Longing for “Normal” Post‐Fordism: Cape Verdean Labor‐Power on a Lisbon Periphery in Crisis

Abstract

AbstractStarting in the late 1970s, Cape Verdean labor‐power became indispensable in a number of sectors of the Portuguese economy, no longer merely filling gaps but serving as a vital part of the workforce in key industries such as civil construction and cleaning services. Assuming a central role in the productive process, these largely “low‐skilled” immigrants came to form a reserve army of labor in the fragmented service‐sector economy of the Lisbon Metropolitan Area. Although they come from diverse backgrounds and belong to different migratory phases, Cape Verdeans continue to be concentrated in the most precarious and poorly paid strata of the Portuguese labor market. The tenuous situation of most Cape Verdean immigrants has made them especially vulnerable to the post‐2010 economic downturn and the accompanying IMF‐mandated structural changes and liberalization measures. In this paper, I examine the trajectory of four Cape Verdean workers in the Portuguese labor market prior to 2010 and during the current “crisis economy.” While these accounts differ in the details, they are alike in how my interviewees have seen their daily lives become more difficult and insecure. In addition to exploring this sequence of events, I contextualize these case studies within the extant literature on precarity. In this regard, I identify a temporal gap in concept of precarity as it has been theorized to date. Whereas most scholars juxtapose the stability of the Fordist period with the precariousness of our post‐Fordist times, I wish to highlight how my interviewees simply long for a return to pre‐crisis post‐Fordism, not Fordism per se.