The Hands that Feed Us: Endemic Precarity and Pandemic Resistance Among Migrant Food Processing Workers
Date
2022-10-26
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University of Oregon
Abstract
This 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.
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Keywords
collective organizing, COVID-19, emotions, food processing, labor, migrantion