Projects

Project Six: Gender, Ethnicity, Migration and Service Employment

Principal Investigator: Linda McDowell (Oxford)

Aims
The aim is to explore the interconnections between economic restructuring in London, new gender divisions of labour in the service sector and the changing life opportunities of skilled and unskilled migrant workers from recent and past migrant and settler communities through a case study of a private and public sector organisation.

Objectives include: (1) to explore the intersection of service sector employment growth and the differential opportunities of men and women from a range of different ethnic and national backgrounds, in light of new patterns of labour demand and new working practices; (2) to examine patterns of recruitment and promotion in the private and public sector among different groups of ethnic minority employees, comparing longer-standing groups, from the Caribbean and the Indian sub-continent in the main, with more recent entrants from, for example, Latin America, Eastern Europe and other parts of Asia; (3) To explore the ways in which different working practices and attitudes of employers and employees, including equal opportunity policies, impact on workplace experiences and everyday lives of men and women from different ethnic and national backgrounds; (4) to explore the ways in which the pre-existing job skills, position in racial and employment hierarchies in origin countries, date and (il)legality of entry of migrants affect and are affected by employment in London; (5) to assess the impact of new forms of work on domestic divisions of labour, focusing in particular on the capacities or capabilities of recent migrants employed in bottom-end service sector positions to reach and maintain an adequate standard of living.

Two organisations will be investigated in depth in order to capture the polarisation of employment emerging in Greater London and the impact of new forms of working on the organisation of daily life and household divisions of labour. The two institutions are a major London teaching hospital and one or more hotels within a large chain.

Background
New gender divisions of labour, intersecting with divisions of class, ethnicity and citizenship status in complex ways, are now emerging in global cities, both shaping and being shaped by economic change and the growing dominance of service sector employment. Economic globalisation and political instability throughout the 1990s are reflected in and affected by the structure of urban labour markets, as new forms of service work emerge, new streams of migrant workers enter the city and growing numbers of women enter waged labour. Thus workers with diverse social characteristics, including national origin, are now employed in large cities (Fainstein et al 1993; Sassen 2001) in an increasingly polarised labour market, in which new sets of opportunities and significant inequalities recut older gender divisions of labour in the workplace and the home (Carnoy 2000).

Older relationships between employment, gender and ethnicity that reflect earlier in-migrations, from Ireland and the 'new Commonwealth' are now being disrupted. Migrants from areas such as Latin America, parts of Asia and Eastern Europe now compete in London's labour market, where as skilled or unskilled workers, they face multiple and diverse forms of opportunity and disadvantage that currently are poorly understood. As in other global cities, Greater London's economy is increasingly dominated by service sector employment, in which employees' social characteristics are a significant aspect of their employability. In service work, gender and ethnicity as well as class, language skills and appearance are of growing significance (Leidner 1993, du Gay 1996).

It is becoming clear that the nature of employment and labour demand in service industries is resulting in a two-tier labour force: skilled 'self programmable' labour and unskilled 'generic' labour (Castells 2000). The project will investigate the ways in which this polarisation is related to the growing diversity in the division of labour. The links between economic restructuring in services and the intersection of ethnicity, racism, migration history, citizenship and gender in explaining current patterns of labour market segmentation in public and private organisations will be analysed.

This study uses both quantitative and qualitative methods. First, drawing on current population, household and labour market statistics including the 2001 Census, a quantitative assessment of contemporary changes in Greater London's employment structure will be undertaken, focussing on recent changes in employment demand and supply in the hospitality industry and health services. Secondly, data from questionnaires and interviews with key decision-makers, representing employers and management in the two case study organisations (10 in each organisation) will be collected. Thirdly, to capture the diversity of employment and the complex relationships between gender, ethnicity and national background among employees, semi- structured interviews will be undertaken with ten matched pairs of male and female interviewees in three different occupational positions within each organisation (120 interviews in total). Representatives of recent in-migrants, as well as more-established groups will be included.

Project Contact
Professor Linda McDowell
School of Geography & the Environment
University of Oxford
Mansfield Road
Oxford
OX1 3TB
linda.mcdowell@ouce.ox.ac.uk
+44 (0)1865 271919