The Cost of Being Hispano: Disposability and Cross-Racial Solidarity in the Workplace

• In Event: 397 - Section on Labor and Labor Movements Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 02. Race, Gender, Solidarity and the Changing Conditions of Work

Abstract

In this paper, I draw on 16 months of participant observation working entry-level production jobs at a North Carolina meatpacking plant, coupled with 25 interviews with workers, to examine the rather surprising claim that it is “worth it” to be black at Swine’s. In the first section, I propose that a crucial corollary to the vulnerability through deportability that illegality produces for the migrant is the vulnerability through disposability that illegality produces for the migrant worker, especially in the context of intensified immigration enforcement policies in the U.S., particularly in the South. In the second section, I demonstrate the challenge that group-based vulnerabilities such as those produced by illegality, which radiate onto the entire group of hispanos, poses for solidarity among workers in the struggle for dignity and justice on the shop floor. In the third section, I argue that Latinos’ perceptions of the different positions African Americans and they occupy within the social organization of labor may well be rooted in reality, a possibility that should not be surprising given the bases for employer preferences in hiring.

Author

• Vanesa Ribas, University of California-San Diego