Work-life mobility and stability: The employment histories of immigrant workers at a unionized Toronto hotel
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the employment histories and future prospects of immigrants employed in main-grade and supervisory positions at a unionized hotel in Toronto. Using interview and observational data, the article examines the employment careers and experiences of the hotel's multiethnic workforce, who were disproportionately located in back-of-house departments. For most, their working lives in Toronto represented downward social mobility relative to their class positions in their countries of origin. This downward mobility was connected to the downgrading of their 'institutionalized cultural capital' since their foreign qualifications and work experience were generally considered invalid by Toronto employers. However, within the city's low-wage service and manufacturing sectors where immigrants are clustered, the workers regarded unionized hotel employment as offering relatively advantageous earnings, benefits and security. Unlike much of the international hotel industry sector, employment at the Toronto hotel was in many ways remarkably stable as seen in the longevity of job tenure. The factors leading to such stability are explored including low promotion prospects coupled with incremental progression via the union-negotiated seniority system. The article illustrates the point made by Gray that lower-end service jobs, such as found in hotels, are not necessarily inherently 'bad' (or 'good') in themselves, but that they are constructed as such via institutional arrangements including the role played by trade unions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".