Labor Market | nccr – on the move

To Go or Not to Go: Unpacking Mobility Decisions in Mumbai During the COVID-19 Lockdown of 2020

Annique Lombard — Mon, 07 Feb 2022 17:30:54 +0000

The hastily announced lockdown in March 2020 by the Indian government precipitated a wave of uncertainty and fear among urban residents living in auto-constructed settlements. In subsequent weeks, images poured in of people undertaking arduous journeys across hundreds of miles to try and get back to their native villages – a process that was dubbed the ‘migrant crisis’ by the mainstream media. This coinage, however, hides a number of differences in the positionality of city residents in terms of housing, employment, access to credit, political clientelism and family structure, factors which are themselves circumscribed by caste, religion, gender and ethnicity. Drawing on qualitative research in two separate field sites within Mumbai, this paper seeks to provide insight into the way choices on staying, leaving and returning to the city were made by various informal workers at the individual, family and community levels. While offering a chronological account of how the lockdown unfolded in the city, it makes three central observations. First, the status and relationship between landlord and tenant within the autoconstructed settlement was a key axis along which migratory decisions were negotiated. Second, the unforeseen gendered fallouts of punitive state action structured certain people’s desperation to leave. Finally, the collective psychology of fear and safety worked more along the lines of caste, religion and ethnic community rather than friends and neighbors. Taken together, these insights aim to emphasize the need for more granular categories and new vocabularies to understand the evolving relationship between mobility, social structures and precarious forms of urban labor.

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Worker Cooperatives’ Potential for Migrant Women‘s Self-Empowerment. Insights from a Case Study in New York City

Annique Lombard — Tue, 29 Jun 2021 11:37:07 +0000

Many migrant women in New York City face structural discrimination and administrative hurdles that complicate their access to safe and well-paid labor. Worker cooperatives have been shown to reduce the precarity and economic exclusion of marginalized groups. However, although much is known about worker cooperatives’ economic potential for improving workers’ lives, other social effects remain far less well explored. The present research contributes to exploring this gap by examining how joining a worker cooperative empowers migrant women in their everyday lives. We apply the concept of self-empowerment to several spheres of the everyday lives of migrant women. At an empirical level, the study focuses on migrant women who are members of nine cleaning- or care-worker cooperatives in New York City. The data were gathered using a participatory research approach and consist of interviews, participant observations, and a quantitative survey. The findings are that worker cooperatives have empowering effects on migrant women beyond the sphere of paid work. Although the additional unpaid workload as co-owners of cooperatives represents an extra burden for many migrant women, they now have better wages, more flexibility, and safer workplaces. Furthermore, they acquire a range of leadership skills, enlarge their social network beyond their ethnic communities, and earn increased esteem as co-owners of businesses. Through worker-ownership, migrant women thus increase their economic, cultural, social, and symbolic capital, which enables them to exercise more agency not only in their paid work but also in their families and leisure time.

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Why Do Employers Sometimes Prefer Minority Candidates? Theoretical Review and Empirical Test

Annique Lombard — Wed, 07 Oct 2020 22:27:02 +0000

Correspondence tests on ethnic discrimination in the labor market usually focus on how often native majority candidates and ethnic minority candidates are invited for job interviews on an aggregated level. Cases in which only minority candidates are invited for an interview have mostly been disregarded as noise and not analyzed further. In this paper, we argue that employers who prefer minority over majority candidates may have good reasons to do so. We propose several theoretical mechanisms that explain why it would be desirable to hire individuals with a non-native background and test these expectations quantitatively with correspondence test data that was collected in Switzerland between October 2017 and December 2018. We find partial support for our expectations: in particular, in urban and thus likely more international firm settings; and among owners doing the recruitment themselves in the context of small enterprises, where close supervision is possible, we identified employers who are more willing to “take the risk” and to invite only minority applicants for a job interview. We argue that employer behavior is likely to be complex and that research should analyze instances of minority preferences more systematically.

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R.I.C.E. – An Integrated Model of Welfare Deservingness Perceptions

Annique Lombard — Mon, 06 Apr 2020 12:40:18 +0000

Research on deservingness perceptions is currently one of the most vibrant areas in the field of welfare state analysis. In this manuscript, we critically assess the state-of-the-art in this field of research and, in particular, the two dominant theoretical approaches, the C.A.R.I.N. framework and the ‘deservingness heuristics’ model. In doing so, we identify some important problems, including conceptual ambiguities and an insufficient explicit integration of the two theoretical models. We suggest a revised and integrated theoretical framework, which we believe provides a way to resolve these issues. Our model suggests four criteria to inform deservingness perceptions: Reciprocity, Identity, Control, and Effort (R.I.C.E.). We provide evidence for our model in the form of vignette experiments administered to online panels in the US and Germany.

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De-Qualification and De-Emancipation among Recently Arrived Highly Skilled Immigrant Women in Switzerland

Annique Lombard — Wed, 12 Jun 2019 08:16:40 +0000

Immigrants face numerous obstacles to integrating themselves into the Swiss labor market. One issue is the underutilization of skills, qualifications, and knowledge, which results in a brain waste for the migrants as well as for the Swiss society. This study examines the determinants of dequalificationand de-emancipation among the recently arrived highly skilled immigrant women in Switzerland. Using data from the Migration-Mobility Survey carried out in 2016 by the nccr – on the move, bivariate and multivariate statistical analyses are conducted with multinomial models. Being overeducated is used to determine the de-qualification process, and being excluded from the labor market to grasp the de-emancipation phenomenon. The main variables tested are the reason to migrate with the timeline of the partner’s migration, births of children with the timeline of migration and the region of origin. Recently arrived highly skilled immigrant women who arrived for family reasons, who have children and who are from emerging countries are significantly more likely to be excluded from the labor market. Furthermore, they have more risk of being overeducated if they come from Latin America and non-frontier countries of Europe. The findings indicate that de-qualification is mostly explained by the region of origin, whereas de-emancipation results, on the one hand, from the family situation of women and their status as tied migrants and, on the other hand, from discrimination towards the origin. There is an urgent need to betterunderstand the factors behind the deficit in labor force integration among immigrants and particularly women immigrants as well as to enhance the situation of those groups. Indeed, in Switzerland, discrimination towards migratory background is strengthened by being a woman and being from a specific country of origin. Therefore, the accretion of disadvantages leads to higher risks of underexploited capacities and knowledge.

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