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COPYRIGHT 1998 Transaction Publishers, Inc.
Since the late 1960s, the U.S. economy has been characterized by a crisis in production as employers strive to maintain high profit levels amidst increasing global competition. Employers have restructured work to cut labor costs by shedding in-house, long-term, union employees and adopting flexible work schedules using subcontracted, part-time or temporary, nonunion employees. One way employers have restructured work has been to recruit immigrant women (SassenKoob, 1984; Smith, 1984). The "new," post-1965 immigration is overwhelmingly from Latin America and Asia and is increasingly female (Tyree and Donato, 1986). In Los Angeles County, by 1990 roughly half of Salvadoran (51 percent) and Guatemalan (49 percent) immigrants were women, while 46 percent of Mexican immigrants were women. The majority of these women came to the U.S. to work; labor force participation rates in 1990 were 66 percent, 63 percent, and 51 percent, respectively.(1) In Los Angeles, Latina immigrants have moved into the low-paid service and factory jobs - such as janitorial, paid domestic, and sewing - that have grown with economic restructuring (Sassen-Koob, 1984; Morales and Ong, 1991).
The importance of immigrant women in these fundamental changes in the U.S. economy has prompted considerable scholarship, indicated by several review essays (Pedraza, 1991; Tienda and Booth, 1991) and edited volumes (Simon and Bretell, 1986; Gabaccia, 1992; Buijs, 1993) on the topic. However, women remain largely excluded from immigration theory (Massey et al., 1993; Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton Blanc, 1994; Portes, 1995) and widely read empirical work (Massey, 1987; Borjas, 1990; Portes and Rumbaut, 1990; Waldinger, 1996; Waldinger and Bozorgmehr, 1996). Although scholars are beginning to examine gender as a set of social relations that structure the work lives of immigrant women and men (Bretell and Simon, 1986; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1992; Romero, 1992; Chang, 1994), this exclusion has meant that too many scholars focus on merely writing women into the literature (Handagreu-Sotelo and Cranford, forthcoming).
In this article, I examine the links between gender, immigration, and economic restructuring. I bring together two literatures that generally do not speak to one another: the literatures on gendered occupational change and on economic incorporation of immigrants. I draw on scholarship concerned with how these inequalities intersect, reinforce and contradict one another. I argue that employers draw on inequalities of class, gender, race, and citizenship in their attempts to guarantee a low-paid, unorganized labor force.
To illustrate this argument, I use census data to examine Latina/o janitors in Los Angeles who work in business services. This industry switched from employing union janitors to nonunion janitors in the 1980s as building owners contracted with the lowest-bidding cleaning companies. Restructuring has allowed Latina immigrants to move into what was previously an African American male-dominated job. Yet the restructuring of janitorial work has generated an unintended consequence: Latina/o immigrants are struggling to reunionize Los Angeles janitors.
The article proceeds in the following way. After a review of the literature and a discussion of the data and methods, I place the restructuring of janitorial work within the broader industrial shifts in Los Angeles and examine Latinas' place within these changes. Next, I describe the restructuring of janitorial work and analyze the shifting demographics this restructuring brought about. I then trace cohorts of Latinas as they move into janitorial work and examine the extent to which the occupation is feminizing. Finally, I summarize what we have learned from this case study and conclude with a discussion of the contradictions that have come with the struggle to reunionize the industry in the 1990s and Latinas' participation in this struggle.
Literature Review
Gender and Occupational Change
The literature on gender and occupational change shows that women workers are recruited to de-skill and restructure previously well-paid union jobs. Scholars argue that in competitive industries, employers cut labor costs by recruiting women who are seen as supplemental workers who will accept a lower wage than men due to inequalities within the family. This literature finds little evidence of genuine integration of women and men workers because when pay and prestige go down, men leave these downgraded occupations (Hartmann, 1976; Milkman, 1987; Reskin and Roos, 1990; Cockburn, 1991).
Three changes in the organization of work have led men to exit jobs and women to enter since in the 1970s. The first is the move from in-house production to contracted work, as occurred in real estate sales (Thomas and Reskin, 1990). The second is a decline in union shops, as occurred with bartenders (Detman, 1990). The third is a change in technology. For example, Roos (1990) argues that the switch to electronic compositing in the printing industry was a deliberate strategy by the owners to eliminate high-paid, union, male hot metal printers and replace them with women to do the new, lower-paid, clericalized work.
This literature reveals how employers draw on relations of gender in the home and in the labor market to restructure work. However, these studies fail to note differences between women, due to race, class and/or citizenship. Immigrant women are recruited for the least-paid, most insecure jobs. In addition, immigrant men are also recruited to cut labor costs in competitive industries. The immigration literature suggests that these men lack the opportunities that would allow them to leave a job when it is restructured. In short, immigrant women and men share disadvantages based on nation, race/ethnicity, and class even while immigrant women are affected by gendered power relations and ideologies.
Immigrants and the Economy
The immigration literature recognizes that the labor force is structured along the lines of race and citizenship (Moore and Pinderhughes, 1993; Morales and Bonilla, 1993; Lamphere, Stepick, and Greiner, 1994; Ong, Bonacich, and Cheng, 1994; Romero, Hondagneu-Sotelo, and Ortiz 1997). Yet scholars differ on whether they emphasize the supply of immigrants willing to work for low wages, or employer recruitment of a nonunion workforce. For example, a debate over whether immigrants are substitutes for U.S.-born workers, displacing them and depressing wages (Borjas, Katz, and Freeman, 1991; Winegarden and Khor, 1991) or whether they are recruited for different jobs than, and are thus complements to, the U.S.born (Bean, Lowell, and Taylor, 1988; Marcelli and Heer, 1997) continues among economists and other scholars.
One reason why these scholars are at odds is their use of static, regression analyses of aggregate sites that fail to capture the dynamics of immigrant incorporation into a restructuring economy. Using case studies, sociologists and anthropologists have found that the dynamics of restructuring are context specific (Portes and Stepik, 1993; Lamphere, Stepick, and Greiner, 1994). For example, in the LA automobile industry immigrants are recruited by the nonunion firms while the U.S. born are concentrated in union firms, thus the former do not displace the U.S. born (Morales, 1983). Yet in the Georgia poultry processing industry employers are actively trying to replace U.S. workers with Mexican immigrants (Bach and Brill, 1991).
Clearly, we need more dynamic case studies to understand the process of immigrant incorporation into a restructuring economy. Roger Waldinger's case studies of several industries in New York (1996) and Los Angeles (1996) are a considerable contribution to this project. Waldinger shows that in many industries, including garment, hotel, retail, and construction, employers have recruited recently arrived immigrants, rather than African Americans, to ensure a low-wage, flexible labor force. Continual immigration from Latin America and Asia allows employers to use the networks of their current workers to reproduce what they see as a docile, vulnerable, labor force. On the supply side, the newly arriving immigrants turn to their relatives and paisanos,(2) who arrived in the U.S. earlier, to help in their job search.
While this literature is critical to the understanding of the importance of race and citizenship in employers' recruitment strategies (and employees' willingness to accept a given job), it says little about gender. Yet we are left with the question of what circumstances immigrant women are recruited to the same jobs as immigrant men, as in the case of janitorial work in Los Angeles? The gender and occupational change literature suggests that immigrant men might be leaving janitorial work, causing it to feminize. Yet, their ability to do so will likely depend on men's citizenship and class status as well as the availability of traditionally immigrant "male" jobs - such as construction and gardening. The movement of Latinas/o immigrants into janitorial work necessitates a framework that is able to consider relations of class, nation, gender, and citizenship simultaneously.
Intersecting Relations of Gender, Class and Citizenship
These two literatures hold either gender or nationality/citizenship as the primary power relation structuring one's labor...
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