Pervasive Precarity: Migrant Mexican Oil Workers' Experiences and Tactics to Navigate Uncertainty

An ethnographic analysis of precarity as experienced by migrant Mexican oil workers in permanently insecure work structures in the Gulf of Mexico, this study explores precarious employment situations in the oil industry and tactics workers use to navigate, cope with, and diminish uncertainty. In addition to workers' experiences, I analyze the contexts in which individuals live and work, including: labor-market changes; the history, politics, and geography of oil; and hurricanes' impacts on labor. To better understand the tightrope walk between precarious employment and unemployment, I conducted interviews with workers and others affiliated with the oil industry during fieldwork in the Coastal Bend of Texas, in 2008, and Ciudad del Carmen, Mexico, in 2012. Both areas are important in the Gulf of Mexico oil industry and draw workers for projects both in the fabrication of offshore vessels and drilling and production of offshore oil. I interviewed industry officials, community members, and others in Texas and Campeche, focusing on work experiences in the oil industry. As in many industries, the oil industry has transitioned to rely on a nonpermanent, contract-based workforce, a move to casualized labor. Consequently, individuals become serial contract workers. Experiences of forced idleness, corruption, and non-material precarity characterize their lives. The labor demand for repair and construction in the oil industry following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita was significant, prompting the importation of guestworkers on the H-2B visa, a problematic program. To cope within precarious work structures, workers develop tactics, including work in the informal economy or without pay and the utilization of a variety of illicit improvisations. They also use their mobility, weak social ties, and so-called traditional livelihoods as tactics. The exploration of workers' situated responses to a multiplicity of uncertainties allows a fuller understanding of local-level effects of global change