Everyday practice and the making of low-wage workers in the hotel industry of Cancun and the Mayan Riviera and manufacturing in the Bajio region, Mexico

Pool Illsley, E

Thesis

Everyday practice and the making of low-wage workers in the hotel industry of Cancun and the Mayan Riviera and manufacturing in the Bajio region, Mexico

Abstract:: This thesis contrasts everyday experiences of low-wage workers in hospitality in Cancun and the Mayan Riviera and export manufacturing in the Bajio, Mexico. I first explore how inequalities, linked to ethnicity, gender and rurality, are embedded and reproduced through public policy and corporate practice. I then examine how workers navigate these demanding and constrained worksites, and how their practices reproduce or challenge social inequalities. The thesis looks beyond training and management practices, to explore workers´ social life at work, an often invisibilised but critical dimension shaping their experience and the productive process.

Faced with the gender and ethnic assumptions reproduced by corporate practices and narratives, male workers in hospitality reinterpret service work as a masculine enterprise, justified by a duty to support their family. Men highlight their skill, strength and endurance, while rejecting and reinterpreting managerial accounts that frame low-wage (indigenous) workers as subservient and docile. Women and young people with further education, in contrast, find less affinity between their roles and expectations within and beyond the workplace, resulting in a less stable engagement with work. In the Bajio, women perform emotional labor to manage the affective deficits of conflict riddled factories, drawing on feminine scripts of care. In doing so, they take on additional burdens, unrecognized but fundamental to facilitate production. Men, in contrast, find less stability at work, constantly negotiating their loss of autonomy, power and the feminine connotations associated to the role.

The comparisons across groups and sectors reveal workplaces as social spaces, shaped by multiple pursuits and adaptations. They show that workers´ engagement is contingent, rather than an immediate outcome of training and corporate controls. Finally, the comparisons illuminate how elective affinities between demands at work and beyond it shape workers´ engagement with the workplace and, since these are dependent on positionality, contribute to reproducing inequalities.

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APA Style

Pool Illsley, E. (2024). Everyday practice and the making of low-wage workers in the hotel industry of Cancun and the Mayan Riviera and manufacturing in the Bajio region, Mexico [PhD thesis]. University of Oxford.

MLA Style

Pool Illsley, E. Everyday Practice and the Making of Low-Wage Workers in the Hotel Industry of Cancun and the Mayan Riviera and Manufacturing in the Bajio Region, Mexico. University of Oxford, 2024.

Chicago Style

Pool Illsley, E. 2024. “Everyday Practice and the Making of Low-Wage Workers in the Hotel Industry of Cancun and the Mayan Riviera and Manufacturing in the Bajio Region, Mexico.” PhD thesis, University of Oxford.
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