This paper describes the uses of undocumented migrants in the low-end temporary staffing industries in France and the United States, and compares two labor campaigns during which migrant temp workers organized to contest their civic and employment precarity in the two countries. The paper is based on four studies: two participant ethnographic studies of light-industrial formal day-labor work in the Chicago area (Chauvin 2010), and of the heavily outsourced construction sector in the Paris region (Jounin 2008); participant observation in a community worker center engaged in ‘corporate accountability campaigns’ in Chicago (Chauvin 2009); finally, the collective ethnographic study of a major movement of strikes by undocumented migrants in Paris and the Ile-de-France region, when workers occupied their companies to pressure their employers to petition for the legalization (Barron et al. 2009, 2011).
In both countries, undocumented migrants are disproportionately represented in temporary staffing agencies, as final employers use these intermediaries to “outsource” legal responsibility for employing an unauthorized workforce.Iin the US case study, in which a factory was pressured to shift its entire temp (overwhelmingly undocumented and female) workforce from a ‘bad agency’ to a ‘good agency’ that had signed a ‘código de ética’, not all agency workers accepted the change, illustrating a contrariothe precariat’s ambivalent relation to the disreputable employers that employ it, and with whom it often shares a certain ‘solidarity within infraction’ (Morice 1999). In contrast, the French campaign took place in the context of a change in legislation allowing employers to petition for the legalization of those of their workers they ‘discovered’ undocumented.
Among migrants on strike, workers from temporary staffing agencies faced particular challenges. First, their embeddedness in complex subcontracting arrangements raised the issue of who their employer was (Jounin and Paternoster 2009), and thus which employer would be their sponsor. Second, the temporary nature of their jobs made them ‘too precarious for legality’ in the eyes of the French government. Some temps occupied their agencies, forcing them to formally commit to employ them for at least one year, and pressuring the French government so it recognizes TSA employment as qualifying for legalization. Often expelled from agencies on the ground that they were “no longer” their employees at the start of the strike, they obtained at least one court decision in 2010 declaring them “regular temporary workers” of their agency, thus entitled to occupy it as legitimate strikers. By recognizing the informal loyalty relation between TSA workers and their agency, this decision thus virtually expanded the right to strike for many other categories of France’s precarious workers. In the end the French case illustrates that in certain policy contexts, the very stigma of migrant illegality which channels so many migrants into temporary staffing agencies can equally become a catalyst for their collective mobilization, potentially leading them to revert or transcend key dimensions of the temporary employment relationship as a precarity-producing device.
