Abstract
Restaurants and other interactive service workplaces in the United States serve as labor niches for two very different kinds of workers doing different tasks. Immigrant Latinos primarily work “back-of-the-house” jobs doing manual tasks, while class-privileged whites work “front-of-the-house” jobs performing customer-facing tasks. How do these social and structural cleavages between dual labor niches affect the workplace dynamic? Drawing on ethnographic research in upscale Los Angeles restaurants, I describe the closed boundaries between these distinct labor niches and the valuable bridging between them performed by certain workers who are able to ease social tensions and buffer the service labor process. I discuss the implications of these findings for the study of contemporary immigrant labor niches and the nature of the opportunities within them and between them.
- © 2018 Russell Sage Foundation. Wilson, Eli R. 2018. “Bridging the Service Divide: Dual Labor Niches and Embedded Opportunities in Restaurant Work.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 4(1): 115–27. DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2018.4.1.07. I would like to thank Rubén Hernández-León, Roger Waldinger, Neil Gong, three anonymous reviewers, and this issue‖s journal editors, Susan Eckstein and Giovanni Peri, for their comments on previous drafts of this article. Any remaining errors are my own. Direct correspondence to: Eli R. Wilson at eli.revelle.wilson{at}gmail.com, 264 Haines Hall, 375 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA 90095.
Open Access Policy: RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences is an open access journal. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.