Researching Inequality in the Global City

Abstract

Social and economic polarization, rather than inequality, is featured in Sassen’s original thesis of the global city (1991). The broad conceptual contours of this thesis are now well known. Within the cities that have emerged as key command and control centres of the global economy, the shift from manufacturing to financial and business services employment is argued to have led to marked income and occupational polarization, with absolute growth at both the top and bottom end of the labour market and a “falling out” of the middle (Sassen, 1991; 2001). These transformations demonstrate the new strategic roles of cities, created through a complex duality of a “spatially dispersed, yet globally integrated organization of economic activity” (Sassen, 1991: 3). Economic production remains a key part of the structure of a global city. The “stuff” that a global city makes is primarily services and financial goods. This restructuring of economic activity in the global economy is manifested most clearly in the global city in the corresponding changes in the organization of work. Migrant labour, in the global city thesis, features as a key component of these reorganizations. In Singapore, as with other global cities, low-paid jobs are increasingly taken on by migrants The divisions I trace, and in particular the growing role of low-paid migrant workers in servicing and building the global city, reflect Sassen’s global cities hypothesis.

When the ground beneath us is always shaking, we need a crutch.

(Burawoy, 1998: 4)