Neoliberal subcontracting creates undocumented workers whose legal invisibility lets employers evade obligations

Evidence

The labor flows required by globalization are not always accompanied by citizenship rights. Saskia Sassen has described how the spread of globalized employment patterns has resulted in the proliferation of low-paying jobs often taken up by immigrants. In addition to casualization, neoliberal economics ensures that “a large array of activities that were being carried out in large-scale, vertically integrated firms in the postwar decades are today increasingly characterized by small-scale, flexible specialization and subcontracting.” Shortcuts taken to avoid national insurance and tax are common. Such is the fate of Asma’s husband: “The subcontractor who had employed Inam as a janitor argued similarly: there was no Inam Haque, since he had taken the job using a fake name and social security number. The subcontractor had insisted on this pretense of legality, but now used it as an excuse to deny Asma help” (70). To add insult to injury, Inam will not be named on the official memorial for the same reason. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 291

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• DEFINE: Concrete example of ‘casualization’ and ‘flexible specialization’ through Sassen and the Inam Haque case.
• XREF: Connects to Hamid’s Changez (The Reluctant Fundamentalist) and the precarity of immigrant labor as a theme the reader already engages.