workers was integrally connected to regaining dignity for their ethnic communities – the importance of ‘fighting’ for such a cause was a recurrent theme in interviews. Although workers saw union campaigns for better economic conditions as helpful in their own communities’ fight for dignity, they nevertheless saw the task of achieving solidarity and collective advancement for their community as a separate goal from that of union organizing: It’s necessary for us as immigrants to unite and fight, and sometimes it’s the union that does that for us, but little by little we’ve waken up and we’ve been advancing, but not like other communities that may have better resources. And I’ve fought always for Salvadoreans. (J17)
Discussion
This article sought to examine how low-wage immigrant workers construct dignity in their work and life. Findings contribute to reconciling depictions of immigrant workers in the US as a new social force galvanizing a dormant labour movement and of immigrant workers as sojourners invested only in short-term gains. Current findings reveal that immigrants undergo a process of reconciling initial aspirations for social mobility with the realities of membership in a low-wage economy by reframing the meaning of work, elongating the shadow of social mobility, and reframing their collective identities as immigrants and as workers. A discussion of key contributions to theory and implications for labour renewal around immigrant workers follows.
While this study confirms some tenets of the role of migrant workers in industrial societies exposited by Piore (1979), it also challenges the extent to which work is seen instrumentally by immigrants and the extent to which value structures harboured by immigrants are impermeable to American institutions. While Piore (1979) and his contemporaries theorized immigrant incorporation in the context of members of rural, mostly agrarian, communities joining the industrial workforce, today’s immigrants come from a varied background. Many of them have left higher status jobs in urban communities and must address the pain of occupational downgrading by revaluing work in terms of life opportunities. Faced with demeaning work, immigrants sought to construct value in other ways. Although initial decisions to immigrate were motivated by economic benefit, immigrants constantly struggled to cope with the social conditions of their jobs and sought to recast the value of work in terms of social roles it allowed them to fulfil and sacrifices for family.
The current findings suggest that the value structures formed in immigrant communities don’t merely reflect community and family attachments as suggested by the immigrant settlement literature. Immigrants, by virtue of their experience of conditions in sending and receiving societies, acquire insights into structural inequality not available to natives in either society. The current findings suggest that these experiences may be generative of value structures that have the potential to challenge and resist conventional depictions of immigrants as undeserving beneficiaries. But findings indicate that motivations for collective action are by-products of an awareness that builds slowly over time and typically involves personal reconciliation with deep disappointment through moral reasoning. Overlooking this process and seeking to tap into immigrant grievances merely rhetorically and symbolically would likely render short-lasting and instrumental alliances, as studies increasingly point out (Martinez-Lucio and Perrett, 2009).
Immigrant workers’ views about American institutions such as unions and schools were neither purely instrumental nor outright transformative, as they came to understand the value of these institutions through an appreciation of the structural conditions leading to immigration that block immigrants’ access to them. The recasting of meaning of work in terms of sacrifice for family, the use of union activities as a source of dignity, and active efforts to reframe collective identities reveal that immigrants desire to be part of something larger than themselves. Although they appreciated assistance from unions, it was clear that immigrants saw lack of advancement at work as only one aspect of their disadvantage, which they viewed as a product of social stigma as well as economic and political disenfranchisement. Unions were seen as being effective in ameliorating the former and as potential vehicles for the latter. Hence, for unions to be able to build on the grievances of immigrants, they would need to address the fact that immigrants’ fears are intimately connected to their social condition, including structural barriers to education, victimization, and criminalization. Furthermore, the immigrant condition reveals the limits of a particularly American approach to empowerment through market-based pressures and points to the need for linkages between economic and political empowerment, linkages that are currently lacking in visions of community unionism (McBride and Martinez-Lucio, 2011: 800–803).
While being extremely useful in examining workers’ own efforts in constructing meaning out of socially tarnished work, the dignity at work literature has primarily identified work-based mechanisms for constructing dignity. This study builds on and expands the literature on dignity at work by showing that for socially stigmatized groups who perform low-status work, constructing dignity includes going beyond workplace roles and building on valued social roles, such as those of carer and productive member of society. Current findings also contribute to our knowledge of moral reasoning. Although Lamont and Mizrachi’s (2011) work on stigmatized groups pointed out that moral reasoning among the socially stigmatized includes reframing collective identities, the broader literature on morality of work has typically focused on workers invoking morality by drawing from personally held values and family roles (Lamont, 2000; Lehmann, 2009; Stein, 2011). The current findings go further to show that reframing collective identities necessitates a critical evaluation of institutional arrangements that act as structural limitations on social mobility. Seen in this way, morality and social mobility are not necessarily in conflict as is suggested by the problem of dual consciousness in theories of working-class morality (Sayer, 2005b). Immigrant workers, who felt relegated to second-class citizenship by virtue of their residential status, considered achieving social mobility as a vindication against the odds. The concept of dual consciousness itself, then, implicitly assumes that members of disadvantaged groups uncritically accept the causal link between individual effort and social mobility. For immigrant workers in low-wage service jobs, this link proved elusive.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.