Being Sandwiched: Korean Immigrants’ Labor Experiences at Korean Transnational Corporations in the United States

• In Event: 351 - Section on Asia and Asian America Paper Session. Work, Labor, and Inequality in Asian America

Abstract

A large amount of research in immigration literature compares job qualities of the workers depending on their use of social ties in employment processes. However, these studies do not address whether high-skilled immigrants also take advantage of their personal networks in the labor market and how their informal job search affects labor outcomes, focusing primarily on the cases of low-skilled, undocumented workers. In this study, I take an example of Korean high-skilled immigrant workers in Alabama to investigate different job qualities that result from the different employment channels through which the workers find jobs: formal and informal channels. Based on 36 in-depth interviews of Korean immigrants working at Korean multinationals of various sizes, I find that there are variations of labor outcomes depending on the workers’ use of personal ties in employment processes. While the connected workers tend to be better received by the employers and have higher earnings and positions, the non-connected workers start their career relatively more at a disadvantage. This could be attributed to the fact that the non-connected workers sometimes have to compromise their career just for a decent job offer, which may not necessarily be a perfect fit. On the other hand, since many of the non-connected workers were not looking for jobs or thinking of changing jobs when the employers recruited them, they could have had more power over the job offers.

Author

• Eunbi Kim, University of Pennsylvania