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>> 127 5 Putting “the Family” to Work Managerial Discourses of Control in the Immigrant Service Sector Miabi Chatterji One blustery December evening in 2007, I went to a small Indian restaurant in Manhattan’s “Curry Hill” neighborhood. This small neighborhood centered around Lexington Avenue is home to South Asian restaurants, grocery stores, clothing shops, and other immigrant-oriented businesses. That evening, I was speaking to four restaurant managers , men in their thirties and forties, all migrants from India, who currently run businesses in New York and New Jersey. All four have run ventures in South Asian commercial enclaves in the New York metropolitan area, from Jersey City to Curry Hill to Jackson Heights, Queens. While the manager of our host restaurant oversaw the dinner rush and stopped by our table to chat and make sure we were comfortable, the other three managers and I discussed their experiences in the United States and in the restaurant industry. 128 > 129 in the service sector in New York City, I in turn studied the dynamics of this metaphorical family of the immigrant-run business. What kind of family is being invoked, and to whose benefit? I examine ways in which workers respond to the rhetoric of the family at work, variously resisting or accommodating this language. I argue that the family is not just a convenient metaphor but a managerial tool that attempts to privatize economic relations and screen them from public view and regulation. The family discourse is one strategy that managers employ to resist legal regulation and enforcement of standards in their industry. The lack of regulation and the level of informality in the service sector in the United States have deep effects on the kinds of work hierarchies that are able to emerge and remain in place over time—informal hierarchies that are usually based on race, national origin, gender, and other ascribed characteristics. Finally, I observe the ways that managers within South Asian ethnic enclaves in New York treat South Asian and Latino workers differently and, in turn, the ways that some groups of Latino and South Asian immigrant workers experience the same or parallel treatment and conditions at work, especially when other factors such as gender, immigration status, or job-prestige status divide employees at the same workplace. For activists and scholars studying the growing service sector in the United States, in which laws and worker protections are laxly enforced, a central problem continues to be: How do we work toward increased enforcement of standards and a meritocratic system that provides opportunities for advancement for low-wage workers? In order to work toward that goal, we need to understand qualitatively how managers make use of their authority and how they are able to evade regulation and standardization of worker treatment. Only then will we be able to change policies, inequalities, and the possibilities available in the urban immigrant-led service sector. As I sat with Bipin, Vinod, Shri, and Mannur in Curry Hill, servers, bussers, and the host were all busy at work in the restaurant around us, as the dinner rush picked up. I eventually spoke to several of these workers, all men in their twenties and thirties, from Nepal, Bangladesh , and India. They, like the many other low-wage service workers from South Asia, Mexico, and Central America with whom I speak in my research, rarely if ever use the term “family” when describing their 130 > 131 lead to more unregulated spaces allowing for sexual harassment and violence, forms of worker control and coercion not uncommon in the low-wage service sector.7 I argue that we must go further in analyzing the conditions of co-ethnic work in the contemporary ethnic enclave, especially in investigating the significance of race, gender presentation, and national origin in the running of the service sector.8 The family firm was a cornerstone of early U.S. capitalism, when family -based capital built entire industries, including industrial manufacturing , real estate, financial services, and insurance. This history comprises parts of the service sector as well, especially restaurants, where family networks and labor have gone hand in hand in the United States since the first restaurants emerged in the early nineteenth century. In immigrant and ethnic-minority communities, family businesses in the service sector have proved to be crucial to economic integration, allowing capital accumulation in some instances. As ideologies of immigrant assimilation and bootstrap-style class mobility were refined through the mid-twentieth century, the small family-run business emerged as...

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