The Hands that Feed Us: Endemic Precarity and Pandemic Resistance Among Migrant Food Processing Workers

Simple item page
dc.contributor.advisorScott, Ellen
dc.contributor.authorLoustaunau, Lola
dc.date.accessioned2022-10-26T19:06:22Z
dc.date.issued2022-10-26
dc.description.abstractThis dissertation research examines how precarity was experienced and resisted by migrant food processing workers in the Pacific Northwest, before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Challenging the exceptionalizing narratives of precarity that emerged during the global health crisis the research brings to the front what I called endemic precarity: the usually uneventful and unrecognized bodily and emotional harm and maiming that is endemic to the industry and that was constantly present in the workers’ own words and formal complaints, even at the height of the pandemic. Drawing upon interviews with 60 migrant and second generation workers employed in 20 food processing companies in Oregon and Washington, the content analysis of all the complaints filed with LNI from March 1st to December 31st 2020 regarding these companies, and interviews with 15 managers, labor and community organizers and others stakeholders, this research 1) reconstructs workers’ migratory and employment trajectories to the Pacific Northwest; 2) exposes the organized disregard for their bodies inside and outside the packing plants before COVID-19; and 3) discusses the particular shape that this previous endemic precarity took in the midst of the pandemic, and the ways in which migrant and now “essential” food processing workers organized collectively to resist their disposability and to be able to build forms of collective care.en_US
dc.description.embargo2023-10-17
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1794/27784
dc.language.isoen_US
dc.publisherUniversity of Oregon
dc.rightsAll Rights Reserved.
dc.subjectcollective organizingen_US
dc.subjectCOVID-19en_US
dc.subjectemotionsen_US
dc.subjectfood processingen_US
dc.subjectlaboren_US
dc.subjectmigrantionen_US
dc.titleThe Hands that Feed Us: Endemic Precarity and Pandemic Resistance Among Migrant Food Processing Workers
dc.typeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
thesis.degree.disciplineDepartment of Sociology
thesis.degree.grantorUniversity of Oregon
thesis.degree.leveldoctoral
thesis.degree.namePh.D.

Files

Original bundle
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
Thumbnail Image
Name:
Loustaunau_oregon_0171A_13458.pdf
Size:
37.63 MB
Format:
Adobe Portable Document Format
Download

Collections

Theses and Dissertations
Sociology Theses and Dissertations