Endemic precarity: a multi-scalar regime of embodied harm and racialized debilitation in food processing

Abstract How does food processing systematically produce bodily harm among migrant workers? This paper introduces endemic precarity—a multi-scalar regime where long-term bodily impairment is the normalized, expected outcome of employment—to analyze harm operating simultaneously across workplace production, employer control over social reproduction, and institutional abandonment. Based on 75 in-depth interviews across 20 food processing plants in Oregon and Washington and analysis of Occupational Safety and Health Administration complaints, I demonstrate how migrant workers encounter infrastructure designed without regard for bodily integrity, managerial control that pushes bodies beyond limits, forced labor through illness and pregnancy, denial of time for sleep and care responsibilities, and institutional systems marked by medical racism and exclusion from workers’ compensation. Drawing on labor process theory, feminist political economy, and critical disability studies, this research advances precarity scholarship by theorizing bodily harm as operating simultaneously across multiple institutional arenas rather than isolated workplace conditions. It demonstrates that debilitation is not incidental but central to value extraction under racial capitalism and reveals how contemporary food systems depend on normalized destruction of racialized workers’ bodies across production, reproduction, and institutional encounters.