A Revolutionary and a Puritan

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Mack
Keyword(s):  
Working Conditions ◽  
Social Distance ◽  
Immigrant Workers ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Ethnicity And Race ◽  
Meatpacking Industry

This chapter analyzes Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle to elucidate his sensory politics and his proposed indictment of industrial capitalism. The Jungle is a fictionalized account of Chicago's meatpacking industry and its appalling working conditions. Sinclair's exposés shocked readers' senses, turning their stomachs with descriptions of rats tossed into sausage hoppers. However, his novel also had much to say about how work in the meat factories dulled the senses of their workers. This chapter examines how Sinclair drew lines of class, ethnicity, and race in sensory terms in order to simultaneously express sympathy and solidarity as well as repulsion and social distance from immigrant workers in Back of the Yards. It also considers how Sinclair described the salvation—socialism—of the characters in The Jungle in non-sensory terms, arguing that he neglects to explain how socialism promised to rejuvenate the senses.

Black Athenians: Making and Resisting Racialized Symbolic Boundaries in the Greek Street Market

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-317
Author(s):  
Max Papadantonakis
Keyword(s):  
Social Distance ◽  
Symbolic Interactionism ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Immigrant Workers ◽  
Symbolic Boundaries ◽  
Stigma And Discrimination ◽  
Interaction Order ◽  
Micro Level ◽  
Using Data ◽  
Of Greece

In this article, I show how groups and individuals maintain racialized symbolic boundaries at the micro-level of personal interactions. Using data collected during an ethnographic study in Athens, Greece, where I worked as a fruit vendor in a street market, I detail how local Greek vendors and immigrant workers use language, gesture, olfaction, along with their interpretations of faith and sexuality to reproduce patterns of social distance that allow for racialized stigma and discrimination. I apply the framework of symbolic interactionism and draw from literature on symbolic boundaries to explore how immigrant street market workers experience and resist racialization throughout the interaction order. I show that racialization underlies perceptions of the immigrant “other,” especially in the case of Greece where race is often ignored as a crucial factor.

The Power of the Dead’s Place

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael K. Rosenow
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Industrial Society ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Cultural Institution ◽  
Cultural Spaces ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ethnicity And Race

This chapter examines how workers used the rituals of death to interpret, accommodate, and resist their living and working conditions during the period 1873–1913. It first traces the history of the American cemetery, and especially its rise as a cultural institution, before turning to Chicago's cemeteries as social and cultural spaces on the city's landscape. It then discusses how broader tensions in industrial society were reflected in the processes of death and burial. It also looks at the ways that Chicago's working classes turned to cemeteries to extend the terrain of contemplating the consequences of industrialization; the importance of religion, ethnicity, and race in the establishment and use of Chicago's cemeteries; and how Waldheim Cemetery became a space that linked anarchism, the labor movement, and radicalism in Chicago to similar movements across the globe. Finally, the chapter cites the case of the Haymarket memorial in Waldheim to show how the meanings of life and death came to be expressed in Chicago's cemeteries as the nation marched into the twentieth century.

scholarly journals The Coronavirus Crisis and Migration: The Pan-Syndemic and Its Impact on Migrants

Two Homelands ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (54) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabio Perocco
Keyword(s):  
Health Inequalities ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Immigrant Workers ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Social Origins ◽  
Health Crisis ◽  
And Migration ◽  
Novel Coronavirus

he coronavirus crisis exposed and exacerbated inequalities that already existed. Simultaneously, it has transformed inequalities, changing old ones, generating new ones, intertwining the old and the new. A test of these processes, in particular, of the differentiated impact of the health crisis, may be observed in migration. After examining the ecological-social origins of the novel coronavirus and the COVID-19 related racial health inequalities, the article analyzes the consequences of the pandemic on the health and working conditions of immigrant workers, asylum seekers, emigrants in travel. It highlights the syndemic situation affecting them.

Regulating domestic and care work in Italy: Assessing the relative influence of the familistic model today

2021 ◽  
pp. 026101832110645
Author(s):  
Luisa De Vita ◽  
Antonio Corasaniti
Keyword(s):  
Working Conditions ◽  
Care Work ◽  
Immigrant Workers ◽  
Family Management ◽  
The Public ◽  
Full Responsibility ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Partners ◽  
Depth Interviews ◽  
Peculiar Case

The domestic and care sector continues to display some problematic aspects due to its complexity, especially in terms of regulation. Italy represents a unique and peculiar case, where domestic and care work remains firmly under the purview of family management, and the work itself is entrusted mainly to immigrant workers. This paper aims to investigate, through in-depth interviews with representatives of both unions and employers’ associations, how the key actors involved in regulating domestic and care work intervene, understanding what kind of measures they take and what systems of relations/exchange exist among the different players involved in this process. The research sought to map strategies at a more macro level. While some of the actions undertaken by the social partners seem promising, there is still a lack of full responsibility for care at the public level, with marked asymmetries with respect to both services provided and working conditions.

Sensory Overload

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Mack
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Sensory Perception ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
Social Difference ◽  
Social Distinction ◽  
The Senses ◽  
A Site ◽  
Sensory Overload ◽  
The City ◽  
Chicago Fire Of 1871

This chapter examines the Chicago Fire of 1871 as a multisensory spectacle—an object of curiosity and marvel. More specifically, it considers how the fire destabilized sensory perception and threw up an array of strange sensations that mocked the civic elite's attempts to control Chicago's sensory landscape. After providing a background on the fire and describing its immediate experiential aspects, the chapter discusses the disaster's impact on survivors and how they represented that impact in terms of social difference. It also looks at the relief and rebuilding efforts that followed and suggests that the firestorm of 1871 called into question Chicago's future as a site of modern industrial capitalism. It explains how the fire tested the senses of victims to expose the connections that elites drew between sensory refinement and social distinction. Finally, it shows how the fire lent credence to the notion that social class expressed itself through the senses, a notion used by elites to promote their vision of civic order even while the city burned.

Analyzing Further Predictors of Correctional Officer Professional Orientations: The Role of Turnover Intentions

2017 ◽  
Vol 62 (6) ◽  
pp. 1668-1693
Author(s):  
Frank Valentino Ferdik ◽  
Phillip Hills
Keyword(s):  
Working Conditions ◽  
Social Distance ◽  
Turnover Intentions ◽  
Correctional Officers ◽  
Correctional Officer ◽  
Regression Equations ◽  
Questionnaire Data ◽  
Maximum Security ◽  
Correctional Policy

Four professional orientations to which correctional officers can ascribe have been identified in extant literature, and they include the counseling roles, concern for corruption of authority, social distance, and punitive ideologies. Studies have generally found officer demographics and correctional working conditions to be significant predictors of these orientations. No study to date, however, has examined the predictive influence of officer voluntary resignation intentions. Linear regression equations using questionnaire data from a statewide population of maximum security correctional officers ( N = 649) were therefore estimated to explore whether officer desires to terminate their employment accounted for variance in their self-reported orientations. Stronger turnover intentions shared statistically significant associations with three orientations, including negatively predicting the counseling roles and positively predicting the punitive ideology. Implications for correctional policy are addressed.

Polish Workers in Ireland

2008 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Turner ◽  
Daryl D'Art ◽  
Christine Cross
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Immigrant Workers ◽  
General Picture ◽  
Low Level ◽  
Rapid Economic Growth ◽  
Level Of Satisfaction ◽  
High Level

Since 1990, Ireland has experienced rapid economic growth and a corresponding increase in immigrant workers, particularly of Polish origin. On the basis of survey evidence, the relatively low level of unionization among Polish workers is examined. Although attitudes to trade unions are positive, there is a high level of satisfaction generally with work, pay, and conditions among Polish immigrant workers. A sense of injustice or grievance appears to be largely absent with regard to either pay and working conditions or their treatment by employers, supervisors, and immediate Irish workers. The general picture is one of a relatively contented proletariat.

Chicken Doctors and the Trials of Transcendence

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 65-100
Author(s):  
Geovani Ramírez
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Immigrant Workers ◽  
Illness Narrative ◽  
Structural Vulnerability ◽  
Industry Chain ◽  
Working Environments ◽  
Labor Legislation ◽  
Poultry Workers ◽  
Journal Entries

This autoethnographic, multidisciplinary illness narrative describes the working conditions of a crew of Latina/o chicken workers (gallineras/os) in North Carolina and explores how these laborers respond to and make meaning of their brutal and dehumanizing work. Transporting us back to a pre-pandemic era, this project seeks to demonstrate how systemic conditions, exacerbating health disparities among poultry workers during COVID-19, are, in fact, endemic and will persist after a post-pandemic US society. Engaging with medical anthropological scholarship that investigates the intersections between Latina/o labor, legislation, and health, this project employs structural violence and structural vulnerability frameworks to investigate the network of structures that contribute to poor health outcomes among Latina/o immigrant workers. “Chicken Doctors” explores how disabling working conditions and their attending legislative and occupational policies debilitate Latina/o immigrant workers, and it argues that gallinera/o labor must be understood as a form of illness, as their toil leaves them with daily pains and lasting impairments. The project draws from an interview with the author’s father, who worked as a gallinera/o laborer and manager for over two decades, as well as from the author’s own observations and journal entries written during his work as a gallinera/o. The piece details the incapacitating gallinera/o labor required to move and vaccinate chickens, describes the toxic working environments, and reflects upon the collective strategies for transcendence that gallineras/os employ to survive their conditions. While this project unveils the spirited resilience of gallineras/os, who make up an essential link in the poultry industry chain but are less conspicuous than their meatpacking counterparts, it especially seeks to expose the network of injustices surrounding their labor.

scholarly journals A qualitative study about immigrant workers' perceptions of their working conditions in Spain

2009 ◽  
Vol 63 (11) ◽  
pp. 936-942 ◽  
Author(s):  
E Q Ahonen ◽  
V Porthe ◽  
M L Vazquez ◽  
A M Garcia ◽  
M J Lopez-Jacob ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Study ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Immigrant Workers
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