Work and organization studies, and the home as a workplace

My next project asks, what do we expect of employers and what do we expect from laws that govern their workplace behavior, especially within the ever-growing informal economy? Connecting ideas around regulation, law and governance of informal sites of labor such as the home, I delve deeper into variances in employer behavior and corresponding worker treatment. What drives the variance in employer behavior when situated inside the home? Drawing upon 22 months of ethnographic research with domestic workers in the global South and North, I show the lapses and contradictions in labor law when attempting to regulate the space of the home as a worksite. I then ask: what could bringing a work and organization studies approach to the home grant us, arguing that it is a site deserving of the theoretical and empirical rigor typically utilized when analyzing traditional work environments such as large firms and small businesses. This research aims to shed light on future efforts to formalize employment relationships in the home by introducing new determinants, such as informality and immigration law, which move beyond the superficial explanation of enforcement. It also moves forward our understanding of law as a site of power through which dynamics of gender, race, and marginality are negotiated. Furthermore, it expands our historical understanding of the pervasive logics of racialization that shape modern labor and employment relations across a number of industries. 

ESSENTIAL food system workers and care work

With $15,000 of support for a pilot project from our implementing partner Oxfam America, Rural Sociology colleagues and I are researching “Impacts of the COVID-19 Crisis on Domestic and Care Work among Essential Food System Workers.” Focusing on women, minority, and immigrant workers in four sectors of the U.S. food system—farm workers, meat processors, food delivery workers, and grocery store workers—this project investigates whether and how low-wage, essential workers are meeting domestic and care work needs during the COVID-19 crisis, and to what extent the pandemic may have altered or exacerbated pre-existing gender inequalities in the performance of this work.

Labor Research and Action Network (LRAN) GRANT

I recently won a New Scholars Grant for a project entitled, “Cleaning, Cooking and Caring in the Time of Covid-19.” The Covid-19 global health pandemic has had a devastating economic impact on most workers, and many domestic workers who lost their jobs due to shelter in place orders and employers working from home are immigrants and therefore do not qualify for unemployment benefits or any form of stimulus relief. This project thus aims to understand: What are the working conditions and challenges to health and safety for domestic workers in the time of Covid-19 in the state of Pennsylvania?

DIGITAL LABOR, GENDER, AND ORGANIZING

This Mexico City-based research project was recently published and investigates new strategies of labor organizing through online platforms in Mexico City. This project investigates how cooperatively-organized tech platforms for food delivery workers (los repartidores) extends recent work on the gig economy as an elite space of white male privilege. Recently, during exploratory stages of this project in Mexico City, I learned that women riders have split from the largely male collective to form their own group, and they are utilizing tech-based tools to warn fellow female riders of sites of sexual harassment and other dangerous areas in the city.