Bringing the Worker Back in

In an earlier review essay that appeared in this journal, Cavalcanti (2002) acknowledged the expansion of professional associations, research networks, and graduate programs focusing on the sociology of work that have emerged over the past two decades in Latin America. Estudios Laborales en México is a product of that expansion. The volume, edited by Marcela Hernández Romo, contains seven chapters jointly authored by PhD students and their faculty advisors in the graduate program of labor studies at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa in Mexico City. The labor studies program was formed in 1998 and since then has become one of the most highly regarded programs of its kind in Latin America, training dozens of researchers and professors throughout the region.

The essays in this collection reflect some of the new directions in scholarship on work to emerge from the region. They move away from an earlier focus on manufacturing employment and labor movements to consider what are emerging as core concerns in studies of work: service-sector employment, culture and identities at work, knowledge work, and migration. In particular, this volume focuses on what Enrique de la Garza Toledo has called “new studies of work” (p. 10). These include new perspectives on traditional topics as well as a new focus on “nonclassic” work. ¹

Here nonclassic work occurs within a web of relationships, including the client or consumer, the family, and multiple “outside” actors that influence the work process (consider the work of a street vendor). In some forms of nonclassic work, an intangible “product” is “consumed” at the moment of its creation, as in a musical performance, a play, or a professor’s lecture. In these examples, the phases of production, circulation, and consumption, which in classical work occur sequentially and are carried out by distinct actors, occur all at once, in a single act (pp. 96-98).

In other words, these studies redefine the workplace and the nature of work, taking as their subject work wherever and however it occurs. Here, a case study of work identities at a McDonald’s, a look at the role of shop floor apparel designers in a garment factory, or an examination of transnational experiences in labor migration are all fitting objects of study. The authors do not develop new concepts so much as they take classic categories of culture, identity, process, and organization and apply them to the study of nonstandard forms of work. Above all, the chapters highlight the fragmentation that these forms of work produce in workers’ identities, in labor processes, and in space.

Most of the essays present empirical cases from Mexico. One chapter on transnational migration focuses on the links between U.S. and Mexican sites where migrants’ lives unfold. Each chapter also addresses theoretical literature from the sociology of work more broadly, striving to add to conversations in the field. The authors employ a range of methodologies. Whereas the majority relies on field work and qualitative interviews, others use surveys or quantitative methods.

The book is divided into three sections: (a) the “classical” in the new studies of work; (b) nonclassic work; and (c) contemporary problems of work in Mexico. In this first section, Beatriz Torres Góngora and Jorge Carrillo examine how “modernization” of production and work organization occurs in an otherwise traditional sector, that of the food and beverage industry in the state of Yucatán, Mexico. The authors use cluster analysis and adopt a conceptual framework advanced by Tetsuo Abo (1994) to identify modernization trajectories and degrees of upgrading in domestic firms and in those where there is a significant degree of foreign capital. The authors note that the literature has mostly focused on foreign-owned companies. Hence, their adaptation of the framework to a mostly domestic food and beverage industry yields insights into a neglected yet important sector.

In their contribution, Miguel Angel Gómez and Luis Reygadas develop a theoretical critique targeting the neoinstitutionalist literature that juxtaposes as polar opposites the market and “hierarchies” in the analysis of actors and exchange processes. Whereas the prevailing framework is grounded in economics, the authors argue for joining economic and sociological perspectives in an alternative framework that takes into account context and a greater number of variables. They build on insights from a case study of subcontracting in the housing construction industry in Mexico.

Abel Pérez Ruíz and Sergio Sánchez Díaz’s study looks at the mostly female workers who design apparel in the garment factories. Their chapter examines the culture of work inside the factory, looking in particular at questions of subjectivity, creativity, and designers’ relationships with other actors, such as sewers and managers. Drawing on Bourdieu, the study shows the ways in which designers engage in the “daily negotiation of creativity” (p. 87), constructing and reproducing the boundaries between their work and that of others who labor in the same productive space in an effort to create status. Here, creative work takes place within a social web in which there are as many spaces for confrontation as for cooperation.

The section on nonclassic work contains two studies in this genre, one that looks at software design as knowledge work and another that focuses on a case study of McDonald’s restaurants in Mexico City. In the first of these studies, José Guadalupe Rodríguez Gutiérrez and Enrique de la Garza Toledo focus on the distinctive aspects of software design and production that make this a “classic” example of nonclassic work. In contrast to more traditional forms of production, in “cognitive” or knowledge work there is no such thing as just-in-time software, there is no single set of best practices, and software that contains errors is not ditched but is instead patched and improved on in a set of successive interactions with the consumer (p. 115). The incorporation of the client or consumer in the web of production is one feature of nonclassic work, as is the production of symbols rather than of objects or goods. ²

Gustavo Garabito Ballesteros and Marcela Hernández Romo dissect service work inside a McDonald’s fast-food restaurant in Mexico City. The authors’ theoretical aim is to demonstrate that nonclassic work can be analyzed as a sociotechnical configuration of labor processes, similar to the way traditional forms of work are studied. Building on the notion of the “social construction of occupation,” Garabito and Hernández find evidence to counter the common assumption that low-wage service work involves a process of fragmentation and of separation of one’s work identity from that held outside of the workplace. Instead, they find that McDonald’s practices and policies reaffirm the centrality of the company both inside and outside the workplace. That is, work becomes the central point of reference for employees, and the “sociability” of the workplace extends beyond it as well. Employees come to resent the company and customers precisely because work forces them to place family, friends, and leisure activities on a secondary plane.

McDonald’s counter and kitchen employees face low wages, an intense work pace, and exploitative scheduling, in which 4-hr work shifts commonly extend to 6 to 8 hr of actual uncompensated work (p. 127). At the same time, the company indoctrinates employees (and franchise owners) through an “ideology of control and supervision” (p. 143). Although employees are aware of their exploitation, their response is not collective action. The “enemy” is diluted; store employees see managers as experiencing a similar situation to their own, without real authority, and the company remains abstract. Workers express discontent and frustration through individual acts such as stealing food or money, ridiculing managers, and quitting. These individual acts turn social the moment they become a common practice among employees.

The third and final section of the book examines contemporary problems of work in Mexico. Its two chapters cover very different topics. Héctor Gaspardel Angel, Ignacio Llamas Huitrón, and Nora Garro Bordonaro propose a new methodological approach for the measurement of labor market skills. The authors use a mathematical model to develop a single aggregate index of skills or “competencies” that measures such components as education, training, and work experience, whereas previously these factors were considered separately.

Labor migration is hardly new, but its inclusion in this volume sends a hopeful signal that migration research has a place in studies of work more generally. Certainly this journal has published a number of articles on Latin American migration in recent years (Donato, Wakabayashi, Hakimzadeh, & Armenta, 2008; Hagan, 2004; Hagan, Lowe, & Quingla, 2011; Hernández-León, 2004). Here, Oscar Calderón Morillón and Fernando Herrera Lima present a longitudinal study of a transnational community that spans the village of Hueyotlipan in the State of Tlaxcala, Mexico, and Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in the United States. Migrants have come to call where they are from “Hueyoming,” to capture the fact that their lives encompass both sites.

Villagers from Hueyotlipan first worked in potato farming in the fields of Idaho and Wyoming but gradually moved into ranch work, nurseries, and groundskeeping at Yellowstone National Park. Eventually, men sought work in restaurants and construction and women moved into hotels and domestic service, mostly as house cleaners for wealthy families in Jackson Hole. This trajectory signals a familiar migrant path from the dirtiest and most difficult work in agriculture to the more desirable urban jobs. Indeed, most of the work migrants did in the United States was completely unrelated to work they had done at home. Instead, migrants used the skills they acquired in the United States to aid them in securing better work and mobility within the host-country labor market.

The chapter contains a number of insights into the strategies that migrants deploy to move through the job hierarchy toward better pay and working conditions. Men entering the construction industry, for example, identify the better paid jobs through their information networks. They then place themselves in positions that will allow them to learn such high-skill jobs as laying logs for the luxurious log houses that serve as vacation homes for wealthier residents. Women seek work cleaning and caring for vacant vacation houses. The authors recount one strategy in which migrant women “convert” to Mormonism and meet potential employers through the church, in effect living as Catholics in Mexico and as Mormons in the United States (p. 173).

This look at the transnational migrant community of Huetlipenses echoes other recent studies that focus on the agency and mobility of migrants and at their skills acquisition in both source and host countries (Hagan et al., 2011). Hagan et al. (2011) find that migrants jump around (brincan) in the U.S. job market in search of jobs with better pay and conditions. The authors claim to address a gap in the literature that associates human capital exclusively with so-called skilled migrants in higher paying professions by showing that similar artfulness and mobility can occur in the low-wage occupations, a point the Mexican study also makes.

On a similar theme, Hernández-León (2004) focuses on how skills acquired at home can be applied in the United States and can even be a factor in the decision to migrate in the first place. The decline of skilled industrial employment creates opportunities for high-skill blue-collar workers from Mexico to seek employment in the United States in a similar industry (e.g., the petroleum industry). Economic restructuring in Mexico led not just to rural displacement and migration of rural workers but also to displacement of those employed in industry, accounting in part for the rise of skilled urban workers in the migration stream (Hernández-León, 2008). Hagan (2004) makes a similar point about the need to focus on home countries’ restructuring processes to understand workers’ migration and their insertion into the U.S. labor market.

Studies of Mexican industrial development and decline broaden our understanding of the factors that push migrants out of their home country. De la Garza Toledo’s (2007) study of the “maquiladora model” challenges the optimistic view held by some scholars that the maquila would evolve in technological sophistication and expand its contributions to border economies (Carrillo & Gomis, 2004). He suggests instead that the sector cannot provide the employment that Mexico’s workers need, fueling northbound migration. In their cross-national study, Brady, Kaya, and Gereffi (2011) likewise note the stagnation of industrial employment in Mexico since the early 1990s.

The inclusion of home-country labor market conditions in studies of migration allows us to make sense of migrants’ employment strategies and options in host countries. Economic restructuring pushes prospective migrants out into what is ostensibly a regional labor market in North America, despite the legal constraints posed by immigration policies. At the same time, economic restructuring in Mexico explains in part the emergence of the service jobs and nonclassical work that this volume’s chapters address. Economic restructuring creates new forms of production, new labor processes, and new categories of employment that command our scholarly attention.

Labor studies in Latin America have generally tracked the impact of changes in the region’s politics, economic systems, and labor markets over the past decades (Abramo, 1998; Abramo et al., 1997; Cavalcanti, 2002; Cook, 1999, 2012; de la Garza Toledo & Pries, 1997). In the 1950s and 1960s research focused on the industrialization process linked to import-substitution-industrialization (ISI) policies. During the military dictatorships in the 1970s and the transitions to democracy in the 1980s, studies chronicled the role of labor movements in politics. The “lost decade” of the 1980s also saw the retrenchment of unions and the beginning of a prolonged phase of economic and industrial restructuring that altered the composition of employment and produced changes in production and workplace organization (de la Garza Toledo, 1993; Dombois & Pries, 1993; Wannöffel, 1995). In the 1990s and 2000s research focused on labor responses to trade and market reforms, with a number of studies examining the impact of regulatory and workplace flexibility on workers and unions (Kohler & Wannöffel, 1993).

Today’s scholarship on labor and work in the region continues to be diverse. Research on national labor policies, institutions, and unions remains important, especially as left-leaning governments have proliferated in the region (Bensusán, 2006). Building on the union revitalization literature to come out of Europe and North America (Cornfield & McCammon, 2003; Turner, Katz, & Hurd, 2001), scholars have focused attention on the resurgence of unions in some countries of the region, especially Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil (Etchemendy & Collier, 2007; Senén González, 2011). ³ Moving beyond the national context, there is much more research on transnational labor alliances as a response to the changes presented by globalization, although most of this comes from North American scholars (Anner, 2011; Armbruster-Sandoval, 2005; Kay, 2011).

The essays in this collection represent yet another stream of research in the region. Their focus on individual workers and their web of relationships marks a significant departure from most past studies of work in Latin America. The worker and work process occupy a central place, but political and economic context matters less, and the normative character of much earlier research is absent. Instead, the focus is on what remains after neoliberalism and globalization have transformed the region: low-wage service work, “nonclassical” knowledge work, and migration. One might include work in the informal economy, which has long been an important source of employment in Latin America. Here, collective identities are hard to forge and resistance is expressed in individual strategies and often in exit, of which migration is perhaps the most extreme example.

Nonetheless, studies such as those contained in Estudios Laborales en México provide the groundwork on which new thinking about policies on work can begin. Perhaps more important, they broach the subject of work as millions of people experience it every day.