Abstract
London is one of the paradigmatic global cities. Following Sassen (1991), scholars on global cities have mostly agreed that these cities’ labor markets are economically polarized into the highly paid professional elites and low-wage unskilled service workers. Yet few authors have provided a nuanced and insightful analysis of the lower echelon of this divide. Global Cities at Work takes a sharp look at the characteristics of employment in low-income occupations and explores the influence of immigration on the labor market in London. The authors show how the neoliberal economy has created the conditions of supply and demand that shape the migrant division of labor in the British capital city. The heart of the argument centers on the role of the “reserve army of labor” for the emergence of current working conditions in the United Kingdom. Wills et al. revive this conventional Marxist concept and provide a compelling case study analyzing the economic, welfare, and immigration policies that have resulted in the division of the labor force.
The first two chapters of Global Cities at Work are strongly analytical. They rely on government statistics and on the authors’ analysis of the Labor Force Survey and the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings to illustrate the emergence of the new migrant division of labor. Wills et al. argue that the labor force at the bottom end of the labor market is more diverse than ever. Native White Londoners, migrants from the EU, and those from outside the EU face different kinds of structural obstacles in moving up the career ladder. The emergence of an on-demand labor market in the 1980s and the 1990s, as well as the soft immigration policies of the New Labor government, have encouraged the formation of a flexible immigrant labor force. They are London’s new labor reserve.
The next part of the book exhaustively analyzes migrants’ working conditions, ethnic relations, and survival strategies, based on a survey of more than 400 migrants and more than 100 in-depth interviews. The results are reported unequivocally and compassionately, though they are not overly surprising. Migrants come to London primarily for economic reasons; they are actively looking for work, they find employment through social networks, and they earn minimum wages working in extremely unstable conditions. Also, predictably, we learn that employment opportunities are shaped by migrants’ gender and ethnicity—a fact that is exploited by the workers themselves and by the prospective employers. The main contribution of the analysis is to highlight the role of legal status in structuring the migrants’ experiences and the labor market’s inequalities. Eastern Europeans and other migrants from EU member states have a vast advantage over migrants from beyond the EU. Workers who are irregular are forced to accept lower-paying jobs, substandard working conditions, and constant job insecurity. Unlike their regularized counterparts, they do not have a social welfare system to lean back on, which turns them into a strongly motivated labor force.
The last three chapters of the book position the immigrant division of labor in a larger framework that includes the world political economy and British national politics. Wills et al. are critical of the attempts that aim to justify migrant exploitation by extolling the benefit of remittances for local development in the sending country. They denounce nation states in both the global South and the North for shunning the responsibility for development and burdening the migrants with the task of saving local economies in the countries of origin and destination. Global Cities at Work leaves no doubt that migrant workers are critical for the functioning of the global city of London but have limited political power to improve their disadvantaged position. Ethnic and racial divisions in the migrant labor force and irregular legal status preclude the possibility of migrants’ forming political alliances. The authors document attempts of the London Citizens campaigns to break through this passivity and mobilize migrant workers around the issues of public participation and economic fairness.
Global Cities at Work is an excellent choice for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses of migration and urban labor markets. The first chapters of the book are most interesting from a theoretical perspective, using the concept of the reserve army of labor to criticize the flexible practices of subcontracting. The following chapters that draw on the findings of the authors’ survey are more descriptive, but they provide an important review of migration and labor market theories. Students will benefit from learning about Piore’s (1979) theory of segmented labor markets, the different takes on the global city hypothesis, competition in the labor market, the gendering of jobs, neoliberal economics, and the migration and development nexus. While this book is very strongly grounded in the socioeconomic realities of London, it offers a rich analysis that will benefit scholars and students from outside the United Kingdom as well.