Networks of Exploitation: Immigrant Labor and the Restructuring of Janitorial Work in Los Angeles.

In this paper, I examine the incorporation of Mexican, Salvadoran and Guatemalan undocumented immigrants into the Los Angeles commercial real estate janitorial industry through social networks in order to illustrate the need to examine who benefits from social networks, to what degree and under which circumstances. Scholars have argued that social networks are a form of social capital that is widely available to immigrants, focusing on the benefits of social networks in the job search process. However, the use of social networks in this case took place within an informalization of employment relations that brought negative consequences for the workers. Combining quantitative analysis of census data with qualitative analysis of work history interviews, I illustrate how social networks facilitated cohort succession and organized the recruitment process in ways that unequally benefited building owners, supervisors and workers and among workers, men and women. I then link the recruitment process to changes in the labor process, explaining how supervisors extracted more labor from workers by violating labor laws. This exploitation was centrally aided by parallel processes of feminization and racialization as the supervisors assigned a greater set of more menial tasks to both women and men and threatened workers based on their precarious citizenship status. This case study suggests that scholars should pay more analytical attention to the relationship between recruitment efforts and changes in the labor process as well as the broader economic and political context within which social networks are deployed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]