Class Inequality in the Global City

In striving to become cosmopolitan, global cities aim to attract highly-skilled workers while relying on a vast underbelly of low-waged, low status migrants. This book tells the story of one such city, revealing how national development produces both aspirations to be cosmopolitan and to improve one's class standing, along with limitations in achieving such aims. Through the analysis of three different groups of workers in Singapore, Ye shows that cosmopolitanism is an exclusive and aspirational construct created through global and national development strategies, transnational migration and individual senses of identity. This dialectic relationship between class and cosmopolitanism is never free from power and is constituted through material and symbolic conditions, struggles and violence. Class is also constituted through 'the self' and lies at the very heart of different constructions of personhood as they intersect with gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity and nationality.

"This book illustrates the way class as a social and economic category is constituted through a strategic migrant division of labour in the global city. While Bangladeshi construction and marine workers labour under precarious conditions of enforced temporariness to replenish Singapore's underclass, Johoreans entering Singapore on daily commutes engage in low-paid service work in fashioning mobile selves and reformulating class subjectivities. At the same time, professional migrants in the financial sector from more privileged positions negotiate the limits and possibilities of cosmopolitan cultures in the workplace. Policy frameworks and human aspirations interact in perpetuating class inequality as a fundamental aspect of globalizing cities." - Brenda Yeoh, National University of Singapore, Singapore

"At a time of unprecedented global inequalities, Class Inequality in the Global City offers a compelling account of how material and social inequalities are produced at the intersection of global economies, labor migration, and locally grounded class subjectivities, relations and aspirations. Drawing on extended ethnographic research with differently secure and precarious groups of migrant workers, Ye's analysis teases out how the socio-political dynamics of class and cosmopolitanism in Singapore connect to broader processes and geographies. This book's relational approach to theorizing how labor migration and markets, national state aspirations and policies, and workers' diverse class identities, subjectivities, and aspirations express in place yet are always also embedded in the processes/relations that make a 'global' city is deeply important for critical scholars interested in contemporary urban development politics, global economies, labor migration, and relational approaches to poverty and inequality." - Sarah Elwood, University of Washington, USA

Autorentext

Junjia Ye is Lecturer in Human Geography at Massey University, New Zealand. She has published writings on cultural diversity, critical cosmopolitanism, class and gender studies. Alongside extensive ethnographic research methods, she also uses techniques of film and photography to create visual narratives through her work. She was previously Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany.

Inhalt

Introduction. Globalizing work in Singapore: class, migration and divisions of labour in the city-state

1. Researching inequality in the global city
2. Situating class in Singapore: State development and labour
3. Migrating to Singapore: Bangladeshi men
4. Commuting to Singapore: Johorean Malaysians
5. Constructing cosmopolitanism in Singapore: Financial professionals
   Concluding Reflections