Fighting for the Job

Day laborers describe their experiences seeking work on street corners through the theme of “fighting for the job.” This theme encodes a contradictory sense of embodied time: workers wait for long stretches while their weariness and anxiety mount, but burst into combat at moments when employers appear. Imagining the corner as a venue for initiating steady upward mobility, even as power dynamics there negate basic premises of market contracting, workers exacerbate this temporal contradiction. Hagar Kotef’s analysis of corporeal mobility-governance under liberalism suggests that under legal and economic imperatives, day laborers inevitably violate (neo)liberal norms for bodily movement in public spaces and invite exceptionalizing punishment. Meanwhile, workers’ dreams of material progress follow the self-defeating pattern of “cruel optimism” that Lauren Berlant identifies with precarity culture at large. Nevertheless, “fighting for the job” evokes a militancy that can fuel antideportation politics and a refusal of work, as Voz’s documentary Jornaleros suggests.

Desperate Responsibility

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.

Generative Themes

This chapter crafts a vision for social research that provokes critical opposition to the forces driving precaritization by drawing on popular education. Freire suggests that researchers should listen methodically for the “generative themes”—characteristic uses of language—through which oppressed people name their daily struggles. Folding such thematic inquiry into a broader approach called “critical-popular research” opens two complementary trajectories of social critique and political activation. As focal points for local popular-educational dialogues, such themes can spark critical awareness and practical resolve among the poor and excluded. A theme’s generative potential also springs from its resonances with existing critical-theoretical accounts of general social tendencies that affect certain groups especially harshly but also implicate working people at large. In association with a politics of the “demand,” critical-popular research can invite affective, reflective, and practical responses that combine militancy with receptivity and challenge precarity on multiple levels.

Risk on All Sides, Eyes Wide Open

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.

Visions of Community at Worker Centers

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.

Organizing the Fight against Precarity

How have day labor organizations responded to predicaments of precarity highlighted by workers’ generative themes, and what prospects for a broader antiprecarity movement of working people do these responses suggest? Day labor groups’ direct action and policy advocacy against deportation challenge exceptionally precaritizing forces aimed at migrants that are associated with desperate responsibility, dangerous work, and job-seeking on the corner. Furthermore, by connecting worker centers with corners and sponsoring ecologically oriented demonstrations of unauthorized local citizenship, day labor organizations contest neoliberal mobility-governance and recompose urban time-spaces as domains of cosmopolitan solidarity. Critical-popular analysis of workers’ themes also yields a composite conception of antiprecarity politics that emphasizes the fight for time, the struggle for the city, and the refusal of work. Demanding worker centers for all working people would invigorate such politics by proliferating experiences of conscientizaçao and opportunities for critical-popular inquiry, in ways complementing the demand for a basic income.

Introduction

In today’s precaritized world, working people’s experiences strangely are becoming more alike even as their disparities increase. This puzzling situation characterizes workers’ intensified psycho-physical suffering, increasing atomization, growing geographical mobility, and mounting struggles with temporal compressions and discontinuities. Yet precarious workers are fighting back, as worldwide upsurges on the left demonstrate. Migrant day laborers’ experiences and reflections offer promising grounds for crafting a critical approach to precarity that addresses both its exceptional and its widely encompassing aspects. Day labor centers are expanding in numbers, tethering dislocated migrants to local communities, building multiscalar networks, innovating organizationally as unions decline, and repurposing temporal gaps in everyday work-life. In addition, day laborers’ lively intellectual culture of popular education suggests new ways to activate theoretically and politically sharpening contact between popular ideas and scholars’ critiques of precarity. This introduction sets the stage for such inquiry by describing the project’s fieldwork, analytical process, and political commitments.