In the day-to-day work of leading professional sectors, ranging from finance to high-end culture, in global cities, a large share of jobs are low-paid and manual, and many are held by minority and by immigrant women. Even the most advanced professionals require clerical, cleaning, and repair workers for their state-of-the art offices, and their work necessitates truckers to bring software, but also toilet paper. Although these types of workers and jobs are never represented as part of the global economy, they are in fact part of the infrastructure involved in running and implementing the global economic system, including, in one of its most advanced forms, international finance. The rapid growth of the financial industry and of highly specialized services generates not only high-level technical and administrative jobs but also low wage unskilled jobs. In my research on New York and other cities I have found that between 30% and 50% of the workers in the leading sectors are actually low-wage workers.[1]

Global cities concentrate some of the key functions and resources for the management and coordination of the most advanced national and global economic processes. The growth of these activities has in turn produced a sharp turn in the demand for highly paid professionals. Both the firms and the lifestyles of their professionals generate a demand for low-paid service workers. Global cities are thus also sites for the incorporation of large numbers of low-paid women and immigrants into strategic economic sectors. This incorporation happens directly through the demand for mostly low-paid clerical and blue-collar service workers, such as janitors and repair workers. And it also happens indirectly through the consumption practices of high-income professionals, which in turn generates a demand for maids and nannies, as well as low-wage workers in high-end restaurants and shops.

Low-wage workers participate in leading professional sectors, but they do so under conditions which render them invisible. Firms and workers that may appear as though they have little connection to an urban economy, which is dominated by finance and specialized services, can in fact be an integral part of it. However, this fact can be invisible even to the workers themselves, given sharp differences in earnings, and often sex and racial/ethnic segmentation. While working in the professional sector was once a position situated for growth, this segmentation has the power to undermine such potential. Cultures of solidarity and skill have historically been important in organizing workers, strengthening the effect of being in a growth sector. Given the extreme exploitation common in low-wage work, these cultures of solidarity are critical for today's organizing, as became evident in the successful struggle by Justice for Janitors. Critical to their success was the preponderance of immigrants and their focus on only a few cities and sectors; after decades of struggle they succeeded in organizing janitors in several major U.S. cities.

Few jobs can be as disempowering as domestic work. Domestic workers employed by top level professionals in global cities make visible what is easily obscured in households less strategically positioned in the corporate economy. The top end of the corporate economy—highly-paid professionals and the corporate towers in which they work—is far easier to recognize as integral to the economic system than are truckers, janitors and other industrial service workers, or maids and nannies, even though all of them are clearly necessary to a functioning economy. However, they their participation is under strict conditions of social, wage, and often sex and racial/ethnic segmentation.

Growing Inequality as Part of the Advanced Economy

There are three processes of economic and spatial organization I see as central to addressing the question of inequality. One is the expansion of the producer services and corporate headquarters sector, and their consolidation into the economic core of major cities. While this sector may not account for the majority of jobs, it establishes a new regime of economic activity and the associated spatial and social transformations evident in major cities.

A second process is the downgrading of the manufacturing sector, a notion I use to describe a mode of political and technical reorganization of manufacturing, which should be distinguished from the decline and obsolescence of manufacturing activities. The downgraded manufacturing sector represents a mode of incorporation into the 'post-industrial' economy rather than a form of obsolescence. Downgrading is an adaptation to a situation where a growing number of manufacturing firms are competing with cheap imports, and, secondly, the profit-making capacities of manufacturing overall are modest compared with those of leading sectors such as telecommunications or finance and their sister industries.

The third process is the informalization of a growing array of economic activities, which encompasses certain components of the downgraded manufacturing sector. Like the latter, informalization represents a mode of reorganizing the production and distribution of goods and services under conditions where a significant number of firms have an effective local demand for their goods and services, but cannot compete with cheap imports. They also can't compete for space and other business needs with the new high-profit firms that are engendered by the advanced corporate service economy. Escaping the regulatory apparatus of the formal economy, even if partially, enhances the economic opportunities of such firms.

These diverse trends come together particularly strongly in cities. The table below shows the staggering poverty rates in our most successful cities, and how that is tied to race/ethnicity.

Table 1 Economic Inequality in Major U.S. Cities by Race, 2006. Source [2]

The following table gives us a larger perspective on how the upper 10 percent of income earners have an extremely high share of all national income: up to 45% in the 'prosperous' decades that began in the mid 1980s.[3]

Table 2 Income Share of the Top 10% of Earners, U.S., 1917-2005. Source [4]
*Income is defined as market income but excludes capital gains.

Domestic Work in High-Income Households

Two trends have come together in global cities over the last twenty years to produce a repositioning of what it means to be a domestic worker in high-level professional households. One is the growing demand for female professionals, and the other is the strong preference among both male and female professionals for living in the city, given their long hours and very demanding responsibilities in the workplace.

The result is a proliferation of what I like to refer to as "the professional household without a 'wife.'" The absence of the 'wife' happens precisely at a time when professional households need to function like clockwork, much like the infrastructure in global cities, because they are crucial to the functioning of globalized sectors. Indeed, these types of households should be reconceptualized as part of that infrastructure. Here the low-wage domestic worker is actually maintaining a strategic infrastructure, which has the effect of changing the valence of this work.

The demands placed on the top-level professional and managerial workforce in global cities are such that the usual methods for handling household tasks are inadequate. Most of the research on this subject has focused on the poor working conditions, exploitation, and multiple vulnerabilities of household workers.[5] These conditions are undeniable. But, analytically, what matters here is the strategic importance of well-functioning professional households for the leading globalized sectors in these cities and, hence, the importance of this new type of serving class.

Immigrant and minoritized women are a favored source for this type of work. Theirs is a mode of economic incorporation that makes their crucial role invisible. Being immigrant or minoritized citizens breaks an important connection: the nexus between being workers with an important function in the advanced global economy and the opportunity to become an empowered workforce. Historically, workers in major growth sectors were able to organize and gain ground. In this sense, we can say that being an 'immigrant woman' becomes the systemic equivalent of the offshore proletariat with its lack of power and lack of political visibility.

The fact that domestic work in high-level professional households is increasingly recognized as important for busy professionals and hence their firms' households, is suggested by the fact that it has become one growth sector of global staffing companies—even though it remains lowly paid. Some of these companies have expanded into household work to help the transnational professional workforce. For instance, Kelly Services, a Fortune 500 services company in global staffing, which operates offices in 25 countries, now has added a home care division, which provides a full range of help. It is particularly geared to people who need assistance with daily living but also for those who lack the time to take care of the household, which in the past would have been the responsibility of the 'mother/wife' figure.[6] More directly pertinent to the professional households discussed here is a growing range of global staffing organizations whose advertised services cover various aspects of daycare, including dropping off and picking up, as well as in-house tasks, from child minding to cleaning and cooking.[7] One international agency for nannies and au pairs, EF Au Pair Corporate Program, advertises directly to corporations, urging them to make the service part of their employment offers to potential employees to help them address household and childcare needs. Increasingly the emergent pattern is that the transnational professional class can access these services in the expanding network of global cities among which they are likely to circulate.[8]

New Frontier Zones: The Formation of New Political Actors

By way of conclusion let me focus briefly on the other side of the global city, a sort of new frontier where enormous mixes of people converge. Those who lack power, those who are disadvantaged, outsiders, discriminated minorities, can gain presence in such cities, presence vis-á-vis power and presence, vis-á-vis each other. This signals, for me, the possibility of a new form of politics centered in new types of political actors. It is not simply a matter of having or not having power. There are new hybrid bases from which to act. By using the term presence I try to capture some of this.

What presents itself as segregated or excluded from the mainstream core of a city is actually an increasingly complex political presence. The city is a far more concrete space for politics than the nation. It becomes a place where non-formal political actors can be part of the political scene in a way that is much more difficult at the national level. Nationally, politics needs to run through existing formal systems: whether the electoral political system or the judiciary (taking state agencies to court). Non-formal political actors are rendered invisible in the space of national politics. The space of the city accommodates a broad range of political activities—squatting, demonstrations against police brutality, fighting for the rights of immigrants (anti-deportation and asylum campaigns) and the homeless, the politics of culture and identity, gay and lesbian and queer politics. Much of this becomes visible on the street. Urban politics is more concrete, enacted by people rather than dependent on massive media technologies. Street level politics makes possible the formation of new types of political subjects that do not have to go through the formal political system. The Justice for Janitors campaigns have precisely insisted on making janitors present in the city via marches, celebrations and public campaigns to shame employers into recognizing the union as a legitimate bargaining agent.

In short, the global city is a strategic site for global corporate capital. But is also one of the sites where the formation of new claims by informal political actors can materialize and assume concrete forms.

Endnotes

1. Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001): Chapters 8-9. [Return to text]

2. Brookings Institute, "Living Cities Census Series," May 2008. [Return to text]

3. For a more extensive discussion, see Sassen (2008), "Two Stops in Today's New Global Geographies: Shaping Novel Labor Supplies and Employment Regimes," American Behavioral Scientist, vol.52, issue 3, pp. 457-496. [Return to text]

4. Lawrence Mishel, "Who's Grabbing All the New Pie?" Economic Policy Institute: Economic Snapshots, 1 August 2007. [Return to text]

5. There is a growing scholarship examining the return of the so-called "serving classes" in all the global cities around the world, made up largely of immigrant and migrant women. See: Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochschild, Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003); Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Ed., Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration and Domestic Workers, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); Natalia Ribas Mateos, The Mediterranean In The Age Of Globalization: Migration, Welfare, And Borders (Somerset, NJ: Transaction, 2005); Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo. Doméstica (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). [Return to text]

6. Homecare services include assistance with bathing and dressing, food preparation, walking and getting in and out of bed, medication reminders, transportation, housekeeping, conversation and companionship. While less directly related to the needs of high-income professional households, it is the case that many of these tasks used to be in the care of the typical housewife of the global north. [Return to text]

7. Very prominent in this market are the International Nanny and Au Pair Agency, headquartered in Britain; Nannies Incorporated, based in London and Paris; and the International Au Pair Association (IAPA) based in Canada. [Return to text]

8. See chapter 7 of Sassen (2001), and Heather Hindman, "Outsourcing Difference: Expatriate Training and the Disciplining of Culture," in Deciphering the Global: Its Scales, Spaces and Subjects, Saskia Sassen, Ed. (New York and London: Routledge, 2007): pp. 153-176. [Return to text]