Language, global mobilities, blue‐collar workers and blue‐collar workplacesKellieGonçalves and HelenKelly‐Holmes (Ed.), New York: Routledge. 2021. 258pp. 3 B/W illustrations. Hardback (9780367279004) 96.00 GBP, Paperback (9780367642730) 29.59 GBP, Ebook (9780429298622) 29.59 GBP

For many people today working life is characterised by global mobility. The edited volume Language, Global Mobilities, Blue-Collar Workers and Blue-Collar Workplaces investigates the linguistic consequences of mobility for workers in blue-collar jobs. Covering a wide range of contexts, the volume takes a decidedly critical perspective on language and work, positioning itself within the field of language and the political economy. While the historical studies in the book show that blue-collar workers have always migrated to find work, the contemporary studies highlight how traditional migration patterns now are complemented by new transient mobilities where oil sands workers fly to Alberta to work for a few weeks before returning home, where Filipino nurses work in Japan for a few years while sending money to their families back home, or where the owner of a Thai massage salon in Germany plans to retire in her home village in Thailand. While multilingualism is also part of everyday life for more stable migrants, for these globally mobile and transient workers, language learning and multilingual language use are tied up with job opportunities and social mobility as well as legal concerns about migration status. As such, the critical focus in the volume is a highly welcome additional to the sociolinguistic literature on language, work, and migration. Language, Global Mobilities, Blue-Collar Workers and Blue-Collar Workplaces includes 10 chapters, all based on empirical work in and about blue-collar workplaces. The empirical chapters are complemented by an introduction by editors Kellie Gonçalves and Helen Kelly-Holmes, as well as a concluding commentary by Alistair Pennycook. While maintaining the critical focus, the volume exhibits theoretical breadth as the chapters variously draw on theories of language ideologies, language policy, language acquisition, and symbolic capital. Similarly, the book covers a range of data types (from ethnographic observations and recordings of interaction to interviews and historical documents) and showcases diverse methods of analysis (including discourse analysis, narrative analysis, and interactional analysis of language practices). This breadth is a key strength of the book, as it covers the role of language among globally mobile workers in different places and at different times. The chapters take the reader to Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, Norway, Saipan, and Turkey, while introducing workers representing a wide range of ethnicities and nationalities. Furthermore, the chapters span several time periods, enabling the reader to gain insight into both current and past practices and as well as reflections on long lives as blue-collar workers. The introduction by editors Kellie Gonçalves and Helen Kelly-Holmes positions the book's contributions against the backdrop of global mobilities. Against an overview of previous sociolinguistic studies on blue-collar work, Gonçalves and Kelly-Holmes point out the need to investigate language in blue-collar workplaces from three complementary perspectives: discourses about blue-collar work, language policies in blue-collar workplaces, and language practices in these workplaces. The chapter closes with some welcome reflections on the use and usefulness of the category ‘blue-collar’. Rather than using the category to reinforce straightforward links between social categories and linguistic practices, the editors aim to ‘shed light on the complex issues surrounding language and work for individuals that are located primarily at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale’ (p. 12). While the chapters in the book are not organised by any clear logic, the empirical chapters in the book can be said to fall into two categories: Six chapters primarily investigate discourses about language and blue-collar work, while four chapters primarily investigate language practices. In the first category, Pietikäinen and Allan take us to a mine in Arctic Finland. Based on interviews with retired mine workers, Pietikäinen and Allan analyse discourses of work, where mining work in the ‘golden era’ in the 1960s–1980s was associated with having ‘jobs for life’ and where the paternalistic owner and the mining company provided economic opportunities as well as life to the town. This era is contrasted with the present empty town devoid of economic opportunities as well as with constructions of a ‘speculative future time’ in which the promise of a bright future of investments in untouched nature and a potential reopening of the mine is also associated with risks, as future mining is bound up with the interests of transnational companies rather than regional and national interests as in the past. In Chapter 5, Divita also takes a life story perspective on blue-collar work. He focuses on Spanish migrant women who worked as maids, or bonnes-à-tout-faire, in Paris in the 1960s. The study illustrates several ways in which language is linked with power and agency, in the workplace and beyond: Learning French allowed the participants agency to negotiate better working conditions, but also to pursue other jobs beyond being a maid. At the same time, knowledge of the local language provided access to a better understanding of labour market conditions and politics, and empowered participants to take part in civil society. Divita thus shows how language learning and occupational narratives serve in projects of personhood and identity formation, also beyond the workplace. In contrast to these two chapters that focus on retired workers, other chapters focus on the role different languages play in the local political economy today. Drawing on job ads, observations and interviews with managers, in Chapter 10 Strömmer analyses discourses about cleaning work and the role of language among seasonal migrant cleaners in an Arctic tourist resort in Finland. Central in the chapter are constructions of blue-collar work as teamwork, skilled work, and customer service work, discourses that go somewhat against stereotypical definitions of blue-collar work. These discourses have implications when it comes to language. When cleaning work is seen as customer service work, ‘passable English’ (p. 194) as well as some Finnish is required. Likewise, when cleaning work is constructed as teamwork, Finnish language skills are required. McLaughlin's analysis of job ads and interviews with mobile blue-collar Francophone workers in the Alberta oil sands also focuses on discourses about language. Specifically, she finds two contrasting ways of viewing language and bilingualism. While participants idealise the French–English bilingualism that is acquired formally in school, they do not regard their informal acquisition of English at work as a valuable skill in the workplace (after all they had gotten along without it initially). However, language is still important for social mobility: While English is not mandatory for the workers, it is mandatory for managers and foremen. The relation between language and better job opportunities also emerges in Hess’ study of Filipino workers in Saipan, a small island in the North Pacific. The Filipino workers are seen as loyal and hard-working, characteristics that allow them to move from the behind-the-scenes production department to positions as delivery personnel. Here, language skills become important. While English is the only language required, the Filipino workers are also valued because they can speak Tagalog with customers from the large Filipino minority. Yet, despite this position as highly valued workers with relevant language competences, the Filipino workers are also precarious workers who rely on the employment for their migration status with visas having to be renewed every year. Sherman and Homoláč present the case of Vietnamese migrants who have settled in the Czech Republic. Here, Czech is constructed as unnecessary for factory work since tasks are repetitive and can be shown with gestures—or the workers rely on informal language brokering. Similarly, many Vietnamese migrants work within the ethnic economy where both customers and co-workers are Vietnamese-speaking, which means that they do not need the local language for work. However, language learning is still important when it comes to life outside the workplace because competence in Czech is a condition for permanent residency. In both cases, language skills are tied up with not just job opportunities, but legal status. The second set of chapters shifts the focus to language practices. Hiss takes us back in time to Northern Norway in the 19th century, where Sámi, Kven, and Norwegian speakers lived and worked side by side, frequently visited by Russian traders. Using historical documents, Hiss compares the language practices in a copper mine with Kven-speaking workers and British owners with the practice of Russenorsk as a lingua franca between Norwegian fisherfolk and Russian traders. By taking a historical sociolinguistic perspective, Hiss is able to highlight issues pertaining to temporality and entextualisation, reminding us that ideologies about language and work change over time, and that both language practices and research carried out in previous historical periods may be influenced by different ideologies than those we now subscribe to. The remaining three chapters all investigate language practices in contemporary multilingual workplaces. Focusing on the use of Kurdish in workplaces in Istanbul, Schluter takes us to a setting where multilingualism is highly politicised, not least the use of Kurdish which is both the most widely spoken non-Turkish language in Turkey and stigmatised as the language of the separatist movement. Schluter's analysis is based on interviews, observations, and recordings of interaction in restaurants with a more or less explicit Kurdish–Turkish multilingual policy. Her study shows the risks for businesses of such a policy: While the use of Kurdish attracts politically active Kurds, there is a risk of turning Turkish-speaking customers away. Schluter also shows how Turkish functions as a language of power and authority, for example used by managers to reprimand employees—similar to how Turkish is used in Turkey, that is, as the language of the authoritative state. Schluter frames her contribution as a counter example to the many examples of minority languages becoming increasingly visible and marketable and argues that we need to examine each context on its own. Serwe investigates the link between language use, language acquisition, and entrepreneurship among female Thai workers in a massage salon in Germany. Through mediated discourse analysis, Serwe shows how the routine nature of the interactions and the use of gestures and objects allow the Thai workers to accomplish their tasks with a minimum of German. However, interactions outside the workplace itself require a wider range of language competences. As a migrant married to a German, the entrepreneur in the study is able to rely on her husband as a language broker as well as her competence in English in these interactions. Finally, Otomo investigates the language policy and practices in a caregiving facility in Japan with migrant workers from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Data from ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with caregivers uncover the strong monolingual and native-speaker bias of the manager and owner. In contrast, Otomo's analyses of interactions reveal multilingual workplace practices where native-speaker fluency in Japanese is rarely required, where the local Japanese dialect is very useful with carees, where English is used as a lingua franca between Japanese and migrant staff, and where caregivers often rely on nonverbal cues and their knowledge of patients’ medical history in addition to spoken language. Otomo's chapter brings into focus the role of language policy, both at the workplace and at a national level. Since Japanese competence plays a central role in the test that the migrant workers have to pass to become licensed caregivers in Japan (and remain in the country), language is also in this setting intimately tied to migration status. The 10 chapters in this volume clearly show that migrants in low-status jobs draw on a wide range of multilingual and multimodal practices at work: the local majority language, local dialects, minority languages, the language of the local ethnic economy, and the international lingua franca English play different and vital roles in these settings. In addition, migrant workers rely on gestures, nonverbal cues, and on language brokers in order to get the job done. The chapters also emphasise the need to investigate multilingual language use at work from a critical perspective, especially when the workers in question are globally mobile migrants in low-status jobs. For these workers, language practices and language learning are tied up with economic opportunities as well as legal concerns about migration status. At the individual level, language competences provide opportunities for work, better jobs and integration into the local society. At a societal level, language policies regulate migrants’ access to work, for instance in bilateral agreements about language learning for migrant workers or laws that make the local language a requirement for obtaining a residency permit. Language, Global Mobilities, Blue-Collar Workers and Blue-Collar Workplaces is a highly relevant book for scholars interested in the critical perspective on language in the workplace. However, while the concept of the blue-collar worker brings the diverse studies in the volume into a coherent whole, the diversity of the workplaces discussed in the book also leads to questioning the concept. Does it make sense to describe all these different types of work as blue-collar? While mining, cleaning, and factory work fit neatly into traditional definitions of blue-collar work as ‘working-class labor that is predominantly done [in], but not limited to, the primary and secondary sectors, such as manufacturing and agriculture’ (pp. 1–2), and the broader definition of work that is ‘temporary, low status and incorporate some type of physical labour’ (p. 2) also encompasses workers in eldercare and restaurants, it is questionable whether small business owners, such as the Thai massage salon owner, fit into this category. And to the extent that blue-collar labour is associated with unskilled work, the trained nurses working in eldercare do not fit the bill either. When the concept is still useful, it is because it allows us to focus on types of work that are characterised by a low socio-economic status, a physical component, and temporariness. While much work has been done in sociolinguistics in the past decades to shine a light on language practices in a range of workplaces, we still need work that looks at practices, policies, and discourses in different types of workplaces from the critical perspective of language and the political economy. Language, Global Mobilities, Blue-Collar Workers and Blue-Collar Workplaces contributes to current sociolinguistic literature with exactly this perspective. The volume clearly shows that although language requirements may vary, blue-collar work is far from ‘language marginal’ (p. 13). In addition, if we wish to understand how language impacts globally mobile workers’ lives and opportunities, we need to investigate both the discourses about what blue-collar work is and should be and the political economy of the languages that are used by and around blue-collar workers.

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