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Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7712-4288
AccessType
Campus-Only Access for Five (5) Years
Document Type
dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Program
Sociology
Year Degree Awarded
2022
Month Degree Awarded
September
First Advisor
Eve Weinbaum
Second Advisor
Cedric de Leon
Subject Categories
Work, Economy and Organizations
Abstract
Sociologists have argued that service workers are “invisible” and this invisibility negatively affects their status, power, and subjective experience in the workplace. Drawing on over 2000 hours of participant observation research as well as extensive interviews with 50 janitorial workers in a large public school system, I find that within systems of increased corporatization, workers in lower-status occupations experience a spectrum of negative slights reflective of inequitable power relationships within their organizations, and these experiences differ according to social characteristics of the individual worker including position title, education, skills, gender, and race. Certain workers use sources of privilege to minimize negative slights and disrespect in the workplace – but those privileges are not available to all. Furthermore, rather than workers being invisible, I find that the corporation itself becomes invisible to the people who work there. While we typically consider invisibility on an individual level, I analyze the structure of the workplace to illustrate how unequal power relationships impact workers, from the janitors to the managers. Alongside growing privatization in the public sector, I find a decrease in the presence of upper management, and an increase in workers presenting an apathetic front – a public form of disengagement from workplace and political issues, that reveals an underlying sense of powerlessness rather than true apathy. This dissertation analyzes how intersectional identities can exacerbate and obscure certain forms of oppression and invisibility, making collaborative resistance and self-advocacy more difficult, and highlighting the need for solidarity in the workplace.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/30824381
Recommended Citation
Perri, Brandi L., "The Unseen Worker? Rethinking Who and What is Invisible in the Blue-Collar Workplace" (2022). Doctoral Dissertations. 2713.
https://doi.org/10.7275/30824381
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/2713
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.