Once associated with a relatively stable and desirable stratum of public sector jobs, housekeeping, laundry, food services and other non-essential health care services in Canada now represent a rapidly expanding sector of low-paid and precarious jobs located on the bottom rungs of the urban service economy. The swift and dramatic conversion of thousands of unionized public sector jobs has occurred alongside the continuation of deeply racialized and gendered employment practices. Socially disadvantaged groups such as immigrant women, women of colour and single women are disproportionately represented in the newly privatized sector of economically downgraded jobs.

This paper focuses on the efforts of one trade union, the Hospital Employees’ Union, to unionize low-paid health support services workers employed by subcontracted firms in Vancouver between 2002 and 2009. Specifically, it examines how labour unions, which are conventionally oriented towards redistributive struggles, have attempted to expand their organizational repertoires by challenging the economic and cultural dimensions of social injustice for disadvantaged groups of workers.

My research findings suggest that labour unions can adopt innovative strategies to revalue the worth of low-paid immigrant women’s labour, but their ability to do so is hampered by the intensification of conflicts and divisions between higher-paid and lower-paid union members. My findings highlight that studies of union politics in neoliberal employment regimes require more nuanced attention to the emotional politics of unionism in two-tiered labour markets divided along gendered, racial-ethnic and public-private lines.

Biographical note

Jennifer Jihye Chun is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and a Faculty Fellow at the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests are animated by questions about the dynamics of power, injustice and social change under global capitalism. Her areas of specialization include comparative labor studies; culture, power and politics; transnational migration and critical ethnography.

Her book entitled, Organizing at the Margins: The Symbolic Politics of Labor in South Korea and the United States (Cornell University Press, 2009), was selected as a finalist for the 2009 C. Wright Mills Award and received an Honorable Mention for the Best Book Award from the ASA Labor and Labor Movements Section.

Currently, she is working on a second book project that examines the emotional and organizational dimensions of revaluing immigrant women’s labour in two cities - Vancouver and San Francisco.