Learning about Citizenship at Work in Despotic Jobs

Ilana Gershon’s The Pandemic Workplace tells the fascinating story of what happened in 2020 when businesses had to shoulder responsibility for public health during the early days of COVID-19. Gershon had been planning to study work contracts in “normal times” to answer the question: “what do we learn about citizenship at work?” She quickly adapted her research to the pandemic context when, it turned out, questions of rights and obligations and how to negotiate them were in high relief. The pandemic became a classic ethnographic “situation” as defined long ago by Max Gluckman: an unusual point of entry that offers new knowledge.

In her introduction to the book, Gershon makes it clear that not all workplaces are the same. She posits a continuum between inclusion and accountability, on one hand, and subordination and compliance, on the other, with some organizations. The poles of her continuum echo Michael Burawoy’s earlier distinction between “hegemonic” and “despotic” labor regimes (1985). In her methods section, Gershon lists the kinds of workers she interviewed (using new Zoom technology): doctors, librarians, grocery store workers, call center workers, pilots, beauticians, tattoo artists, and many more. She notes that interviewing individuals in one specific type of work or in one region would have provided detailed insights into how the pandemic affected that context but would not have allowed us to see the extent of commonalities and would have obscured the essential “Americanness” of the dilemmas faced.

Even though Gershon interviewed individuals from many different occupations, the book is subtitled “How We Learned to Be Citizens in the Office” [emphasis mine] and most of the examples given reflect workplaces nearer the “inclusion and accountability” end of the spectrum. The book offers compelling insights about when and how these workers are willing to trade autonomy for security and well-being; when decisions about their health and safety are made by fiat and when by consultation; and about how those decisions were legitimized. It provides illuminating examples of workers who are actively evaluating the question of their rights and obligations—and those of their employers. In this short essay, I will pose the question of how studies of workplaces that fall closer to the “subordination and compliance” end of the spectrum might have revealed different insights about learning citizenship at work and specifically how the COVID-19 pandemic might have altered those understandings.

Annabel Ipsen has studied what she calls the “refugee labor regime” in the meatpacking sector in the United States (Ipsen 2024). This is an especially powerful site for learning citizenship at work because these newest Americans are gaining their first exposure to their new country through the workplace. Ipsen describes a system where the federal government resettles economically vulnerable refugees in meatpacking regions with few employment options and where federal policies push them to find jobs within 90 days. Over the past four decades, deregulation and deskilling have rendered meatpacking jobs so dangerous and degrading that few U.S. citizen workers will take them. Unable to hire citizen workers, firms began to hire large numbers of undocumented men and women in the 1980s and 1990s. In recent years, they have welcomed refugee workers because doing so eliminates the risk of government raids and fines (see also Frydenlund and Dunn 2022).

During COVID-19, meatpacking plants became what Carrillo and Ipsen (2021) call racialized “sacrifice zones”—since workers in these plants were considered “essential” to food supply chains. Employers did not take measures to reorganize crowded workplaces that fostered the spread of COVID, or to alter ventilation systems that exacerbated transmission. In fact, at the height of the pandemic, the U. S. Department of Agriculture removed restrictions on line-speed for many plants. As of May 2021, scholars estimated there had been over 18,000 COVID deaths related to meatpacking jobs (Saitone et al. 2021). Because refugees are required to work and due to the limited array of options they have (language barriers, lack of recognition for credentials from their country of origin, lack of social networks, and poverty) the citizenship lesson they learn is that their very presence in this country depends on their acquiescence to dangerous, degrading, and in the case of the pandemic—deadly—working conditions.

Andrew Wolf’s (2021) research on food delivery workers in New York City emphasizes the physical and psychological impact of having one’s work directed by non-transparent algorithms that instill fear of surveillance and being “kicked off the app.” In New York City, the “deliverista” sector is dominated by immigrant workers. While these workers are technically independent contractors, Wolf argues they are subject to a despotism as harsh as that of the sweatshop, prodded to provide the right amount of labor at the right times and to create a uniform customer experience. In his view, the angry foreman has been replaced by electronic signals, push notifications, “gamification” of work rules, and customer reviews. All risks (bad weather, traffic jams, accidents, failure of restaurants to provide food on time) are borne by the worker. Without a manager of any type, when things go wrong, there is no one to help solve the problem, to negotiate with, or to complain to.

In a separate study, Wolf (2022) makes the case that the precarity and risk equations of the ride-share/food delivery “workplace” were major factors leading to high rates of COVID-19 among immigrant workers in places like New York. Because drivers are only paid when actively ferrying passengers or food, and because they have no guaranteed hours, no employer-sponsored health care, and are often not able to access unemployment insurance (UI), most felt compelled to keep working during the pandemic. Those who stopped driving to avoid sickness, went into debt to do so. Wolf found that 83% of neighborhoods where drivers lived had above average numbers of COVID-19 cases, and 57% were in the top quintile. And as with other work complaints, there was literally no one to consult or negotiate with about the conditions of their pandemic labor. The citizenship lesson here was “you are on your own.”

These two brief examples provide a glimpse into what individuals learn about rights and responsibilities in jobs that are far from the inclusion and accountability end of the spectrum. It is clear that race structures experiences at the “despotic” end of the spectrum; workers in these spaces are largely immigrants and refugees, and citizenship is enacted and taught within workplaces shaped by our racialized version of capitalism. While many work settings do provide opportunities to practice participatory governance and collaborative decision-making, in cases like these, work is associated with coercion and unfreedom for some and unbearable risk for others.

Jane Collins

Professor Emerita

Community & Environmental Sociology

University of Wisconsin-Madison

References

Burawoy, Michael. 1985. The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes Under Capitalism and Socialism. Verso Books.

Carrillo, Ian and Annabel Ipsen. 2021. “Worksites as Sacrifice Zones: Structural Precarity and COVID-19 in US Meatpacking.” Sociological Perspectives 64(5): 726-746. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07311214211012025

Frydenlund, Shae and Elizabeth Cullen Dunn. 2022. Refugees and Racial Capitalism: Meatpacking and the Primitive Accumulation of Labor. Political Geography 95. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0962629821002353

Gluckman, Max. 1958. Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand. Manchester University Press.

Ipsen, Annabel. 2024. Unsettling the Borders of ‘Legal’ Work: The Refugee Labor Regime. Paper presented at the Law & Society Association Meeting, Denver, Colorado, June 8, 2024.

Saitone, Tina L., K. Aleks Shafer, and Daniel P. Scheitrum. 2021. COVID-19 Morbidity and Mortality in U.S. Meatpacking Counties. Food Policy 101. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030691922100049X

Wolf, Andrew. 2021. Manufacturing Disruption: Worker and Union Response to the Gig Economy in New York City, chapter 3. PhD dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Wolf, Andrew. 2022. COVID and the Risky Immigration Workplace: How Declining Employment Standards Socialized Risk and Made the COVID-19 Pandemic Worse. Labor Studies Journal 47(3).