The Other Workers in the Advanced Corporate Economy
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.
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