Perfecting Exit: The Politics of Quitting Among Migrant Care Workers in the United States

Abstract

Quitting tends to be overlooked in studies of resistance and labor because of its individual and private character, its ineffectiveness in changing conditions of labor, and the difficulty of studying it, in favor of more organized and public protests and strikes. This paper examines why quitting is so popular among African immigrant home care workers in the United States, arguing that exit was attuned to the diffuse power relations of fissured workplaces in which home care workers care for individual clients through the mediation of brokering agencies. Quitting was not entirely individualized and private, as it became a collective strategy nurtured through circulating stories and a widely shared worldview of anti-Black racism and anti-immigrant sentiment. In exploring the complexity, possibilities, and limitations of quitting, I point to the continuum of modes and degrees of resistance, rather than compartmentalizing some as private and some as public. The variability in the degree of privacy and individuation makes these forms of maneuver in relation to diffuse power adaptive to different degrees of scaling up and organizing. As anthropologists attend to the dynamism of resistance in relation to power, they should not overlook the phenomenon of quitting.