Introducción al Control por Modelo Dinámico Inverso Ventajas y desventajas

Another way of grasping differences in participants’ employment destinations is probably the notion of ‘racialised gendering’ (Brah, 1993), as defined above. This is because needing to have the appropriate language skills was usually associated with having the appropriate appearance. For example, Jianah, a woman from Hong Kong, worked as a salesperson in a retail skin care store. She vouched that having a ‘Chinese face’ and ‘the ability to speak in Mandarin and Cantonese’ was the reason she got the job, since she was hired to target rich customers (tourists) from China, so her racialised appearance also played a role. She was employed in the retail store of an international skin care brand, not the ethnic economy, and did not mention working with other co-

ethnic employees. However, her ethnicity played a major role in her labour market participation. Jianah emphasised the importance of what I would term ‘aesthetic- linguistic labour’ within the spaces of consumption in London.

So, I know…we know what kind of jobs is[are] available in different countries… for instance, in London it’s always like being in sales, in either luxury brands…you [have]… like Chinese face and you have the ability to speak like Mandarin and Cantonese […] I am working in a skin care brand called Aesop as a sales person.

(Jianah, 31, Female, Hong Kong, Retail staff)

Her job requires racialised gender, since it is clearly a highly gendered sales role. Later, Jianah mentioned that the majority of staff at the store were women or gay men. She also puzzled over the idea of why heterosexual men would ever work in luxury sales – implying it as a ‘female job’. In this way, Jianah did not contest gendered expectations of her job role. The feminisation of retail sales also came through in the account of Donein, who had worked as a retail assistant, and told me that it was difficult for men to perform docility and touch in skin care:

You have to speak like softly… you have to pretend that..ermm..how to sell products properly...and so you you have to …how you use that cream and you have to put on your hand and then you can feel the texture and then its creamy and you can feel water inside going [to] your deep skin. Something like that.. yea you have to do like that..so actually it is the Chinese image even for the Asian men..but for the female I think that they…they can easily put down their character and then work.

(Donein, 26, Male, Hong Kong, Waiter)

At the time of interview, Donein was working as a cook and waiter. However, he had worked as a salesperson for the Body Shop (on a 3-4 months contract). He was uncomfortable with the experiences of feminising himself, and later moved into jobs which he thought were acceptable for Chinese men – cooks or waitors in restaurants. What is remarkable is how he associates feminisation and ‘Chinese image’ for retail sales in London – similar to Jianah’s account mentioned earlier.

Because it is retail...I mean London is always about retail, and when you talk about retail, the big spenders are always from China... So, it is just simply that if you know Chinese there’s an advantage. (Jianah)

As well as looking and speaking Chinese, Jianah performed touch as part of her job, by applying the cream on herself and inviting customers to touch and see how soft her skin was and also applying skin care products to customers. As she noted, ‘skin care is all about touching’. This ‘body work’ (Wolkowitz, 2002) performing touch on the customers was important to her work. Interestingly, Jianah’s case also illuminates the preference for diversity by employers in London, who may seek out ethnically defined and gendered ‘aesthetic labour’ (Warhurst & Nickson, 2009) in order to diversify their market for fashion consumption (Pettinger, 2004) and thereby make sales. What is worth noting from Jianah’s and Donein’s accounts are how luxury retail is patterned along ethnicity, gender and ‘aesthetic labour’ in London. Thus, it seems that first language on it’s own is not so important, because some employers are looking for appearance. Another example of a participant being placed in a job through explicitly racialised gendering was Melissa, whom I mentioned above, who also mentioned the gendering of the work she did:

Women can communicate better than guys did [do]. And for my these two jobs [in retail sales] we have to talk a lot with the customers and you have to build up like stable relations with some potential big spenders! So I think it’s more like you have to be approachable, you have to be friendly and you have to be like really willing to talk to people. And I think it’s a job for women.

(Melissa, 25, Female, Hong Kong, Customer service)

Melissa’s and Jianah’s accounts reveal participants’ internalisation of gendered and sexualized assumptions about who is suitable for luxury retail work.

Racialised gendering also applies to the women participants working in the feminised fields of education and health. As Glenn (1992) argues, with respect to the United States, white women are usually associated with the above fields, and obtain the more prestigious jobs, which are seen as involving professionalised caring, whereas racialised minorities are more concentrated in low-paid menial work in the same fields. Among the participants, only white women from the Old Commonwealth enjoyed well paid jobs in

health and education, although the reasons for this also involve access to network capital, discussed later (6.5).

All three respondents who reported working in human health and social work activities were women. Two respondents were from Australia – Kate, who worked as an NHS speech therapist, and Raisa, who worked as a personal carer to a quadriplegic patient; Anna, from Taiwan, worked as an au-pair. The Australian women were much more satisfied with their employment than Anna.

Kate recognised speech therapy as a feminized field, ‘even back home’ and sees her working life in the UK as a great success in providing what she wants.

So far I have done two different jobs. I am loving here. The first one was for about three months, and that was for Watford hospital…and that was just...well, actually most of the time I spent there, it was just one role on the Stroke ward. And then… I then said I was going to go travelling for a month, and they said ‘Okay, we’ll need to find someone to replace you for the time, had you not been here for a month, and then when I came back, I found my second job, which was at Edgware community hospital. Again, consistent, two different roles, but the same two roles, the whole week. And they are a lot more flexible with me taking hold of their time, so, so far, taken 3 weeks, 3 and a half weeks’ block and I have taken another 2-week block and I haven’t needed to find another job when I came back, I had gone back into the same job.

(Kate, 26, Female, Australia, NHS locum)

Kate has been able to find work consistent with her speech therapy qualification and which pays well enough to allow her to travel. Her location in the health sector of the UK speaks less of the phenomenon of ‘assembling a supply of migrant labour’ in the health and hospitality sectors (Batnitzsky & McDowell, 2013) and instead displays the transnational mobility of skilled professionals to London (Beaverstock & Hall, 2012). Similarly, Raisa was able to find work as a live-in carer despite having no qualifications towards it.

With the care work I think I do like…erm I know someone who does kind of similar work at home. And you need to be qualified...here you do not need to be qualified. Erm like they put you through like 5 days training kind of thing..but

its more.. since everybody is different and everybody’s injury is different, its more kind of like they’d rather you learn on the job ..rather than have this set idea of what everything does..which is good but yeah… you learn a lot.

(Raisa, 24, Female, Australia, Personal carer)

Interestingly, Raisa knew that she would not be able to do the same work in her home country without specific qalifications, although in London she could make use of agencies that preferred her gender, whiteness, and Aussie identity. She told me that care work is highly gendered since ‘women can work with both men and women whereas men can only work with men’.

However, Anna, from Taiwan, the third woman in health and care work, had a less enviable job working as an au-pair. She worked for twenty hours a week and looked after two children in a British household. According to her ‘the normal [pay] is £7.00’, although she got £8.00 per hour (for a total of twenty hours per week), since she gave the children informal piano and Mandarin lessons. But £80 per week was deducted by the family for her room and board, so she was only able to save a meagre £80.00 per week. The accounts of Kate, Raisa and Anna point to racialized gendering of human health and care work activities, and demonstrate how ‘localised-inflections’ of whiteness and nationality (Benson, 2015: 23) privilege some over the other.

Further, three participants (two women and one man) worked in education. Here again we find that only one of them had a well-paid, secure job. Jane, a white New Zealander, worked as supply teacher in primary schools:

So, it’s like a supply agency. Erm… I don’t know you call them different things around the world. So, in New Zealand, they’re called relief teachers, and in the UK, they call them supply teachers. So basically, if a teacher calls in sick for the day, the school will then call the agency... ‘So, we need a full teacher for the day, and then the agency will then call you… they call you between 7 and 7:30 in the morning…and they say, ‘are you up and ready? got a school for you – here’s the address’.

Although Jane had secured a diploma in primary teaching in New Zealand, she had no work experience as a teacher71_{. Regardless, she could get a supply teaching job through}

familiarity with a teaching agency which ‘recruit[s] Australians, New Zealanders and Canadians to come and work in the UK’.

In contrast, the other two participants who worked in education had less secure and less well-paid jobs. Harry, a Taiwanese man who had obtained a part-time job teaching Mandarin in a primary school, did this job only after a succession of jobs below his qualifications, and Cheryl, a woman from Hong Kong, who worked as administrative staff at a public health educational organisation, had also had periods without work. She had navigated a waitressing job, a charity internship and a customer service role at a student accommodation company before obtaining her job in education.

I did some casual work once I have been here like waitering [waitressing]… like doing event waitress which is kind of fun actually (…).so I go for…sign up for event waitressing and I think I just do less than 10 shifts and then I struggle in applying for jobs but at the end I decided to take up an internship in a small charity called like HostUK...I don’t know if you have heard of it (…) HostUK…and I worked for… I think just I worked for two… four weeks there and I got a full-time job.

(Cheryl, 27, Female, Hong Kong, Administrative staff)

Doing a charity internship (unpaid) was strategic to landing a job for Cheryl, since she could demonstrate her office experience in the UK. She later secured a stable six-month contract with the educational organisation. At the time of the interview, she was also planning to take up a part-time position with a human rights organisation, as cover for maternity leave.

Overall, and albeit from a small number of cases, it appeared that the secure and skilled jobs in health and education were mostly available for those from Old Commonwealth. In contrast, East Asians (Anna and Cheryl) did several unpaid/low-skilled jobs before they secured work in health/education, and often simultaneously worked on part-time or temporary contracts, with little stability.

‘Racialised gendering’ also applies to some of the masculinised jobs obtained by young men. For instance, Peter, who is a marketing graduate, told me about the relationship between his Aussie identity and finding jobs in London:

Finding a marketing job is hard …like for manual labour they love Aussies… because we work hard…so yea it does work,it does help me being an Aussie a little bit.

(Peter, 26, Male, Australia, Bar worker)

In Peter’s account (above), he acknowledges that stereotypes of (white) Australian men also influence the jobs they are offered – and which they seek out. ‘Social representations’, to use Brah’s term, about being an Aussie in London had influenced Peter to apply for bar work in an Aussie-themed pub, and he may have had to perform a kind of ‘aesthetic-linguistic labour’ as part of his job role.

To summarise, the respondents who found jobs in ethnic economies and ‘ethnicised fringes’ of mainstream economy were largely concentrated in lower-skilled jobs in retail sales and restaurants. Racialised gendering was also evident in these jobs, with women concentrated in retail sales, and men in restaurants. Lack of English language proficiency pushed the participants into jobs that required the knowledge of particular languages and, sometimes, a particular physical appearance.Among the jobs in health and care work, which was gendered, white Old Commonwealth participants got better pay and better opportunities to combine travel with work – demonstrating ‘localised-inflections’ of privilege (Benson, 2015: 23) in London that must be analysed through networks that sustain such privilege. It is in this context that I focus on network capital and strategies to access work among the participants.

6.5 ‘Network capital’ and strategies to access work

Earlier in this chapter, I discussed the concept of ‘temporariness’ (Robertson, 2014), a common positionality of YMS participants given that their visa is only valid for two years. However, I then argued that it is inadequate in itself to understand their labour market position, given the diverse work experiences of my participants and the generally more advantaged position of those from the Old Commonwealth. I also considered the concept of ‘network capital’ (Elliot & Urry, 2010) and its potential to make sense of the capital endowments at the disposal of participants from different countries. On the basis

of their labour market participation and its polarisation, I argued that ‘network capital’ mediated other, analytically prior and historically previous forms of relative advantage and disadvantage, in terms of nationality, gender, first language and ethnicity. In this section, I will return to these discussions and critically review the concept of ‘network capital’, by examining four types of network capital used by participants to access work: relocation companies; recruitment agencies (both formal), familiarity and co-ethnic networks (both informal).