Desperate Responsibility

2019 ◽  
pp. 73-114
Author(s):  
Paul Apostolidis
Keyword(s):  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Work Ethic ◽  
Personal Responsibility ◽  
Free Action ◽  
Day Laborers ◽  
Affective Labor ◽  
Temporal Discontinuity ◽  
Working People ◽  
Digital Work ◽  
Contemporary Work

The temporally inflected theme of “desperate responsibility” predominates when day laborers describe their incessant work searches and arbitrary treatment by employers. For day laborers, temporal uniformity fostered by anxiety about insufficient work mingles with extreme temporal discontinuity whenever jobs and employers’ demands shift. In a contradictory response, day laborers affirm a time-conscious work ethic of personal responsibility even while their self-avowed desperation precludes independent choice. This predicament reflects migrant workers’ exceptional exposure to neoliberal crises and the deportation regime. Yet desperate responsibility also references contradictions experienced by working people in general due to the postindustrial work ethic, affective labor, and digital work. As work bleeds into every waking moment while undergoing severe temporal fragmentation, workers are pressed to embrace responsibility freely under conditions that undermine capacities for free action. This critical-popular investigation thus spurs militant demands to end deportation and to reject the self-destructive temporalities of our contemporary work culture.

The Fight For Time

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Apostolidis
Keyword(s):  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Occupational Safety ◽  
Personal Responsibility ◽  
Mass Scale ◽  
Migrant Labor ◽  
Day Laborers ◽  
Worker Centers ◽  
Job Seeking ◽  
Education Theory ◽  
Working People

In today’s precarious world, working people’s experiences are becoming more alike even as their disparities sharpen. This book unfolds a critique of the precarity phenomenon by setting Latino day laborers’ commentaries in dialogue with critical social theory. The Fight for Time shows how migrant labor on society’s jagged edges relates to encompassing syndromes of precarity as both exception and synecdoche. Subjected to especially harsh treatment as unauthorized migrants, these workers also epitomize struggles that apply throughout the economy. Juxtaposing day laborers’ accounts of their desperate circumstances, dangerous jobs, and informal job-seeking with theoretical accounts of the forces fueling precaritization, The Fight for Time illuminates a schema of precarity defined by temporal contradiction. This “critical-popular” approach, informed by Paulo Freire’s popular-education theory, elicits resonances and dissonances between day laborers’ themes and scholars’ analyses of neoliberal crisis, the postindustrial work ethic, affective and digital labor, the racial governance of public spaces, occupational safety and health hazards, and self-undermining patterns of desire and personal responsibility among precaritized subjects. Day laborers offer language redolent with potential to catalyze social critique among migrant workers. They also clarify the terms of mass-scale opposition to precarity. Such a politics would demand restoration of workers’ stolen time, engage a fight for the city, challenge the conversion of capital risk into workers’ bodily vulnerability, and foment the refusal of work. Day laborers’ convivial politics through self-organized worker centers, furthermore, offers a powerful basis for renewing radical democratic theory and imagining a key practical innovation: worker centers for all working people.

Class and the post-Fordist work ethic: Subjects of passion and subjects of achievement in the work society

2019 ◽  
Vol 67 (5) ◽  
pp. 1086-1101 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Farrugia
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Politics ◽  
Work Ethic ◽  
Young Workers ◽  
Subject Formation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Contemporary Work ◽  
Class Distinction ◽  
The Way

This article explores how the ‘post-Fordist work ethic’ contributes to the formation of classed subjectivities. Drawing on the work of Kathi Weeks, the article approaches the post-Fordist promise of self-realisation through work in terms of the individualised accrual of value that has become so central to the experience of class within the cultural politics of neoliberalism. Empirically, the article draws on a programme of research on the formation of young workers to describe two ideal typical manifestations of the post-Fordist work ethic, characterised as ‘subjects of achievement’ and ‘subjects of passion’, which reflect classed differences in the way that self-realisation through work is defined and experienced. In this way, the article argues that the contemporary work ethic is inflected with forms of class distinction that pre-date the shift to post-Fordism, and that these distinctions within the post-Fordist work ethic are critical to classed modes of contemporary subjectification. This differentiation reflects the ideological history of work and class under capitalism as well as the promise of individualised self-realisation that is so critical to subject formation in the post-Fordist present.

Risk on All Sides, Eyes Wide Open

2019 ◽  
pp. 149-186
Author(s):  
Paul Apostolidis
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Occupational Safety ◽  
Personal Responsibility ◽  
Occupational Safety And Health ◽  
The Self ◽  
Day Laborers ◽  
Class Groups ◽  
Physical Vulnerability ◽  
Safety And Health

The theme of facing “risk on all sides” imbues day laborers’ reflections about occupational safety and health (OSH) hazards. This theme expresses a contradictory structure of body-time pairing workers’ incessant physical vulnerability with suddenly arising dangers and traumatic incidents. Workers vow to keep “eyes wide open,” striving to protect themselves through temporalized practices of personal responsibility, although employment power-relations induce workers to violate their own principles. Drastically erratic employment and deportation threats make day laborers’ OSH predicament exceptional, even among nonwhite working-class groups. Yet the themes also reflect the pervasive proliferation of OSH risks in “fissured workplaces,” as conceptualized by David Weil, under post-Fordism and financialized capitalism. Day laborers further help generate the morally stigmatizing discourses of “slow death,” theorized by Berlant, that produce the self-undermining subjectivities needed by this order. These theme-theory resonances nonetheless invite workers at large to oppose the transmutation of capital risk into workers’ bodily risk.

scholarly journals Understanding the Perception of the ‘Migrant Work Ethic’

2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (5) ◽  
pp. 811-830 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Dawson ◽  
Michail Veliziotis ◽  
Benjamin Hopkins
Keyword(s):  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Work Ethic ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Hiring Decisions ◽  
Native Workers ◽  
Migrant Work ◽  
Short Run ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Absence From Work

Over the last decade, the UK has experienced unprecedented increases in migration associated with the 2004 A8 expansion of the European Union. These migrant workers have been praised by managers in the UK, who have frequently stated that they perceive these workers to have a strong ‘work ethic’ when measured on aspects such as absence from work rates. This article examines this perceived migrant ‘work ethic’ by analysing worker absence data from the UK Quarterly Labour Force Survey for the period 2005–2012. Regression analysis reveals that when A8 migrant workers first arrive in the UK, they record substantially lower absence than native workers, but that these migrant absence levels assimilate within two to four years. If employers use this information to make hiring decisions, this may have negative implications for native workers, but, importantly, only in the short run.

scholarly journals Rurally rooted cross-border migrant workers from Myanmar, Covid-19, and agrarian movements

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saturnino M. Borras ◽  
Jennifer C. Franco ◽  
Doi Ra ◽  
Tom Kramer ◽  
Mi Kamoon ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Rural Communities ◽  
Global Health ◽  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Food Justice ◽  
Central Component ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Working People ◽  
Practical Politics

AbstractThis paper examines the situation of rurally rooted cross-border migrant workers from Myanmar during the Covid-19 pandemic. It looks at the circumstances of the migrants prior to the global health emergency, before exploring possibilities for a post-pandemic future for this stratum of the working people by raising critical questions addressed to agrarian movements. It does this by focusing on the nature and dynamics of the nexus of land and labour in the context of production and social reproduction, a view that in the context of rurally rooted cross-border migrant workers necessarily requires interrelated perspectives on labour, agrarian, and food justice struggles. This requires a rethinking of the role of land, not as a factor in either production or social reproduction, but as a central component in both spheres simultaneously. The question is not ‘whether’ it is necessary and desirable to forge multi-class coalitions and struggles against external capital, while not losing sight of the exploitative relations within rural communities and the household; rather, the question is ‘how’ to achieve this. It will require a messy recursive process, going back and forth between theoretical exploration and practical politics.

Visions of Community at Worker Centers

2019 ◽  
pp. 187-230
Author(s):  
Paul Apostolidis
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Work Ethic ◽  
The Political ◽  
Day Laborers ◽  
Worker Centers ◽  
Democratic Action ◽  
Worker Center ◽  
Racial Ethnic ◽  
Shed Light

Two thematic strands characterize day laborers’ conceptions of their worker center communities. Many workers stress the need for order and efficiency backed by strong authority aimed at distinguishing worthy participants from the unworthy, providing security to migrants with a stout work ethic, and ensuring members’ unity as a disciplined workforce. Many others highlight convivial and mutualist practices through which day laborers assist suffering compañeros, govern centers autonomously and democratically, and mobilize politically. Day laborers thus manifest modes of democratic action grounded in mundane habits of reciprocity, enlivened through intercorporeal resonances, and catalyzing politicization within precaritized conditions. Workers’ community-making activities further shed light on the temporalities of transformative practices conceptualized by Raymond Rocco, Romand Coles, and Anna Lowenhaupt-Tsing, whose writings in turn illuminate the political significance of worker center cultures. Day laborers also rearticulate racial-ethnic identity according to temporalities that counter neoliberal permutations of the Latino unity ideal criticized by Cristina Beltrán.

scholarly journals The Affective Labor and Performance of Live Streaming on Twitch.tv

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (8) ◽  
pp. 813-823 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jamie Woodcock ◽  
Mark R. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Digital Games ◽  
The United States ◽  
Live Streaming ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Immaterial Labor ◽  
Affective Labor ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Digital Work ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Critical Investigation

This article explores affective and immaterial labor on the leading live-streaming platform, Twitch.tv, which boasts over one hundred million regular viewers and two million regular broadcasters. This labor involves digitally mediated outward countenance, including being friendly to viewers, soliciting donations, building parasocial intimacy with spectators, and engaging audiences through humor. We offer an examination of streamers broadcasting as a “character,” which we situate within the context of play becoming work, the labor of performance and acting, and the economic compulsions that shape cultural labor on Twitch. We draw on hundred interviews with professional and aspiring-professional game broadcasters conducted in 2016 and 2017 at gaming events across the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, and Poland, alongside ethnographic research. This inquiry into the dynamics of digital games and labor underscores the importance of studying live streaming as part of a wider critical investigation of contemporary digital work.

My Culture Made Me Do It

2012 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 108-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Luis Uhlmann ◽  
Brian A. Nosek
Keyword(s):  
Personal Responsibility ◽  
Cultural Socialization ◽  
Racial Biases

The present research examined the effects of egocentric motivations on individuals’ explanations for how their automatic racial prejudices came into being. The majority of participants reported experiencing biased thoughts, feelings, and gut reactions toward minorities which they found difficult to consciously control, and they attributed such biases to cultural socialization. Of particular interest, ego-threatened participants were significantly more likely to attribute their automatic racial biases to their culture and significantly less likely to attribute such biases to themselves. Results suggest that attributing one’s racial biases to cultural socialization can be a defensive, motivated process aimed at diminishing personal responsibility.

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