Latinas as labor problem and solution

Latinas as labor problem and solution

Latinas as labor problem and solution

The future is here! Meet AVA - your Advanced Virtual Assistant. She works 24 hours a day, seven days a week and does not charge for overtime. She never gets sick and does not require a background check.²⁶

Airus Media’s promotional material positions AVAs as offering a number of affordances for employers, setting up a kind of dichotomy between the (ideal) virtual worker and the (problematic) human employee. In doing so, the brochure says as much about how the company perceives the ‘problems’ of human employees and the current labor landscape as it does about the customer service interfaces that it is selling (figure 3). AVAs are presented as a technological solution that promises to maximize profits for the employer-company, while reducing the social and economic frictions that are associated with managing a human workforce. If the “paperless office” was about embracing the utopian potential of information and communication technologies for unencumbered work processes, the rhetoric of AVAs posits a utopian labor landscape—a “peopleless office”—where U.S. employers are able to harness Latinx labor without the economic and legal obligations of paying workers fair wages, overtime, or offering health care and leave benefits, and perhaps, most importantly, without the always present question about the citizenship status of those employees.

Figure 3. Screenshot of Airus Media’s promotional brochure outlining the “Features and Benefits” of AVAs.

Cost-effectiveness is heavily emphasized in the brochure for AVA as well as in other promotional material across Airus Media’s website. The AVA FAQ section of the website specifically addresses this in a discussion about the outright costs of AVA noting that “the Sky is the limit when it comes to features and costs.’’ ²⁷ The “basic” AVA model is priced at $20,000 USD for a single unit, with no upper cost quoted for the “advanced” models that include voice recognition technology integration and integration with flight systems. Maintenance costs are described in the same section as “practically non-existent.” Though these statements are describing the upkeep of the AVA as an information and communication technology, they hint at the many cost dimensions (economic and social) of maintaining a human workforce. This is echoed in one of the video promotions that features one of the white AVAs smiling at the camera while saying, “I am very cost effective. I will save you time and money.”²⁸ This sentiment is problematic enough when applied to the AVA shown in the promotional video, but it takes on a more nuanced meaning when applied to the Latina AVAs placed in the San Antonio and Long Beach airports.

There is a historic precedent in the United States that simultaneously values Latinas’ labor as desirable and threatening.²⁹ Large wage disparities reflect the overlapping systems of gender, race, and citizenship that shape a highly segmented workforce, constructing the economic value of people as workers according to their social identities and position. Latinas’ labor in the United States is currently some of the most underpaid and undervalued, with Latinas making .54 cents on the dollar of what their average white, male counterparts earned in 2019.³⁰ This gender pay gap plays out amongst undocumented workers as well, with undocumented women earning less than their male counterparts, who are also severely disadvantaged in the workforce.³¹ In the background of these disparities are long standing white American cultural narratives about Mexican immigrants (and Latinx people more generally) “taking American jobs.” These fears are undergirded by a sense of white entitlement to economic opportunities a la Harris’s concept of whiteness as property.³² Through this lens Latinx people are positioned as racially contingent outsiders poised to “steal” labor opportunities that operate as legally protected resources for white Anglo Americans. These fears are intensified when applied to undocumented Latinx people who are blamed for both devaluing blue collar labor (by “accepting” low wages for these positions) and burdening social infrastructures (taxes, schools, health sectors, and social services). The irony here is being that many undocumented workers are, in fact, paying into systems like Social Security that they themselves are not eligible to then draw on, bringing new valence to the discourse of the “cost-effective” employee.

The cost-effectiveness discourse is particularly mobilized around undocumented Latinas, who are often relegated to domestic and agricultural labor because of the labor segregation mentioned above. In many ways the AVA, as a stand-in for “affordable” Latina immigrant labor, harkens back to Las Solas, a time when Mexican women were migrating alone across the border to provide financial autonomy and support to their families in Mexico. Along the Texas-Mexico border in the early 1900s immigration officials viewed solas, single mothers and women travelling alone, as a potential burden to the U.S economy and scrutinized their passport application.³³ Meanwhile their male counterparts who travelled for migrant farm workers would be alerted to the “competing pitches of labor contractors.” ³⁴ Still, Mexican women sought work across the border for lower waged jobs since the early 1900s.³⁵ In the 1930s the most common employment for Mexican immigrant women was in the service sector, blue-collar employment, and in agriculture.³⁶ This history reveals that, in spite of Latinas’ own agency, the U.S. has discursively positioned Latina immigrants as political ammunition when necessary to fuel xenophobic immigrant policy while still relying on them as a labor resource that undergirds the national economy.

Elements of the cultural fear of Latinx immigrants “taking American jobs” remains present in AVA’s marketing, this time refashioned through the twinned fear of technology replacing human workers. The response to the FAQ “Do staff feel like they are being replaced?” reads:

That has been a concern; however, staff have generally learned quickly that the avatar is meant to supplement their efforts and free them up for more complicated tasks, or tasks that require human interaction.³⁷

The very presence of this question in the FAQ suggests labor tensions, or the anticipation of unrest, as these technologies directly compete with human workers for information service jobs. The company’s response echoes the oft repeated “promises” of technology to improve working conditions by automating jobs that are seen as undesirable– a promise that has not come to fruition in the modern workplace. Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora write that these fantasies are about,

the emancipation from manual, repetitive, and unimaginative labor by making the ‘the worker invisible… extend the history of the autonomous subject whose freedom is only possible because of the invisible labor of servants, slaves, wives, and, later, industrial service workers who perform this racialized and gendered labor.³⁸

Latina AVAs act in this scenario as what Atanasoski and Vora describe as “surrogate humans”, replacing human labor. As they point out, this replacement is contextualized by global capitalist frameworks that uphold gendered and racialized hierarchies. In this sense Latina information service workers function as human avatars that embody opportunities for labor extraction and exploitation.

These labor “solutions” are deeply tied to political issues of national identity, immigration and citizenship status. As far back in the past as the transition from Mexican territory to the United States, and as recent as the 2016 election of Donald Trump, invoking xenophobia around Latinx immigrants as “aliens,” “illegal,” and ineligible for citizenship, is a long standing trope that fuels politics and policy surrounding immigrant status. Airus Media’s emphasis on “no background checks” carries particular political valence when applied to the Latina virtual assistant as the ideal information service worker. Whereas background checks may refer to employer verification of a variety of parameters that define worker eligibility (including past work history, criminal records, credit history, drug testing, or references), the image of the Latina information service workers re-codes worker eligibility primarily as a function of immigration and citizenship status. In this context, the workplace is identifiable as a site of immigration policing that makes use of technologies like the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) E-verify website to screen and regulate the employment of undocumented people.³⁹ The E-verify program tracks worker eligibility by comparing information “from an employee’s Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification, to data from U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Social Security Administration records to confirm employment eligibility.”⁴⁰ With this technology, “immigration enforcement more effectively than ever before deputizes private sector employers as immigration police, while it generates fear among the undocumented.”⁴¹ With Latina virtual assistants, Airus Media is offering employers an “out” to this bureaucratic assemblage: the benefits of the Latina information service worker without the hassles of immigration policing.

These histories point to the complex tensions surrounding the status of Latinx workers in the United States. Namely, the products of Latinx labor and consumer activities are valued insomuch as they bolster the American economy, while they are otherwise actively devalued and heavily surveilled as inherent criminals and threats to national security. As Alex Rivera’s prescient 2008 film Sleep Dealer argues, the American government is perpetually trying to solve the problem of maximizing the cheap labor potentials of Mexican workers, while maintaining a xenophobic, nationalist agenda that seeks to close borders, fuel immigration anxieties, and actively surveil Latinx populations in the borderlands.⁴² While the film explores this concept through a story of Mexican workers who export their labor transnationally to the U.S. through remote cyborg technologies, Latina AVAs offer an alternative extraction of labor that leverages superficial markers of cultural identity without extending labor opportunities to actual Latina information service workers within U.S. borders. The “cost-effective” Latina AVA provides a convenient labor “solution” compatible with the aims of colonial techno-capitalist patriarchy that circumvents the “problem” of actual Latina workers.

Latinas as labor problem and solution

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