Embodied labours: migrants in Greater London’s service sector

May 2008

Linda McDowell

School of Geography, University of Oxford

GeNet: ESRC Gender Equality Network

• Theme 1: Pathways to Adult Attainment – Changing Occupational Careers of Women and Men– Biographical Agency and Developmental Outcomes – Gendered Pathways to Adulthood

• Theme 2: Resources, Gender, Ethnic and Class Inequalities– Gender, Time Allocation and the 'Wage Gap' – Within-household Inequalities and Public Policy

– Gender, Ethnicity, Migration and Service Employment– Class and Gender, Employment and Family

• Theme 3: Policy Responses to Gender Inequalities– Addressing Gender Inequality through Corporate Governance – Tackling Inequalities in Work and Care: Policy Initiatives and Actors at

the EU and UK levels

Aims of Project 6

How a diverse migrant labour force is– assembled– segmented– maintained– how hierarchies of difference and

desirability/suitability for different types of ‘servicing’ jobs within the migrant labour force are produced and maintained, creating inequalities

Context of the research

• Growth in the service sector –feminisation and increasing polarisation of the labour market

• Rise of poor work and multiple job holding• Use of agency and sub-contract labour is expanding in ‘flexible’

labour markets• Increasing spatial reach of agencies: new international division of

labour in most local of ‘servicing’ work where co-presence and face to face contact is essential

• Nature of interactive work: body work so personal characteristics (gender, skin colour, language) are crucial: intersectionality and inequality

• New migrants

A8 migration from 2004

• EU accession states May 2004: Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland Slovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, plus Cyrus and Malta

• EU accession states January 2007: Bulgaria and Romania

• Different rights• New points based system- growing significance of

whiteness

Extent of immigration

• Government estimates: 5-15,000

• Probable entrants between 600,000 and a million

• No exit data

• WRS (not required after a year of continuous employment)

• Age, gender and sex

What we did

• Case study of public and private sector organisation with reliance on migrants labour force and use of agencies

• 60 interviews in each organisation – public sector WCH; private BI

• Interviews with personnel

• Interviews with owners/managers of 10 agencies

Where

• West London (Wills et al in East London

• High percentage of foreign born population, especially of Asian origin

• Tight job market: according to WCH report ‘probably the most competitive in London’ in 2006 when we stated interviewing

• Teaching hospital; upmarket hotel, part of an international chain

Focus of argument today

• Agency workers as sub-set of most exploited (EU Directive; CBI/TUC deal)

• Their characteristics

• Comparison between BI and WCH

• Implication – divisions of labour within migrant population

• Competition with local workers especially BME workers

Why agencies matter

• As Peck and Theodore (2001) argued, employment agencies are thus both empirically and theoretically interesting as they are ‘active institutional agents in the remaking of labour market norms and conventions, brokering as they do between under-employed workers on the one hand and would-be employers of contingent labour on the other, while turning a profit in the process’ (p 474).

• Agencies supply workers employed under fixed term contracts to meet changing needs, providing what Booth, Dolado and Frank (2002) et al refer to as ‘a buffer stock’ (p 182) to meet changes in the operating environment, including peaks of demand.

Why they matter now

• ‘the only extra jobs at present [in the UK economy] are for temporary staff and the self-employed. This growth in ‘contract working’ is almost certainly a reflection of the increased supply of migrant workers from Central and Eastern Europe’ Philpott, chief economist at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD 2007)

•  Already mentioned CBI/TUC agreement

Types of agencies

• the market which agencies construct and operate within is polarised between bottom end, low status and ‘back street’ agencies, supplying ‘warm bodies’, and high status and highly skilled specialist workers for professional positions.

• Parallels the wider pattern of polarisation emerging in service sector economies, between high status and credentialised workers in ‘good’ jobs, and the ‘generic’, unskilled warm bodies, in poorly paid and insecure work.Former operate on large scale, often mulit-national in scope, workers often recuited in ‘home’ country; later more likely to be smaller-scale and to recruit ‘here’, although not always, as I shall show.

Agency workers at WCH and BI

• Total number: 22 at Bi and 23 at WCH

• Warm bodies: 20 at BI and 17 at WCH in bottom end catering, cleaning, security etc

• 16 different nations represented: 9 out of 20 at BI from Eastern Europe (mainly A8) only one from 17 at WCH

• BI recruits bodies through agency; WCH buys a service from Greenspan

The comparison

• New migrant labour force at BI: East European and Indian, temporary, here in the main for training – language and management skills

• Older post-colonial labour force at WCH: in country longer, lnger job tenure, wanted to stay both in UK and in NHS (though worked for an agency not NHS employees)

Young migrants in BI

• It was a quick decision, I had a call from London [from a Polish-owned employment agency], . . . . I bought a one way ticket [from Warsaw] . . . it was very cheap, but it was a bus, so 34 hours. . . . [I arrived] Saturday morning. I had to go to sign the contract with the agency; that was Monday, the next day I came to work.

(Stanislaw Polish, previously in the army, early 20s)

Migrants in WCH

• I am from Afghanistan. I came through India and Russia and I don’t know where else. It took many months and I was not sure where I was at first.

• I have job cleaning at WCH and I work in a bus garage.

Hafiz’s job search

• My friend working down in this car parking so I come because I come sometime, I say “if you help me, so if you know someone, so if I find some job here”. So after they told the supervisor, so the supervisor said “okay if I have something, I can tell you but I can’t promise”. I said “no problem, please if you help me, I want, I’d like a job here at this hospital”, so after they said “okay”. I’m waiting about one and a half months, still with the agent. After they called me and said “bring your paper and come here”. So I come. . . . fill my form, everything, so I start my job about the last Sunday. . . . I do the cleaning in the ward, cleaning, everything I do. I am happy, I am really happy, . . . I love this job.

Role of agencies and sub-contractors

• check references

• undertake work histories

• do the requisite police checks and WRS

• arrange occupational health clearance and visa where needed

• advise on living conditions, setting up bank accounts etc

• if appropriate, interview applicants

Changing pool of potential recruits

• ‘there’s quite a lot of the new European states now, the Polish, Latvians, Lithuanians.’

• ‘You’ve got the WRS so we have to make sure they apply for that which is time-consuming. We give them a month to apply but then we have got to chase them when they don’t apply. They have to apply every time they go to a different job and it’s £70 a go. I don’t think they are really educated on the importance of it. You ask some of them – the Lithuanian, the Polish – they don’t know what the WRS is, so I have to sit here and explain to the best of my ability and to the point where I now have a stack of application forms in my drawer. You have to chase and chase and chase so it’s a bit difficult. It’s hard to manage.’

Claire, agency employee recruiting in hospitality sector

Advantages for BI and WCH

• Probation for permanent employment

• Flexible

• Easy to sack

• Could use them to discriminate

“Well, when it is BI staff and if it’s busy or not you

have to give them the job. If they do 10 rooms or

16, you are paying them for 16 because this is

what the contract is saying. If you have agency,

how many rooms they do, that much you are

paying them. It’s saving. It’s simple. And when we

don’t need them, we say “you’re not working

tomorrow” and that’s it. This is why they’re using

the agency, but it is horrible…”

Sylvia, BI Housekeeping Deputy Manager

Interactive work in the hotel

• We look for someone whose got a very strong aptitude to interact with customers because that's key, that's what hospitality is about, whether that be on the front desk, whether that be in the restaurant, whether that be conference banqueting, even housekeeping, it's really important. ... We look for somebody who has a style basically, the kind of person that when you first meet, you’ll warm to because that's the image that Bellman has. It's all about hospitality, and we also look for someone who’s very well presented, has made an effort.

Not got what it takes

• ‘We went to Hungary first and then to Latvia but so far it hasn’t been very successful – not like the Indian recruitment’. There wasn’t ‘the actual aptitude I was talking about, the smiley, bubbly hospitality attitude, is not as prevalent in the people we interviewed, they're a lot more serious . . . , so there wasn’t a natural what I call personality or that demonstration of “I’m here for the customer”, so that was a little bit of a concern’.

Aggressive Poles

• The main problem is language barriers and also cultural barriers sometimes, because perhaps what I consider to be rude or abrupt, another person might not see that as being rude or abrupt because that’s the way they would generally converse with each other. . . I think the Polish people are quite headstrong, and so rather than just getting on with it, they ask “why? Why? Why?”, then you gave to explain, explain, explain and sometimes you just want to get on with it.

Compliant Vietnamese

• we used to have Vietnamese people before and the Vietnamese people are very soft and compliant.

• Parallels with Indian staff seen as having ‘a heritage of service’

• Feminisation of Asian men

Indirect discrimination

• ‘I have asked the agency staff not to give me any more Polish staff, . . . because I think if I have a whole Polish staff it would be just too much to handle’

An older labour force at WCH

• At WCH, we interviewed agency workers from Afghanistan, India, Sri Lanka, Ghana, Malaysia, Algeria and Turkey but only one person from the A8 countries.

Been in country longer and planned to stay

More people of colour

Minority workers in Greenspan

• The hospital and the sub-contractor Greenspan used to recruit, from an older, long-standing migrant population in the locality, predominantly British Asian women most of whom had come to Britain between 1968 and the mid 1970s, - ‘these ladies are in their late 60s now, so they have been here quite a long time’ - to more recent migrants including ‘Chinese, Afro-Caribbean (sic), Portuguese, Polish, Irish – this is where it all starts to change, and now definitely with the East Europeans, that’s definitely created a big change’ although she told us East Europeans were hard to place in the hospital because of poor English (Agency owner who recruited for Greenspan).

Same old gender divisions of labour

• Women as care assistants and cleaners

• Men as doorstaff, heavy cleaning, in BI waiters and kitchen staff

• Relies on stereotypical characteristics of femininity and masculinity

Caring in WCH

• Some people they haven’t got a family and like myself I was giving more care to the people who haven’t anyone, because they don’t have a visitor they don’t have anyone looking after, doing right thing, because some people come in and check, you know? But some people haven’t got that and that I think in myself [I] was saying, you know make more effort and we do the care, because I will do this and we will talk to them. That can be hard, it was emotionally, it was very emotional. (Habiba, Health Care Assistant, female, Somalia)

Care work by cleaners at WCH

• If they're short of staff, they will ask me if I can go on the ward to help the patients ...I really love old people, I love to help old people as well. Yeah, I have a pity for old people, so I go there and I’ll make them breakfast and tidy the ward, like mop and clean the sink and going in their room, clean anything, check toilets, soap and stuff, so I’m used to it…I like caring, sometimes I go there and I sing for them. (Amber, cleaner, female, Jamaica)

Cleaning at BI

• Valentina, an agency worker, originally from Russia, describes her daily routine: ‘I should make ready my trolley. Put in chemicals. I take a key, I go upstairs, I knock in the door for sleeping. I start cleaning. Change beds, bathrooms, dust’. . . . ‘I should be quick and it is difficult’.

• Differs from hospital cleaning as (usually) no co-presence and so invisible

Dirty work at BI

• It was a ‘very dirty room, one hour is cleaning this room because everything is oh my God! Family, it’s one room and family, the children …many children and all the rooms it’s oh my God!’ (Teresa, Polish agency worker)

• Paid to clean 16 rooms in a shift

Discussion• Migrant labour market segmentation neither starts nor finishes in the local

labour market where it occurs

• Thus the most ‘local’ of work (body/caring labour) is organised across multiple scales

• Consequences for workers/EO policies, labour market policy.– ‘bodies as products’– Hierarchy of desirability– insecurity– Flexibility– Protection– Competition with ‘local’ and BME workers (British jobs for British

workers)

• Implications for managed migration policies– citizenship– Regulations– GATS

Papers out

• Economic Geography 83 (1), 2007• Global Networks 8, 1 2008• Journal of Ethnic and Migrant Studies, later this

year• Forthcoming• Brit.J. Of Industrial Relations late 2008• JEMS 2009• Gender, Work and Organisation 2009• Geoforum