New Jobs, New Workers, and New Inequalities

Abstract

While sociologists have shown how employers contribute to occupational segregation along lines of race, gender, and nativity,little attentionhas been paidtounpackingwhyemployersengagein thosepractices. We takeonthis gap through a case study of hired labor relations on Wisconsin dairy farms, which have become segregated along lines of nativity and race in recent years. We ask how these workplaces have become segregated, what employers’ roles in this process have been, and why, in particular, employers have engaged in practices that contribute to workplace inequalities. We find that employers engage in practices that leave immigrant workers clustered in the low-end jobs for a complex array ofreasons: to maintain profits withina changing industrycontext, meet their own middle-class aspirations, comply with their peers’ middle-class lifestyle expectations, manage their own concerns about immigration policing, assert their own class identity, justify the privileges that they and their U.S.-born employees enjoy on the farm, and maintain the advantages they have gained. We argue that sociologists seeking to explain employers’ roles in occupational segregation must examine not only the stories employers tell about different worker groups but also the stories they tell about themselvesand the contexts that shapetheir aspirations and identities. Doing so provides more complete explanations forwhyoccupationalsegregationoccurs anddoesthe importantworkofbringingwhitenessintothe spotlight and showing how privilege is quietly constructed and defended. Keywords: occupational segregation; workplace inequality; symbolic boundaries; immigrant workers; illegality. Work in “America’s Dairyland” is changing hands. Rural Wisconsin has long reflected the pastoral model of small-scale family farms established by German and Scandinavian immigrants in the 1800s (DuPuis 2002; Gilbert and Akor 1988; Janus 2011). Yet our research shows that the state’s dairy farms are expanding in size and increasingly hiring immigrants from Latin America, many lacking legal authorization to be in the United States, to do the low-level, arduous jobs of milking cows. Having hired these immigrant workers into nearly half of all dairy jobs over just the past10 years, dairyfarmers arethusplayinganimportant roleinrural Wisconsin’s emergence as a new Latino immigrant destination (APL 2011). In this article, we use this case as a timely opportunity to explain why employers organize workers in unequal ways. In so doing, we build upon scholarship that identifies how employers contribute to occupational segregation. Philip Moss and Chris Tilly (2001), Roger Waldinger and