TY - JOUR
T1 - The embodied precarity of year-round agricultural work
T2 - health and safety risks among Latino/a immigrant dairy farmworkers in New York
AU - Sexsmith, Kathleen
N1 - Funding Information:
This research project was supported by the National Science Foundation, Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences, Division of Social and Economic Sciences, Sociology Program under grant number 1333367; the Cornell College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Alumni Association, Academic Enrichment Program; the Institute for Social Studies Theme Project on Immigration, Cornell; the Department of Development Sociology, Cornell, and USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture and Multistate Research Project #PEN04623 (Accession #1013257) titled, “Social, Economic and Environmental Causes and Consequences of Demographic Change in Rural America.”
Funding Information:
The author wishes to thank Philip McMichael, Wendy Wolford, Shannon Gleeson, and Michael Jones-Correa for support and feedback through the dissertation project that led to the publication of this manuscript. Three anonymous reviewers provided excellent feedback that helped to improve this paper. I am also grateful for the opportunity to present my work and receive helpful feedback from faculty members and students in the Department of Economics and the Global Political Economy Program at the University of Manitoba. Thanks also to the innumerable people who provided support that made this research possible, including Mary Jo Dudley, Carly Fox, Rebecca Fuentes, and Tom Maloney. Thank you above all to the farmworkers who trusted me enough to talk about difficult issues and share their precious time with me.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.
PY - 2022/3
Y1 - 2022/3
N2 - This paper analyzes how industrial agricultural production and an exclusionary immigration regime produce an embodied form of precarity among an undocumented immigrant labor force in the New York dairy industry, a much-celebrated engine of rural economic growth. In this industry, immigrant workers settle for years at a time, forming ethnic enclaves from which employers source workers for low-wage, exhausting, dangerous, year-round jobs. While much of the literature on migrant worker precarity has focused on temporary, insecure, flexible, and informal workers, this paper adds to this literature by analyzing how the permanence and regularity of dairy farming shape the embodied dimensions of worker precarity. The analysis shows how ‘everyday deportability’ (De Genova in Migrant “illegality” and deportability in everyday life. Annu Rev Anthropol 31(1):419–447, 2002), a weak regulatory structure, and the particularities of the production process combine to shape severe forms of physical risk to immigrant working bodies in the dairy industry. Findings are based on a qualitative study with current and former Latino/a dairy farmworkers between 2011 and 2015. This paper contributes to theorizing worker precarity in agricultural workplaces under the ongoing neoliberal restructuring of the global agri-food system.
AB - This paper analyzes how industrial agricultural production and an exclusionary immigration regime produce an embodied form of precarity among an undocumented immigrant labor force in the New York dairy industry, a much-celebrated engine of rural economic growth. In this industry, immigrant workers settle for years at a time, forming ethnic enclaves from which employers source workers for low-wage, exhausting, dangerous, year-round jobs. While much of the literature on migrant worker precarity has focused on temporary, insecure, flexible, and informal workers, this paper adds to this literature by analyzing how the permanence and regularity of dairy farming shape the embodied dimensions of worker precarity. The analysis shows how ‘everyday deportability’ (De Genova in Migrant “illegality” and deportability in everyday life. Annu Rev Anthropol 31(1):419–447, 2002), a weak regulatory structure, and the particularities of the production process combine to shape severe forms of physical risk to immigrant working bodies in the dairy industry. Findings are based on a qualitative study with current and former Latino/a dairy farmworkers between 2011 and 2015. This paper contributes to theorizing worker precarity in agricultural workplaces under the ongoing neoliberal restructuring of the global agri-food system.
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U2 - 10.1007/s10460-021-10252-8
DO - 10.1007/s10460-021-10252-8
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85111674886
VL - 39
SP - 357
EP - 370
JO - Agriculture and Human Values
JF - Agriculture and Human Values
SN - 0889-048X
IS - 1
ER -