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The Fight for Time: Migrant Day
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Paul Apostolidis
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The Fight for Time
STUDIES IN SUBALTERN LATINA/O POLITICS
Series editors: Raymond Rocco, University of California, Los Angeles, and
Alfonso Gonzales, University of California, Riverside
The Fight for Time: Migrant Day Laborers and the Politics of Precarity
Paul Apostolidis
Specters of Belonging: The Political Life Cycle of Mexican Migrants
Adrián Félix
The Fight for Time
Migrant Day Laborers and
the Politics of Precarity
PAUL APOSTOLIDIS
1
3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
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Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

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© Oxford University Press 2019

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Apostolidis, Paul, 1965–author.
Title: The fight for time : migrant day laborers and the politics of precarity /Paul Apostolidis.
Description: New York, NY, United States of America : Oxford University Press, 2019. |
Series: Studies in subaltern Latina/0 politics |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018024333 (print) | LCCN 2018028943 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190459352 (Updf ) | ISBN 9780190933180 (Epub) |
ISBN 9780190459345 (pbk. :acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780190459338 (hardcover :acid-free paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Foreign workers—United States. | Foreign workers—Latin
America. | United States—Emigration and immigration—Economic aspects. |
Latin America—Emigration and immigration—Economic aspects.
Classification: LCC HD8081.H7 (ebook) | LCC HD8081.H7 A66 2019 (print) |
DDC 331.5/440973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018024333
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Paperback printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
To my children, Anna and Niko,
with joy and hope.
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Generative Themes: Freirean Pedagogy and the Politics of
Social Research 37
2. Desperate Responsibility 73
3. Fighting for the Job 115
4. Risk on All Sides, Eyes Wide Open 149
5. Visions of Community at Worker Centers: From Protected
Workforce to Convivial Politics 187
6. Organizing the Fight against Precarity 231
Notes 253
Bibliography 291
Index 305
Acknowledgments
I AM MORE grateful than I can say to a great many people whose various
collaborations with me were crucial to this book. Above all, my heartfelt and infi-
nite thanks go to the day laborers who spoke at length with my assistants and me
about their working lives and their hopes for Casa Latina and Voz’s MLK Center.
At Casa Latina, I thank the many coordinators who welcomed us warmly into
the community and provided us with essential opportunities to conduct research,
above all Hilary Stern and Araceli Hernandez, with whom I worked out the ini-
tial research program, as well as the following individuals: Gabriel Aspee, Amanda
Chavez, Veronique Facchinelli, Emily Gaggia, Raul Garcia, Esteban Ginocchio-
Silva, Marcos Martinez, Deborah Purce, Daniel Silva, and Leonardo Ulate.
At Voz, my thanks go especially to Romeo Sosa, whose enthusiasm for this
project I have always deeply appreciated and with whom I collaborated in de-
signing our field research and planning the Jornaleros screenings. I also especially
thank Francisco Aguirre, whose courage, humor, and gentleness inspire me and
whose friendship and assistance I have greatly valued. In addition, I am grateful
to Ignacio Paramo, Paul Riek, and Justin Shear for facilitating our fieldwork at
the MLK Center.
In the broader network of day labor organizations and worker centers, the
following leaders took the time to share their analyses, visions, and experiences
with me in interviews: Pablo Alvarado, Loyda Alvarado, Yesenia Castillo, Omar
Henriquez, Adam Kader, Omar Leon, Nadia Marin, Marlom Portillo, Eric
Rodriguez, Valeria Treves, and Paul Zilly. I am also very grateful to Nik Theodore
for our discussions of this project and for his own essential research with day
labor organizations.
It has been a true pleasure to work with Angela Chnapko, who has consist-
ently been an insightful and engaged interlocutor, and an excellent editor in all
ways. My thanks also to two anonymous reviewers for the provocative and careful
comments they provided.
x Acknowledgments
Several friends and colleagues deserve special acknowledgment for their

indispensable contributions to this project. Romand Coles was a constant in-
tellectual companion throughout, always willing to swap ideas, read drafts, bol-
ster my enthusiasm, and push me in theoretically and politically challenging
directions. My development of the project additionally benefited from crucial
conversations with the following individuals, most of whom also commented on
draft material and whose own work enriches the book in both explicit and inex-
plicit ways: Cristina Beltrán, Joseph Carens, Jodi Dean, Hagar Kotef, Raymond
A. Rocco, Abel Valenzuela, and Kathi Weeks. Sustained conversations with
Noah Seixas shaped the discussions of occupational safety and health issues in
this book, and I am also grateful to him for inciting my interest in day labor,
connecting me with Casa Latina, and introducing me to vital domains of public
health research. I further thank Michael McCann for giving me the privilege and
the opportunity to share my analysis of occupational safety and health matters
in day labor with a dynamic group of scholars at the University of Washington’s
Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies, as well as for his valuable comments re-
garding the project.
Major portions of this book’s analysis took shape during several years in which
I had the good fortune to participate in a remarkable intellectual community at
the Institute for Social Justice at Australian Catholic University in Sydney. I thank
the following friends and colleagues for sharing their penetrating reflections in
work sessions on papers that became chapters, in panel sessions and lectures,
and in many casual conversations: Linda Martín Alcoff, Rajeev Bhargava, Akeel
Bilgrami, Joseph Carens, Costas Douzinas, Naser Ghobadzadeh, Kiran Grewal,
Lia Haro, Emilian Kavalski, Nikolas Kompridis, Jennifer Nedelsky, Jacqueline
Rose, Allison Weir, and Magdalena Zolkos; thanks also to Paula Gleeson and
Lisa Tarantino for all their work enabling these vital discussions.
Discussions with participants in the Radical Critical Theory Circle seminar
in Nisyros, Greece, sharpened both the critique of precarity and my arguments
about its political implications in pivotal ways; thanks especially to Darin Barney,
Andreas Kalyvas, Regina Kreide, and Artem Magun.
During the course of this project, Robyn Marasco, Sara Rushing, and Joan
Tronto all provided insightful discussants’ comments on conference papers that
formed the basis of chapters for this book. Thanks also to Jules Boykoff for his
incisive feedback on a draft chapter. This book further benefited from stimu-
lating discussions with a number of other individuals whose remarks about the
project stayed with me and helped shape my arguments: Anna Agathangelou,
Lawrie Balfour, Jane Bennett, Angelica Bernal, Rebecca Brown, Susan Buck-
Morss, Craig Burowiak, Samuel Chambers, Anita Chari, William Connolly,
George Ciccariello-Maher, Joshua Dienstag, Lisa Disch, Michaele Ferguson,
Acknowledgments xi
Ricardo Gomez, Katherine Gordy, Margaret Kohn, Joseph Lowndes, Keally

McBride, Kirstie McClure, Tamara Metz, Paul Passavant, Holloway Sparks, Peter
Steinberger, Chip Turner, Andrew Valls, and Juliet Williams.
I am grateful to the following colleagues at Whitman College for their helpful
comments on my work as well as for many informal conversations about this proj
ect: Susanne Beechey, Shampa Biswas, Aaron Bobrow-Strain, Phil Brick, Arash
Davari, Jack Jackson, Timothy Kaufman-Osborn, Bruce Magnusson, Gaurav
Majumdar, Jason Pribilsky, and Elleni Centime Zeleke. This book’s critique of
precarity, especially aspects of gender, also benefited greatly from discussions
with Jennifer Cohen. I thank Whitman College for providing research funding
and sabbatical leave-time that were essential to the completion of this book;
thanks also to the Department of Politics for additional funding for student re-
search assistants.
From this project’s earliest stages, a growing roster of students at Whitman
College contributed invaluably to this endeavor. Most of all, I am tremendously
grateful to Ariel Ruiz and Caitlin Schoenfelder for their reliable, meticulous, crit-
ical, and spirited efforts as primary research assistants with the fieldwork. Their
dedication to this research and to achieving justice for day laborers was indispen-
sable to the project. In addition, I thank the following students who served as
research assistants in other important ways: Pedro Galvao, Gennie Jones, Diana
Madriz, Madelyn Peterson, Leslie Rodriguez, Paloma Romero Lopez, Julia Stone,
and Annie Want.
This book culminates in a discussion of convivial politics, and I want to ac-
knowledge the many people in my near and extended family as well as numerous
friends—on the East Coast, on the West Coast, and in Argentina and Greece—
with whom I have enjoyed much precious convivial time, without which a lengthy
project like this would not have been possible.
This book is dedicated to my children. I thank Anna for the gift of our
conversations about ideas and for her assistance with the bibliography, as well as
for the inspiration I get from witnessing her jubilant and vigorous engagement in
intellectual life. I thank Niko for his own joyful spirit and tenacity, his boundless
curiosity about life, and his sage advice about reducing the word count.
Finally, inexpressible thanks go to Jeanne Morefield for being my rock
throughout a turbulent and precarious phase in our life together, for our innu-
merable discussions about this project, and for the example she sets of devotion
to work like this and to feeding the intellectual and political communities that
give it life.
The Fight for Time
Introduction
THE M AT U R AT I O N O F neoliberal capitalism has yielded a curious conun-
drum: even as the social circumstances of the world’s populations become ever
more vastly dichotomous and unequal, in certain ways the fates of working
people everywhere have become more densely interwoven. At one and the same
time, working people’s experiences have come to resemble one another more
closely and have acutely diverged.
The damage wrought by neoliberal transformations of working life has been
exceedingly partial and sometimes narrowly targeted. The continually growing
burdens of employment reductions, wage and benefit cuts, corporate restruc-
turing, finance-driven accumulation, social welfare retrenchment, deunionization,
and workforce casualization have fallen hardest on the least fortunate in terms of
class, racial, gender, and national privilege. Social commentators and academic
theorists often usefully gather the panoply of losses, stresses, and humiliations
that stem from these social-systemic transformations under the conceptual ru-
bric of “precarity.” These problems, ranging from daily punches in the gut to
dwindling hope for long-term personal security, familial well-being, and social
justice, have by no means been distributed equitably. Indeed, it is central to ne-
oliberal logic that social disparities, and hence competitive and self-preservative
motivations, should deepen and proliferate aggressively.
Yet precaritization also has projected tendrils and sent down roots within
multiple class strata well above the bottom, among white as well as nonwhite
people, in the lives of men and women alike, and in the United States just as
in societies victimized by US empire in decline. If precarity names the special
plight of the world’s most virulently oppressed human beings, it also denotes a
near-universal complex of unfreedom. In critically attending to these strangely
juxtaposed situations and drawing their political consequences, there is the po-
tential to make things turn out differently. Precarity can have a politics, and that
politics can espouse radical desires and imaginings.
2 THE FIGHT FOR TIME
This book searches for portents of such radical hope in the words and practices
of day laborers. These beleaguered and impoverished migrants inhabit social quar-
ters quite remote from the spheres of labor that tend, for good reasons, to kindle
the most excitement among critical theorists on the lookout for a constituency
that could form the nucleus of a new workers’ mobilization. If, for instance, com-
municative value-generating processes define capitalism’s current formation, as
Jodi Dean argues, then it makes sense to hinge expectations on the radicalization
of knowledge workers.1 Insofar as digital innovations comprise the leading edge
of capitalist expansion, “info-producers” who perform “cognitive labor” would
seem the most fitting candidates for leadership in any new mustering of working-
class political spirit.2 Others reason that given capital’s growing reliance on logis-
tics to ensure optimally timed transfers of material commodities and technical
information between globally networked ports, warehouses, and retail outlets,
attractive opportunities exist for strategic intervention in logistically structured
“domains of struggle.”3
Developing anticapitalist theory and molding practices for constructing alter-
native social forms certainly require investigating workers’ political potentialities
in these tactically advantageous domains. Nevertheless, a different perspective
on dominant social tendencies must also be sought by engaging the reflections
and experiences of people cast to the banks by capitalism’s rushing currents of
innovation. As Walter Benjamin advised, it is often amid ruins strewn across re-
vealingly disordered landscapes by societies bent on progress that theorists can
discern the telltale marks of domination and the stirrings of hope.4 Without
such illuminating signs, critique and resistance in the face of power will lack not
only a genuinely universal scope but also critical bite. In other words, the war-
rant for paying sustained attention to the thoughts, acts, and communities of the
hypermarginalized goes beyond simply taking stock of tactical assets that partic-
ular groups could lend to others’ mobilizations. The rationale is also more than
a matter of principled respect for the dignity of the most woefully downtrodden
individuals. Lingering sympathetically and critically with those mired most
deeply in society’s ruts is also necessary because general social phenomena invar-
iably look different from the vantage points such tarrying makes possible, as this
book demonstrates. With surprise, at times with shock, we come to know oth-
erwise the warp and texture of the social world that vastly inclusive systems—of
labor, work’s ethics, public spaces, or social temporalities—generate for all classes
and cultures of workers when we try out the viewpoints of day laborers and others
at the extreme margins.
This book provides a new and politically redolent critique of contempo-
rary precarity through intellectual collaboration with migrant day laborers. Of
course, others before me have elaborated, derided, and wrestled with the concept
Introduction 3
of precarity. Rather than catalog such prior interventions, I begin this account
by offering a series of general theses or propositions regarding precarity today.
This preliminary exercise unfolds various ways in which precaritization at once
singles out specific groups of people for uncommonly deplorable treatment and
makes work-related experiences isomorphic for populations throughout class, ra-
cial, and gender hierarchies. These theses also provide opportune moments to
acknowledge preceding accounts of precarity’s qualities, antecedents, and effects.
In addition, exploring these propositions about precarity furnishes an avenue for
introducing day laborers’ circumstances, considering why their idioms of work-
life and organizational struggle merit special attention, and offering some initial
meditations, in a heuristic and exploratory spirit, on several key concepts that
later chapters address systematically, following day laborers’ leads: time, move-
ment, isolation, suffering, and collective struggle.
Thesis 1: Precarious Workers Are Suffering

There is a diffuse awareness today that people who work in the most benighted
occupations suffer grave threats to their lives, bodily integrity, and emotional sta-
bility as a result of their jobs. Regular albeit discontinuous news stories about
industrial disasters in the global South offer familiar touchstones for this phe-
nomenon. Emblematic of such reports was the brief coverage of a dilapidated gar-
ment factory’s collapse near Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2013. The building’s cave-in
killed over one thousand workers and drew scrutiny of their dismal wages, which
were at planetary lows.5 As is customary with media cycles, the public gaze soon
shifted to other matters but then returned abruptly to Dhaka when further reports
emerged about a spate of factory fires in the same region.6 Neither Walmart’s
sanctimonious promises to embrace new safety standards in the plants supplying
its megastores, nor Disney’s holier-than-thou severing of ties with Bangladeshi
producers, seemed to have altered daily realities for Dhaka textile workers. Such
news stories resonate with periodic reports about intolerable working conditions
elsewhere—women clothing workers in Cambodia who faint by the dozens due
to extreme heat and overwork;7 Foxconn iPhone assemblers in China who see
no exit from infernal laboring conditions apart from suicide;8 Latin American
migrant meatpacking, dairy, and farm workers in the United States exposed to
constant injury, wage theft, and poisoning on the job.9 Cumulatively, such reports
foster an ongoing, low-grade perception that employers across the world are
treating workers disgracefully and that these problems are inevitable. Intervallic
evocations of shock enable an overall schema of normalization.
The odious suffering of precaritized workers thus has become a matter of
public consciousness that is, itself, distinctly precarious. Both formations of
precarity feature a similar temporal tension. On the one hand, the mainstream
media supply routine reminders of low-wage workers’ abysmal employment
conditions; there is a continuity and predictability to the stories’ publication,
just as the grinding abusiveness of workers’ job-situations remains a constant. On
the other hand, precarity is made to seem a matter of astonishing events, such
as a long-serviceable building suddenly collapsing or a conflagration bursting
out unexpectedly. A “breaking” story about workers dying en masse qualifies as
“news” because it is supposedly about something extraordinary, just as the re-
port itself is intense but fleeting. In short, the suffering endured by precarious
workers involves not only hazards of life and limb but also the social death asso-
ciated with the commodification of their circumstances: the mortifying effects
of temporalized media rituals that stave off serious engagement with workers’
experiences by making them objects of public consumption.
But who exactly qualifies as a precarious worker consigned to a suffering
existence? The better question might be: who does not belong to the vast pop-
ulation of the precaritized? As Lauren Berlant argues, precaritization inflicts
suffering on not only the indigent and racially abjected but also much wider
swaths of the working population, although it reserves its greatest wrath for the
former groups. Berlant underscores that what matters is not just the depth of
suffering but also its affective structure: the ways certain emotional, relational,
and corporeal habits become ingrained and reinforce one another under specific
sociohistorical conditions. She sees a particular affective syndrome as character-
istic of precaritized work-life, in which people’s fantasy-filled struggles to thrive
or just survive economically ironically diminish their capacities to do either of
these things. She calls this predicament “cruel optimism,” and she contends that
it applies “across class, gender, race, and nation: no longer is precarity delegated
to the poor or the sans-papiers.”10
Another news genre illustrates how precaritization in this form—protracted
self-debilitation through work that registers in anxious psyches, overtaxed senses,
constricted hopes, and worn-down bodies—radiates throughout the economy.
In the early twenty-first century, reports abound about emerging technologies
and management-techniques that are making work environments hostile and
displacing masses of working people from their jobs, even as they promise to
tailor work to individuals’ dreams and desires. One exposé probes Amazon’s
“Darwinist” white-collar work culture, where employees’ mutual ratings through
social networking combine with intensive job-performance data-collection to
foster a cutthroat and mercilessly stressful milieu.11 Uber, we read elsewhere,
adapts algorithmically contrived stimuli from video games to induce drivers to
extend their hours beyond the point of exhaustion.12 Airbnb relegates most who
try to earn a living through the online rental economy to a perpetual gauntlet of
Introduction 5
temporary gigs and ultimately magnifies affluent people’s advantages rather than
redistributing wealth downward, as the company’s celebrants claim.13 Popular
apprehensions mount as a torrent of reports project the termination of whole
categories of employment, from the most stingily paid supermarket checkers to
lawyers and financial advisers, due to accelerating innovations in artificial intelli-
gence.14 Precarity thus stamps its imprint on declining mental and physical health
prognoses for working people in virtually all industries. It augments this misery,
furthermore, through the peculiar malice of encouraging fantasy in the pose of
resignation to these cruel circumstances of self-incapacitation as less bad than
completely going under.15 Only superficially disputing such resignation, in turn,
is the compensatory fantasy suggested by the news media that major institutions
are always ready to respond to breakdowns in the “normal” social order, not least
(although perhaps at most) when the media themselves break stories about new
crises of precarity.
In sum, precarity is written on the bodies and inscribed in the psyches of suf-
fering workers the world over. Precarity means injury, illness, sudden death, and
foreshortened life, including attenuated life from the constant and growing anx-
iety about when the next lethal threat will target the worker’s already pummeled
body, heart, and mind. Precarity portends these maladies especially for non-
white people, women, low-status workers, and residents of countries outside
neoimperial America. Yet precaritization as suffering extends to many more
privileged populations through structurally encompassing dynamics. The dom-
inant venues of public communication intrepidly hide both these inclusionary
features and the narrowly concentrated forms of working people’s misery pre-
cisely through granting them publicity. Public discourses enlist time and tempo-
rality as field generals in the ongoing campaign to reassure us that the problems
we see all the time are mere aberrations, thereby compounding the suffering of
precarious workers.
Thesis 2: Precarious Workers Are out of Time

Precaritization not only advances through time-calibrated rubrics for translating
workers’ suffering into public discourse—it also arises through workers’ day-to-
day experiences with distinctive temporalities of action and affect. The analysis of
social time-patterns has been central to the critique of capital since Marx famously
dissected the working day and proclaimed its strategic manipulation as the secret
of capital’s genesis. From today’s perspective, Marx’s intervention appears less a
solution to capital’s riddle than a provocative starting point for contemplating
the ever more widely proliferating and variegated forms of capitalist domina-
tion rooted in temporal flows and formations. Critiques of post-Fordism and
postmodernity by André Gorz and David Harvey, respectively, highlight some

particularly crucial transformations in work-related time since the mid-twentieth
century.
For Gorz, unprecedented temporal “discontinuity” results from the
ascendance of “economic reason” through post-Fordism’s advance, especially
as firms boost profits by replacing permanent full-time jobs with temporary
and part-time employment arrangements.16 Work time becomes disjointed in
an everyday sense, as workers constantly shift gears between multiple jobs that
they perform for shorter durations during the same day or night. Furthermore,
argues Gorz, short-term and independently contracted employment breaks up
people’s work time trajectory over a personal life-span.17 Workers who experience
such fragmentation are thrust “out of time” in at least three related senses. First,
they lack time to do much else apart from working or going to and from what-
ever jobs they have at the moment. Second, workers must perpetually carve out
time in the midst of their present work-lives to find and prepare for the next job
they will need when the one at hand expires, even as the concentrated effort any
given work-activity requires is becoming more and more taxing; this not only
aggravates time’s diminution in quantity as a disposable resource but also spells
the overburdening of time in everyday life with an excess of activity. Third, be-
cause modern mythologies that ground social belonging and political citizenship
in stable full-time employment remain hegemonic, people whose work-lives fail
to correspond to these ideals end up feeling, and being viewed as, out of sync
with “normal” society.18 These modes of social-temporal dysfunction dispropor-
tionately implicate women, who continue to shoulder the bulk of domestic care
responsibilities and hence must squeeze another entire category of work into
these multiply constrained circumstances.19
Precaritized workers also are “out of time” inasmuch as their jobs block them
from consciously and collectively intervening in capitalism’s globally distributed
and historical temporalities. In part, the problem is that workers are caught in
the prevailing social condition of time’s condensation into a present with neither
forward-nor backward-looking trajectories, which Harvey describes as follows:
Accelerations in turnover times in production, exchange and consump-

tion . . . produce, as it were, the loss of a sense of the future except and
insofar as the future can be discounted into the present. Volatility and
ephemerality similarly make it hard to maintain any firm sense of conti-
nuity. Past experience gets compressed into some overwhelming present.20
As subjection to such temporal compression, precarity signifies imprisonment

within a self-contradictory formation of time that is both homogenized as a
Introduction 7
relentless presentism and replete with fragmentation and flux. For Harvey, these
temporal constraints also correspond to a form of spatial confinement: even as
globalizing capital surmounts obstacles of time and space, “the incentive for places
to be differentiated in ways attractive to capital” grows.21 As a result, working
people are increasingly subordinated to locally specific regimes of labor control.
People’s temporalities of work therefore become disconnected across varying
geographical regions, even though their labors aggrandize an ever-slimmer set
of corporations, whose activities increasingly conform to a uniform worldwide
beat. Immersed within divergent and place-specific temporal rubrics of labor, and
even though they are capital in the classic sense theorized by Marx, precaritized
workers nonetheless occupy practical conditions of everyday life that systemati-
cally impede their apperception of capital’s structural and historical dynamics.
Considering the multiple ways that precarious workers are out of time
suggests further aspects of precaritization’s dual structure as both aimed at cer-
tain exceptional groups and pervading the general population. Even working
people fortunate enough to hold full-time, long-term jobs increasingly face man-
agement techniques, ideological inducements, and technical interventions that
intensify the productivity for capital of each moment of their day. As Franco
“Bifo” Berardi, Kathi Weeks, and Christian Marazzi each show in different ways,
the activity of work has saturated people’s everyday lives in several key respects.
Technological devices such as smartphones now make it possible for any tiny
stretch of time in any part of one’s day to yield bits of surplus-value-enhancing
work.22 Meanwhile, an ever-more insistent “postindustrial work ethic” bids us
to use every opportunity to “grow” our individual value as “human resources,”
in a world where firms’ stepped-up reliance on “immaterial” and “affective” labor
makes any human activity or encounter potentially convertible into economic
value.23 This reconstituted work ethic gains irresistible force, moreover, from
exhorting us not only to do our jobs dutifully but also to love our work and to
seek ultimate fulfillment from working24—so, why would we not want work all
the time? Yet we also end up working incessantly even when we think we are
relaxing or just having fun. Businesses coax consumers to provide surplus-value-
producing labor routinely and for free, such as through social network-based
product or service evaluations that spread information—that is, advertising—
about companies’ offerings.25
These social patterns of desire and behavior comprise general forms of
precaritization insofar as they make people throughout society feel that, and act
as if, they are never working hard enough, no matter how hard they try. To be
sure, some groups experience this predicament with more material urgency than
others, just as some grapple disproportionately with post-Fordist time’s rampant
discontinuities and postmodern time’s self- contradictory compressions. Yet
Cameroonian day laborers who wait on edge for highly uncertain, dismally paid,
and micro-term construction jobs at Casa de Maryland’s Silver Spring worker
center, decompressing now and then by going on Facebook, render services to cap-
ital not unlike those of white millennial techsters clustered at northern Virginia
start-ups, regardless of whether the latter are permanent staff or independent
contractors. Throughout the employment hierarchy, working people are running
out of time and living out of time, notwithstanding the greater abilities of some
to approximate standards to which all aspire. Likewise, the suffering produced by
this temporal drain and arrhythmia imposes itself on the working population at
large through generalized syndromes of anxiety and depression even as it expands
most alarmingly among migrant workers and others at society’s distant margins.
Thesis 3: Precarious Workers Are on Their Own

Capitalism has long been indicted for creating a world where people live in
atomized, hostile dissociation from one another. Yet critics of capitalism also have
traced dialectical switchbacks by which capitalism’s need for temporarily stable
worker-collectivities counteracts its own fostering of anonymous individualism.
For instance, Marx and Engels envisage modern factory floors as sites where in-
dustrial workers can recognize their world-making power as a class; Gramsci
ruminates on prospects for forging counterhegemonic projects among culturally
distinctive and geographically localized constituencies that economic-structural
developments endow with special historical consequence; Harvey underscores
capital’s inevitable dependence on relatively fixed spatializations of produc-
tion, markets, and legitimation regimes. The historical formation of human
collectivities catalyzed by capital’s relentless pursuit of self-expansion, at least at
times, has thus provoked a series of unintended opportunities for convening an-
ticapitalist associations.
Precarity in our time immeasurably deepens workers’ individual segrega-
tion from one another while ruthlessly eliminating possible loci for forming
communities of any sort, let alone solidarities of resistance. Capital’s centripetal
effects with respect to human interrelationality have metastasized as temporal
disjunctions and desynchronizations have proliferated. Lacking a contiguous
space-time of work, contingently, multiply, and sporadically employed workers
no longer have even the ambivalent basis for cultivating subversive associations
that regular jobs once offered. Gone are the ballasts such interpersonal and polit-
ical relations once could find within a fairly consistent set of colleagues, a familiar
institutional culture, and a steady organization of work featuring stable proce-
dural “games” one could learn to play skillfully over time.26
Introduction 9
The consequences of these developments, once more, are felt most acutely by
those in the worst jobs. Thus, migrant meatpacking workers endure bitter isola-
tion in the midst of densely populated but insanely sped-up cattle disassembly
operations, in which perpetual panic and sense-numbing noise foil any attempt
to speak to coworkers. Rapid employee turnover, as mega meat companies churn
through the “disposable” migrant workforce, further undercuts efforts to kindle
solidarity, or even just sustained acquaintances, among workers.27 Meanwhile,
household domestic workers’ ranks swell as neoliberalizing states offload social-
reproductive responsibilities onto women and as companies’ wage and benefit
cuts induce women to take on more wage-earning activities for longer hours. On
the job, women who do domestic work find themselves marooned and alone in
the intimate spaces of their “despotic” employers’ homes, sometimes lacking even
an informal network of fellow workers with whom to commiserate over routine
abuses and humiliations.28 Migration as such also freights those who relocate
continents away from those they love with weighty burdens of loneliness and loss,
while the ever-present fear of capture by immigration officials terrorizes the unau-
thorized into avoiding social contact and seeking solitary refuge in what Mexican
migrants to the United States call la vida encerrada (living shut in or encaged).29
Nevertheless, the atomizing instrumentalities of precaritization operate at
all levels of the class, racial, and gender hierarchies, and for lawful citizens and
the unauthorized alike, if not in equivalent manners or proportions. Dean’s em-
phasis on knowledge workers’ decisive implication in communicative capitalism
as a class notwithstanding, the mechanisms of expropriation she describes apply
throughout contemporary society. Insofar as the population at large eagerly
performs the “searching, commenting, and participating” online that companies
convert “into raw material for capital” in the form of “Big Data,”30 people every-
where, at every rung of the social ladder, are working for communicative capital.
Correspondingly, all of us undergo precaritization through this ubiquitously ex-
tractive process in the sense of being left on our own. Dean characterizes the social
milieu spawned by newly dominant profit-making strategies as “a setting of com-
munication without communicability” in which “the content of our utterances”
loses importance in direct proportion to the capital gains achieved through our
words’ quantification.31 As this general “decline in a capacity to transmit meaning”
gathers pace,32 isolation spreads in the form of a pervasive disability to have mean-
ingful, language-mediated interactions with anyone outside our own heads.33
Consigned to a form of la vida encerrada, albeit likely without the phys-
ical abuse and everyday terror that shape many migrant workers’ existences,
mass populations dispossessed and atomized through the communicative “en-
closure” movement also know they are on their own in the struggle not just to
survive but, more specifically, to prove their own worthiness to survive. Such
“responsibilization” furnishes key contours of the dissociative individualization

that is precaritizing all reaches of society. Wendy Brown succinctly defines neo-
liberal responsibilization as an array of techniques aimed at “forcing the subject to
become a responsible self-investor and self-provider.”34 Enthusiastically devoted
participation in protocols of outcomes-maximizing “governance” supposedly
ensures not just the individual’s sustenance but also that person’s perpetual in-
crease in value as “human capital.” This, in turn, promotes value’s nonstop growth
in society at large in a way that relieves leading institutions of accountability for
the vast risks their ventures precipitate.35 Similarly, Maurizio Lazzarato sees the
hallmark neoliberal figure of the “indebted man” as emerging through discipli-
nary practices that induce individuals always to strive to appear deserving of
credit through conscientious labor and ceaseless self-valorization. The cancerous
growth of hyperindividualized and monetized conscience tracks the degree to
which such diligent “work on the self ” also becomes “an injunction to take upon
oneself the costs and risks of the economic and financial disaster.”36 Of course,
migrants face more daunting and distinct pressures to prove themselves trust-
worthy and hard-working, and to “pay their debt” to society for violating border
laws, even as their personal liabilities balloon with the ever-increasing costs of
coyotes’ smuggling services. Still, in important ways, the trope of the self-reliant
and industrious immigrant, on which migrant advocates reflexively lean and
which most migrants strive to emulate, expresses but one permutation among
others of the broader phenomenon of responsibilization.
In sum, precaritized workers are hoisting heavier, more isolating, and more
densely moralized burdens of economic self-sufficiency, as firms cut wages and
casualize jobs, states slash social programs and retract union rights, and debtors’
obligations mount while capital’s financialization expands. As their private
encumbrances become more unwieldy, workers also feel the weight of the world
pressing down on them as never before. Ever more segregated and alienated
from others by work processes—whether in manufacturing or services, as paid
employees or unconscious drones in the communicariat, and for legal residents
and national citizens just as for unauthorized migrants, although more inten-
sively for the latter—precarious workers are on their own as they face the moral
injunctions decreed by the responsibilizing culture.
Thesis 4: Precarious Workers Are on the Move

The precaritization of work-life is tightly intertwined with the growing geograph-
ical mobility of people across the globe. In absolute numbers, as of 2015, more
people were migrants than at any other time in the history of migration record-
keeping—over one billion people in total, including 244 million international
Introduction 11
migrants.37 Although migrants have comprised about the same proportion of the
world’s population over the past few decades, this figure has more recently crept
upward, from 2.8 percent in 2000 to 3.3 percent in 2015.38 International Labor
Organization (ILO) data show that migrant workers comprise “about two-thirds
of the total international migrant stock” and that migrants “have higher labour
force participation than non-migrants, particularly due to higher labour force
participation rates for migrant women relative to non-migrant women.”39 In
North America and the Arab states, migrant workers make up particularly high
proportions of the total working populations.40
It would be inaccurate to say that work’s precaritization is causing migration
to increase, pure and simple. Violent conflicts have recently displaced record
numbers of people from their communities of origin, in particular from Syria.
People fleeing war and destruction in Syria generated a 55 percent increase in the
worldwide number of refugees between 2011 and 2015.41 Once people are on the
move, violent clashes in destination locations aggravate migrants’ hardships and
propel further efforts to find refuge elsewhere, as has happened with Somalian
and Ethiopian refugees in Yemen.42 In addition, to say that work is becoming
precaritized implies a previous situation in which work was more stable, better
remunerated, and more capable of securing normative identities associated
with the work society. Although such conditions and expectations have hardly
been limited to advanced capitalist countries in North America, Europe, and
Australasia, they have been far more deeply embedded in these societies than in
developing countries of the global South.
Yet the standard distinction between economic migrants and refugees, and
hence the sorting of migrants into laboring subjects and victims of violence,
needs to be critically interrogated, for at least two reasons. First, war distributes
its effects in dramatically unequal and class-specific ways. Second, refugees and
“asylum seekers” work for self-supporting income more commonly than many
people assume. They also usually work for little monetary reward, under hazardous
circumstances, and in informal arrangements, just as do most “economic migrants.”
In Jordan, for instance, over 40 percent of the massive and growing population of
working Syrian refugees in 2014 labored in construction, which is rife with job-
related injuries and illnesses the world over.43 Among Syrian refugees in Jordan
who were working for pay, a full 99 percent worked in informal occupations and
most worked longer hours than Jordanian citizens.44 Syrian refugee workers also
netted significantly less money than native Jordanians, with most camp residents
earning below the statutory minimum wage for non-Jordanians, which in turn was
roughly 30 percent lower than the rate for Jordan’s citizens.45
Precarious work also does impel people to uproot and relocate themselves for
multiple reasons and with mounting frequencies. The temporal discontinuities
and compressions analyzed by Gorz and Harvey have spatial correlates. Tenuous
ties to any given job, whether in terms of inconsistent hours, limited hours per
week, or brief contract durations, weaken people’s desires to stay in one place
rather than moving elsewhere to seek work. The condensation and presentism
of temporal experience propelled by accelerating capital turnover erodes people’s
abilities even to imagine enduring bonds with particular places. Such temporal
speed-up also imparts a quicksand-like quality to the ground underlying stra-
tegically devised place-specific economies because the progression from ini-
tial success to capital’s overaccumulation, crisis, and exit becomes that much
swifter—and when that happens, people leave, too. In turn, capital benefits hand-
somely from and thus promotes mobile workforces of precaritized migrants.
Not only have major business sectors such as meatpacking and other agricultural
industries come to rely structurally on migrant workers; in addition, the inflation
of global migration rates has fueled the growth of an entire “migration industry”
(with its own precaritized workforce) that profits from facilitating, interdicting,
incarcerating, or deporting workers on the move.46
Strangely, precarious workers’ ever more hectic and frequent movements to
other locations are often accompanied by obdurate forms of stasis. Berlant suggests
that precaritization in this sense creates yet another affinity between the degraded
conditions of the most oppressed and the problems of more privileged social
constituencies. Recent films about unauthorized migrant workers and those who
take advantage of them illustrate this paradoxical coinciding of movement and
immobility: they depict “the constant movement of people and things through
national boundaries, temporary homes, small and big business, and above all an in-
formal economy,” yet no one gets anywhere in the sense of upward mobility.47 The
immobility that oddly twins with precarious workers’ wanderings can also be a
bodily attribute. It is discernable, for instance, in the sedentary habits encouraged
among those who lack the wealth to avoid standing in line, whose jobs prevent
them from walking around at will, and whose haphazard work schedules make the
idea of regular exercise regimens laughable. In certain ways, as Judy Wacjman acer-
bically notes, “Speed for the few is contingent on others remaining stationary.”48
More precisely, all but the 1 percent face the spatial conundrum of precarity that
melds stubborn fixity with perpetual motion, although the intensity of this con-
flict varies for different groups of precarious workers.
Thesis 5: Precarious Workers Are Fighting Back

Assaulted frontally and on every flank by forces that wreak so much suffering
and cause such extensive isolation in precarity’s time-spaces, precarious workers
often battle tendencies toward acquiescent fatalism and respond to the powers
Introduction 13
that assail them with courage and inventiveness. Precaritized workers’ political
counterthrusts have taken many different forms and yielded ambiguous results.
Following the world financial crisis of 2008, Greece became a focal point for those
seeking signs that precarious workers could mobilize to contest both national and
international neoliberal regimes. Activists initiated radical-democratic circles of
protest and deliberation in Syntagma Square in Athens that thousands attended.
Those who gathered repudiated European austerity demands, launched mili-
tant demands for social policies to counteract precaritization, and audaciously
asserted the constituent power of ordinary people just a few meters outside the
walls of parliament. Migrants contributed in energetic and gutsy ways to this
Greek activist culture. For Andreas Kalyvas, the 2008 “insurrection” witnessed “a
real rupture: a new subject appearing into the public realm, the rebellious immi-
grant, politicized and public, claiming a political life.”49 Embracing both deliber-
ative and confrontational modes of action, and refusing to confine themselves “to
the civil and private spheres of social life and economic production,” immigrants
numbered among the hundreds arrested for causing civil disorder and joined in
debates about defining the rationale for the uprising. 50
More ambivalent assessments have greeted the institutionalization of Greek
popular-democratic energies through the SYRIZA electoral coalition, as with
similar attempts to create more formal vehicles for radical upsurges in other coun-
tries. Initially celebrated worldwide as the first genuine repulse of neoliberalism’s
advance in Europe, SYRIZA’s 2015 victory was soon followed by disillusionment
as leaders’ actions belied their denunciations of international creditors’ austerity
demands. Analysts of Spain’s leftist Podemos party have similarly criticized its
detachment from the most radically democratic currents in the Indignados pop-
ular movement.51 Events in other regions have been even less encouraging, as
popular-democratic revolts in Turkey and the Middle East have met with brutal
repression. Already by the time of SYRIZA’s watershed moment in Greece, the
Arab Spring seemed a very long time ago, as did the previous gains of the neo-
Bolivarian left in Latin America.
Disaffection and disappointment with momentous struggles to reignite a pow-
erful and spirited left politics thus abound at this book’s writing, although these
sentiments are also alloyed with a growing, albeit at times desperate, sense of ex-
pectation that the world stage is being set for left resurgence. On the one hand, the
deflation following the dissolution of Occupy and other radically democratic and
anticapitalist thrusts to reappropriate public spaces has more recently been mixed
with dread upon witnessing the racist Right’s expansion, as indicated by Brexit
in the United Kingdom, Trumpism in the United States, and nativist parties’
advances throughout Europe. In this sense, the kernels of a left politics of precarity
that had seemed to sprout shortly after the start of the new millennium, including
the EuroMayDay movement and various other protests in France staged in the
name of la precariat,52 seem to have produced shoots either stunted by opportun-
istic compromise or bent toward the sickly phosphorescence of the new fascism.
On the other hand, socialism has gained renewed currency in the United States in
the wake of the Sanders presidential campaign, especially among millennials, while
a formidable new sanctuary movement has networked progressive urban leaders
with migrant justice organizations to challenge Trumpist nativism. Brexit may
have passed, but Labour in Britain then tacked left, elevating Jeremy Corbyn to
party leader. In Europe, some newly emerging left parties have treated antimigrant
parties’ alarmingly swelling numbers in parliaments as opportunities to forge new
constituencies from the detritus of social-democratic and green coalitions. Across
the globe, people are increasingly defining action in response to climate change as
a matter of taking stands against capital and welding the environment’s defense to
the mobilization of displaced and exploited workers. Both climate-oriented polit-
ical activism and counterorganizing against antimigrant hate also face the impera-
tive of responding to the distinctive phenomenon by which precaritization for the
world’s general population twins with exceptionally lethal forms of precarity for
the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people.
The political ferment among precarious workers, especially migrants, thus
argues against any simplistically disconsolate narrative that would see recent
left insurgencies as culminating merely in repression, sellout, and right-wing
counterorganization. Taken together with the first four theses, the tenuous
yet proliferating materialization of precarious workers’ political struggles then
prompts a basic and urgent question: how can working people craft a poli-
tics of precarity that addresses both acutely marginalized groups’ uncommon
predicaments and social syndromes that enwrap mass constituencies? Proponents
of such a politics face the core challenge, in other words, of configuring an au-
tonomously collective force that is at once formidable and elastic and that stays
bifocally attentive to the ubiquitous and the exceptional. We need a politics
that merges universalist ambitions to change history, which are indispensable to
structural change, with responsiveness to group differences that matter because
minimizing them means leaving some people out whose contributions are essen-
tial and whose demands for freedom are nonnegotiable.
Other pressing questions follow from the prefatory meditations on precarity
in the prior sections: How might a politics of the precaritized give workers’ suf-
fering its due without valorizing it in ways that make it seem acceptable or even
laudable? How, in addition, might a politics of precarity forge collaborations
among workers who suffer in very different ways and with varying intensities,
even while sharing certain politically significant miseries? How might organizers
among the precaritized nurture the relational attachments crucial to any political
Introduction 15
cause even while precarity relentlessly isolates and displaces individuals? With
legions of precarious workers on the move and with capital itself ever a moving
target (yet always seeking provisional points of fixity), how can workers develop
alternatives to capitalist spatial logics? As spatial flux mounts among precaritized
workers, how might antiprecaritization efforts splice together place-making
elements with other components that tap the transformative energies of migra-
tory mobility? In turn, if anticapitalist struggle has quite frequently been in some
sense a fight for time, then how should this fight be updated and retooled today?
How might precarious workers’ organizations invent more self-conscious, more
affectively dynamic, and more politically galvanizing strategies for grappling with
the temporal dimensions of precarity?
Finally, what organizational forms can best equip working people to strike
back against precaritization in all its multiple and varied guises, and what substan-
tive priorities should those organizations adopt? This issue increasingly absorbs
the attention of political theorists, who have offered widely divergent proposals
in response, of which the following are illustrative examples. Jodi Dean advocates
refocusing on the mass party as “a basic form of political struggle” that operates
affectively, psychologically, and across “different organizational terrains” to build
and unleash the “collective power” of “the people.”53 Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri warn against reinvesting hopes in “a vanguardist revolutionary party” but
affirm the need to reflect critically on organizational implications of the radical
“critique of leadership” in recent liberation movements, such as Zapatismo in
Mexico and Black Lives Matter in the United States; they call for the creation of
“institutions without centralization” and “organizations without hierarchy.”54 In
contrast to Hardt and Negri’s embrace of “nonsovereign” organizational forms,
Ali Aslam sees transformative promise in social movements’ “micro-practices” for
“democratizing sovereignty” and rejuvenating popular hopes for attaining polit-
ical freedom through the state.55 He concentrates on social movements inspired
by the Tahrir Square protests, analyzing their affectively stimulating efforts “to
cultivate responsiveness and vitality among citizens habituated to low-intensity
citizenship” and accustomed to satisfying “their desires for agency in their
identities as consumers.”56 Romand Coles shares Aslam’s regard for the transform-
ative effects of microaffective energetics. Rather than focusing on movements,
however, Coles highlights even more localized efforts to forge “a radically dem-
ocratic habitus,” in part through organizational forms and tactics that co-opt the
neoliberal “politics of co-optation” such as action research programs at public
universities.57 Thus, there is no shortage of difficult questions about the social
scale, structural attributes, internal power-distribution, core practices, and rela-
tion to neoliberal culture of organizations we might envision to advance a politics
of precarity.58
A Sojourn with Day Laborers

Day laborers’ activities and commentaries make up the focus of this book, and
these workers have much to say regarding the questions just posed. Faced with
endemic suffering that comes from poverty, insufficient work, and the hardships
of migration; often alone as they wait to get hired or work exceedingly brief jobs
with no steady location or consistent coworkers; awkwardly positioned in urban
spaces that expose them to daily harassment and intimidation; desperately out of
time, in all the ways I have described—day laborers also have grounded robust
forms of common life and political solidarity in the muck of their suffering and
loneliness, forged innovative and atypical political spaces within cityscapes on
digital capitalism’s cutting edge, and converted the scattershot-yet-continuous
drumbeats of precaritized time into opportunities for developing new organiza-
tional forms for autonomously collective action. Those who seek answers to the
questions about precarity formulated in this introduction should consider taking
a sojourn among day laborers and listening to how they think about time, space,
suffering, community, politics, and work.
A sojourn: a detour from what might seem like more urgently needed
inquiries with workers central to the digital and logistical economies; an ex-
travagant expenditure of time in an era when none of us has time to spare; a
tarrying with the temporary, at which the word’s etymology hints (with the an-
tecedent Latin subdiurnare59 and Old French surjurn,60 words related to Latino
day laborers’ self-designation, jornaleros); an irresponsible digression from work,
shirking the social-scientific labor of dutifully scrutinizing policies, institutions,
and populations more obviously decisive for the shape of the polity; a search
for contemplative repose and reinvigoration through transitory relocation else-
where. It is perhaps the most heartrending, and heartening, contradiction in the
lives of day laborers that even as they express with poetry and grim precision what
it means to face necessity’s relentless pull and the obligation to work without
rest, they are creating social spheres where work is not all, where there is time
for freedom, and where the people’s precarity catalyzes the precaritization of
capital’s rule.
I was initially drawn to learn more about day laborers while finishing an
earlier research project about migrant workers employed at a large meatpacking
plant owned by Tyson Foods.61 A corporate titan whose beef, chicken, and pork
products dominate world markets, Tyson operated a cattle slaughterhouse and
beef-processing plant near my home in eastern Washington State that generated
job-related injuries and illnesses with astonishing frequency. The broader factory
culture was rife with unfair, degrading, and illegal labor practices. Banding to-
gether at first quietly but then with growing boldness and numbers, immigrant
Introduction 17
workers at this plant ultimately staged the largest wildcat (i.e., unauthorized)
strike in decades, took control of their local union (Teamsters Local 556),
democratized its internal operations, and launched challenges against Tyson
on multiple fronts. Interviewing the Tyson workers gave me a gruesome famil-
iarity with the mechanisms that systematically expose migrant meatpackers’
bodies to disfigurement, pain, and death. I also learned that for migrant workers,
bodily endangerment and its psychological comorbidities are hardly confined
to meatpacking—they permeate all reaches of the low-wage migrant laboring
world. Particularly energetic efforts to tackle job health and safety problems,
I then found, were underway among day laborers, who were studying occupa-
tional safety and health (OSH) problems and developing training activities
through the nontraditional labor organizations they called worker centers, while
also calling badly needed attention to a wide range of other deplorable working
conditions in many areas of the low-wage labor economy.62
Worker centers, I soon realized, were quirky places that fomented power
among day laborers in ways both similar to and different from the processes of
solidarity-building I had witnessed among Tyson workers in their Teamsters local
union. Above all, I noticed a puzzling contrast between the significant political
influence worker centers seemed to exert and the dolorous poverty, acute margin-
alization, and personal crisis-states of most members. The Local 556 unionists had
been fully employed individuals with stable homes and families, notwithstanding
the personal agony and turmoil that resulted from the injury mill at the plant,
and they were also mainly legalized migrants. Day laborers at Seattle’s Casa Latina
and Portland’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Labor Center (MLK Center), the two
worker centers where I began new research, were in much more dire straits. About
half the workers were homeless; virtually all were legally unauthorized; many were
“food insecure,” as the delicate euphemism puts it; many struggled with substance
abuse; their family and personal lives were often a wreck, or at least under severe
duress; almost all were men who had migrated from Latin America, and the mi-
nority who were trying to support families abroad or in the United States seemed
unable to do so consistently; they moved locations constantly, although at irregular
intervals, largely because they lacked stable jobs. More than a few day laborers told
me they had relocated temporarily to the Midwest to work in meatpacking but
then left due to injuries, pain, or stress from those jobs. Skeptically, I wondered: if,
unlike the stalwarts who doggedly waged Local 556’s decade-long fight despite the
brutality of their jobs and the company’s vicious attacks, these workers had quit
and moved on, then what were the chances day laborers could contribute much
insight about contesting neoliberal capitalism? How, indeed, could anyone in
circumstances so thoroughly precarious be expected to develop an activist will, a
critical consciousness, and a commitment to common struggle?
Casa Latina and the Voz Workers’ Rights and Education Project (Voz), the
MLK Center’s parent organization, held precious assets Local 556 lacked, how-
ever. The worker centers were gradually and methodically sending down roots in
their urban communities, which was ironic because their very physical structures
were visible testaments to day laborers’ wobbly and transient existence. In 2008–
10, when I conducted most of the fieldwork for this book, both organizations
operated out of run-down trailers perched tenuously in the shadows of the down-
town viaduct (Seattle) or just off the freeway’s edges (Portland). Yet Voz and Casa
Latina were also forging enduring relationships with local groups: Latino advo-
cacy organizations; nonprofit associations; social-justice-oriented churches; mu-
nicipal officials; university research shops; student organizations; service learning
courses—even labor unions, despite the obstacles to cooperation imposed by
competition for construction jobs. Like most other worker centers in the United
States, these organizations were in the process of growing beyond initially
underfunded and “undernetworked” origins into groups with more stable mem-
bership bases and denser community ties.63 Although Latino small businesses
and churches had at first rallied to the Tyson workers’ cause, that support had
waned over time, and the reformed union’s later efforts to build new commu-
nity bases, ambitious though they were, did not survive Tyson’s eventual busting
of the union. Brilliant as it flared up in the “hot shop” atmosphere at the plant,
and instructive for the critical analysis of race, class, migration, and power under
neoliberalism, the meatpackers’ movement never implicated itself into a larger
and more durable solidarity network. Casa Latina and Voz were also tossing out
lifelines far beyond their respective cities when I started my research and have
continued to do so avidly. At that time, under the leadership of the National
Day Labor Organizing Network (NDLON), which Voz and Casa Latina helped
found, day labor organizations were embracing more militant antideportation
activism.64 The intensifying political vitality of the immigrant rights movement,
which day labor groups had fueled since their inception, thus further infused
these organizations. By the time of Donald Trump’s election, Casa Latina and
Voz had assumed indispensable roles within the political infrastructure pursuing
migrant justice in the Pacific Northwest.
Popular Education and the Constellating of Theory

Still another important difference between migrant worker activism via Casa
Latina and Voz centers in comparison to the Tyson mobilization was that worker
centers organizers had a more autonomously developed theory of transform-
ative social action. Worker-activists in Local 556 had eagerly embraced princi-
ples of rank-and-file democracy borrowed from Teamsters for a Democratic
Introduction 19
Union (TDU), a long-running effort to build leadership from below within the
International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Viewing union governance and legal ac-
tion as scaffolding for worker-leadership development rather than the realms of
elites serving passive clients, these migrants had made the union the animated
body of the workers-in-struggle. Moreover, through shared narratives that linked
the battle at Tyson to harrowing experiences of migration, workers had recrafted
the TDU approach as their own intellectual creature. The day labor centers, how-
ever, drew on a theoretical disposition with organic antecedents in Latino mi-
grant and Latin American working-class activism, and with a less embattled, more
intuitive, and more palpable presence among participants. This was the theory
and practice known as popular education. Casa Latina, Voz, and their network
partners celebrated a theoretical culture oriented by popular education, although
this culture was often more a manifestation of taken-for-granted common sense
and habitual affect than the result of intentionally elaborating and implementing
a conceptual model.
Here was a new opportunity and growth challenge for me, as a researcher
and theorist. In my earlier project, I had advanced an egalitarian approach to
social theory by seeing migrant workers’ narratives as bases for developing a
Gramscian critique of hegemony’s reliance on ordinary people’s common sense.
Yet those workers, although appropriating TDU concepts and attitudes in ways
that resonated deeply with Gramsci, had never conceived of their own stories and
struggles in Gramscian terms. Day labor organizations possessed a more home-
grown intellectual account of their own activities. In addition, their popular-
educational culture spoke directly to methodological issues regarding how one
might relate academic theory to vernacular speech and how social research can
help motivate popular action for radical social change. In this situation, engaging
day laborers and worker center organizers as intellectual collaborators implied an
obligation on my part—and a prospect I found exciting—to draw upon popular
education in crafting the interpretive procedures and categories for my analysis.
Proceeding in this manner gives this project affinities to other critical and
political theorists’ recent interventions, to which it may be helpful to compare
this book. Like Romand Coles, I immerse theory within activist contexts as a
way of sparking theoretical ideas about how to undertake radically democratic
action in the face of neoliberal capitalism’s profoundly antidemocratic and so-
cially oppressive onslaught.65 My explorations of precarity in day laborers’ bodily
experiences and thought-worlds further synergize with Coles’s avid engage-
ment with affective politics in Arizona migrant collectivities of resistance. Coles
and I also share a curiosity regarding modes of transformational action that are
densely imbricated within congealments of domination yet strike out beyond
them. Recent investigations by Raymond A. Rocco and Alfonso Gonzales also
meaningfully resemble what I seek to accomplish here. Rocco gauges the demo-
cratic electricity that circulated through Latino and migrant informal-mutualist
networks in East Los Angeles in the 1990s, in the wake of massive job flight and
social program cuts. His fieldwork propels an alternative conception of “asso-
ciational democracy” that overturns theorists’ common assumptions about the
proper institutional foci and practices of democratic action.66 Gonzales fashions
an incisive account of the “anti-migrant hegemony” orchestrated by the US
“homeland security state.”67 He does this, in part, through conversing with Latino
migrant workers in Southern California warehouses as well as with deportees
who confront life-threatening circumstances upon their forced relocation to El
Salvador. With all these scholar-activists, I hold a common commitment to doing
research that takes an active and self-reflective role in migrant workers’ struggles
on the ground and that produces theory from within those contexts.
How, exactly, to do this, is a complicated question that admits of multiple
valid answers. My approach derives its specific orientation from the popular-
educational culture percolating among day laborers today, and thus I strive to
be studiously attentive to these workers’ thoughts and situations of everyday life.
In the pages ahead, readers will find a series of sustained, fine-grained, carefully
wrought encounters with thematic elements of day laborers’ commentaries about
searching for work, performing day labor jobs, interacting with employers, and
participating in worker center communities. To some, this might seem like a form
of ethnography because it prizes meditation on the specificities and idiosyncratic
wrinkles of people’s everyday speech as well as their micro-level, habitual, corpo-
real, and communal practices. Especially since so many anthropologists conceive
of ethnography as immersed in intersubjective relations with the people whose
lives are at issue, and sometimes in political struggles alongside them, family
resemblances abound between my project and ethnographic research.68 Also,
within political science, a small but feisty contingent of scholars has recently
taken up the banner of ethnography to demand greater recognition of research
that employs qualitative methods, in a situation where quantitative inquiries still
enjoy the greatest prestige in the discipline.69 I am grateful to have found soli-
darity among these researchers for the kind of analysis I carry out here.
Nevertheless, what I offer differs from most ethnography in two related
respects, and understanding these differences helps convey what makes this proj
ect methodologically distinctive. First, an investment in theory is fundamental to
this book. By “theory,” I mean both (1) the critical elaboration and exploratory
reformulation of general social-analytical concepts that proceeds self-consciously
in the context of historically based, critical-theoretical textual genealogies, al-
though not necessarily with the goal of extending any one particular strand;
and (2) the characterization of social phenomena in analytically stimulating or
Introduction 21
reflective ways by people who are not usually recognized, and typically do not
regard themselves, as “theorists.” Rather than primarily seeking to satisfy a cu-
riosity about the complexities of people’s vocalized and lived experiences and
subordinating theory to the probing of such nuances, I aim to activate mutu-
ally enlivening moments of contact between popular conceptions and scholars’
attempts to describe and account for precarity in social-structural terms. The
point is to see how ordinary migrant workers theorize both their own specific
circumstances and more broadly ranging social predicaments in distinctive ways
that at once resonate with, diverge from, and can spur critical rearticulation of
notions of precarity suggested by those who theorize in academic registers—and
vice versa.
Second, this book has metatheoretical ambitions, which are to sculpt a subtly
contoured figure of how to conceive of and call forth this resonant relation while
also modeling how to fashion such a figure by reflecting on migrant workers’ own
theoretical culture. I thus hope to furnish a stimulating example of how similar
critiques could be carried out with other groups in other contexts, taking up what-
ever cultures of theory such groups honor and practice. In addition, I hope to
foster more critical appreciation for the political-intellectual resources offered in
this respect by popular education—that is, concerning how to enact encounters
between academic social critique and popular understandings of power, such that
these juxtapositions embody a spirit of intellectual equality and emanate polit-
ical vibrancy. This intention fosters a kinship between this book and the work of
James Tully, whose call for theorists to pursue “public philosophy in a new key”
I affirm. Tully encourages theorists to “establish pedagogical relationships of re-
ciprocal elucidation between academic research and the civic activities of fellow
citizens.”70 For Tully (and for day labor leaders, as the final chapter discusses), cit-
izenship is thus a practical rather than narrowly legal designation.71 The category
also includes academics and activists alike, and it accentuates dialogical relations
of mutual learning, just as popular education does.72
The principle of reciprocity oriented my field investigations for this project,
which centrally comprised individual interviews but also included participant
observation at the Seattle and Portland worker centers. Two bilingual research
assistants and I conducted seventy-eight interviews in total with day laborers at
Casa Latina (in 2008) and Voz’s MLK Center (in 2010).73 I worked out the inter-
view questions through processes of mutual accommodation with coordinators at
each center, settling on paths of inquiry meant to yield useful information for these
organizations while also furthering my academic aims and with an overarching
ethos aptly described by Tully’s notion of public philosophy.74 The interviews
explored workers’ experiences seeking jobs at the centers, on day labor corners,
and in other fields of work; their encounters with employers, occupational safety
and health concerns, and other working conditions; the general circumstances
of workers’ everyday lives and needs; workers’ conceptions of community mem-
bership at the centers; and workers’ thoughts and experiences regarding po-
litical action through the centers or otherwise. At each center, systematic and
extensive participant observation in the context of regular volunteer work at the
worker center complemented the conduct of interviews. I describe our volun-
teer activities in detail in chapter 1. For the most part, my assistants and I taught
English classes at the MLK Center; we took employers’ calls and dispatched
workers at Casa Latina; we supplemented these efforts with many other activi-
ties in both locations. Through these endeavors, we all came to feel part of those
communities, enjoying day-to-day friendly acquaintances with workers, staff, and
other volunteers. The interview process further strengthened these ties, inasmuch
as we performed them at the center or a few steps around the corner, with the aid
of coordinators who ran spirited lotteries for the interviews and vocally played
up the importance of these conversations, and also because the interviews, them-
selves, for which we paid workers twenty dollars apiece, materially wove together
the political-educational aspects of the center cultures with these organizations’
economic activities, in characteristic ways that I explore in depth in chapter 5.
As I discuss further in chapter 1, all these personal experiences provided a con-
crete basis for listening attentively to the workers’ interview-commentaries in the
analyses that unfold in c hapters 2–5 and for attributing various social-critical and
political provocations to them, despite certain misapprehensions that doubtless
exist in the pages ahead. Importantly, we treated the question protocol as a basic
organizational tool and a flexible spur to relatively open-ended exchanges: we
engaged with participants on topics they brought up as significant even if our
questions did not cover those issues. We also made a point of asking participants
not just to describe their experiences but also, following the core thrust of pop-
ular education, to share their thoughts about the reasons behind problems and
the forms of action that could address them.75
In a sense, this book participates in popular education by conducting pre-
paratory activities for it, although my theoretical and metatheoretical interests
also mark the project at hand as different from an exercise in popular educa-
tion per se. As the next chapter argues, Paulo Freire’s early texts offer compelling
reasons to view the critical correspondences I evoke between workers’ themes
and academicians’ concepts as vitally conducive to the popular-educational
process of “conscientization” (conscientizaçao). My discussions of day laborers’
themes partly seek to provision organizers with fruitful material for “dialogues,”
in the Freirean sense of interactive and affectively charged discussions through
which oppressed persons identify problem situations in their lives and develop
a critical sense of how they can transform these conditions. I have conducted
Introduction 23
experimental dialogues informed by workers’ themes that confirmed my char-

acterization of these themes as intellectually and politically generative for day
laborers, as I recount in chapter 4. On the whole, however, this book seeks to
lay groundwork for popular education, through analytical procedures critically
drawn from popular education, rather than practice popular education—which,
as any organizer with Casa Latina or Voz will tell you, would consist in reiterated
dialogical interactions in real time among people in the flesh. This also means
that in this project, I am the one responsible for the interpretations here of what
day laborers seem to be saying. Only in the case of workers’ themes regarding
occupational safety and health, and even then, through just one workshop, have
I exposed my readings of day laborers’ commentaries to workers’ critical scru-
tiny in an organized and methodical fashion, although I have discussed my anal-
ysis casually with coordinators, workers, and volunteers on numerous occasions.
Nonetheless, Freire’s writings suggest the distinctive value of the novel form of
critique I unfold here as a prelude to popular education. Furthermore, as the
next chapter contends, radically transforming precaritized conditions not only
requires practicing popular education among local groups of working people; it
also demands efforts to knit those endeavors to much larger embodiments of col-
lective action. Envisioning the terms of such connections is precisely the point of
combining popular-educational priorities and perspectives with interventions in
critical theory.
Apart from my methodologically oriented critical recuperation of Freire, the
chapters that follow foreground an eclectic assortment of theoretical writings
selected because of the luminosity each acquires when placed in proximity to day
laborers’ themes, to which it reciprocally lends a distinct glow. My textual archive
is weighted somewhat toward autonomist Marxism but, on the whole, is purpose-
fully not confined to any particular school of thought, much less any canonical
theorist or theoretical construct (thus differing, for instance, from the way my
analysis of the Tyson workers’ narratives sought to rearticulate Foucault’s con-
ception of biopolitics). Instead, this archive brings together a cluster of theoret-
ical texts chosen because of each one’s capacity to resonate, in its own way, with
workers’ commentaries, such that the two forms of theorizing disclose more about
precarity jointly than each could do by itself. That said, my successive pairings of
workers’ themes and scholars’ concepts do yield a tenuously coherent account of
precarity: as both lamentable condition and political opportunity; as both targeted
at the hyperoppressed and extending throughout society; and as having certain key
temporal, spatial, bodily, and ethical aspects. What makes thinkers as diverse as
Kathi Weeks, Lauren Berlant, David Harvey, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Hagar Kotef,
David Weil, Nicholas De Genova, Raymond A. Rocco, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing,
Cristina Beltrán, and Romand Coles all capable of contributing to this theorization
of precarity, in particular, is their common ability to join day laborers in revealing

the defining temporalities of precaritization in ways that simultaneously suggest
political tactics for contesting these time formations and time deformations.
This, then, is theory as the provisional and politically entangled construction of
thought constellations rather than as the developmental extension of a theoretical
tradition that subjects itself to dutifully rigorous self-critique. As the charting of
constellations, such theory inevitably partakes of the fortuitous. This situationally
configured theory is also especially attuned to the singular rhythms of historically
generated currents surging in the present, and better outfitted for illuminating, by
faint starlight, courses through and beyond them.
Day Laborers and Counterprecarity Politics

This book aims not just to rethink precaritization but also to help fight it. The
passion for political research that animates this effort echoes similar expressions
of resolve in writings by Coles, Tully, Dean, Gonzales, and others, albeit with the
distinctive sonorities that my particular style of engaged theory emits. This com-
mitment to research that gains a critical edge from its conduct within contexts of
political struggle, rather than from any inevitably misleading pretense of detached
objectivity, also links my endeavor to important undertakings outside political
theory. Some might consider the project at hand a species of “militant research,”
for example, and I would affirm this association. As Glenda Garelli and Martina
Tazzioli explain, the qualifier “militant” signifies the dislodging of research from
the depoliticizing snares of “its incorporation within the academic practices of a
‘-Studies,’ ” such as “migration studies” or “labor studies.”76 These theorists also
intend the moniker of militancy to evoke historical associations with the practice
of collaborative research developed by Italian workerist movements during the
1960s that later gained adherents in Argentina:
Militant researchers sought workers’ direct engagement in social research,

to sift through the transformations that occurred within the system of
production and to come up with new strategies for workers’ struggle.
The explicit goal was to overcome the distance between the researcher
and the target of the research (hence the name conricerca/co-research);
to craft a knowledge practice stripped of the “comfort of ‘critical distance’
with regards to the object” (as [the Argentinian organization] Colectivo
Situaciones would later put it), and thus to stage a mode of enquiry rooted
in a particular point of view, i.e. that of the workers’ struggles. It was a po-
litical goal: making certain knowledges part of, and tools for, social and
political struggle.77
Introduction 25
My effort to situate research squarely within determinate fields of political and

social struggle also connects this book to Aziz Choudry’s explorations of “the
knowledge about systems of power and exploitation developed as people find
themselves in confrontation with states and capital,” whether in the Quebec stu-
dent movement, antiausterity organizing in the Philippines, or elsewhere.78 I have
written this book as a participant in day laborers’ and worker centers’ struggles to
demand justice on city streets, in the sequestered spaces of employers’ homes, and
against the deportation regime. More precisely, this text has emerged in the midst
of an as yet only partial politicization among ordinary day laborers, as organizers
strive to spin the straw of precarity into the gold of power. I proceed with the
task of envisioning such political activation and exploring its possible links to
wider forms of solidarity, upon the premise that intellectual collaboration with
day laborers is indispensable to this endeavor.
Strategic considerations also underscore the value of investigating day laborers’
working worlds and political initiatives for any broad-scale attempt to contest
the forces of precaritization. In part, this value stems from the fact that day labor
organizing is happening in rapidly mutating global cityscapes that day laborers are
physically building and that therefore depend on their cooperation with the capi-
talist forces engineering these changes. In other words, day labor is a strategically
significant aspect of the current economy, even if these workers do not perform
communicative or digital labor. Residential housing construction throughout the
United States now structurally relies on migrant day labor, even as commercial
real estate construction continues to depend on traditionally unionized workers
in the building trades.79 Day labor also has been thoroughly integrated into the
burgeoning economy for home improvement projects that renovate, enlarge, and
beautify people’s dwellings and yards. The home remodeling and residential con-
struction industries, in turn, connect the work of day laborers to the enormous
growth of Home Depot and other such retail companies. The significance of day
labor for contemporary urban capitalism also goes beyond providing an easily ex-
ploitable labor force for dynamic industries: these economic-sectoral activities are
hardwired into the most frenetic circuits of financial capital via the mortgage and
consumer-debt industries. Furthermore, the home improvement retail firms help
solidify the recently evolved capitalist strategy of boosting accumulation by relying
on logistics-enabled “just in time” supply chains.80 In addition to all these material
implications of day labor for capital today, furthermore, business activities in the
areas of home renovation and construction bolster American fantasies about the
family and the livable city in an era when a bewildering array of socioeconomic
forces have rendered these ideologies fragile. In sum, migrant day labor is implicated
in post-Fordist, globalized, digitized, logistical, financialized capitalism in intricate
and extensive ways that are belied by these workers’ socially marginal status.
Similarly, as I have noted, the political vigor and sway of day labor groups
contrast strikingly with day laborers’ socially peripheral condition, and this cu-
rious incongruence reflects day labor organizations’ tactical ingenuity and cath-
olicity. The one nationwide study of day laborers, conducted in 2004, found a
median hourly wage among day laborers of just $10 and monthly earnings that
ranged from $500 in slow seasons to $1,400 during peak periods.81 Just under
120,000 worked or searched for jobs as day laborers on any given day, in a tre-
mendously fluid labor force that individuals enter or exit daily; it was also a
small labor force, representing less than 1 percent of total employment in 2006.82
The study further found that three-quarters of day laborers were unauthor-
ized migrants, mostly from Mexico (59 percent of all day laborers) and Central
America (28 percent) and that 60 percent had lived in the United States for six
years or less.83 Other research notes that even though day laborers typically expe-
rience egregious violations of basic fair labor standards, few are even aware that
they have any rights under labor law much less disposed to seek legal or polit-
ical redress for these injustices.84 Nevertheless, by inventively combining direct
action, community organizing, policy advocacy, and other modes of struggle,
day labor groups have wielded far greater power than day laborers’ humble num-
bers and marginal circumstances would lead us to expect. During the second
Obama administration, for instance, day labor groups and their coalition part-
ners mobilized blockades of ICE vehicles and hunger strikes that successfully
pressured the initially reluctant president to grant a temporary deportation re-
prieve to millions of undocumented youth and then to propose a similar stay
for their parents. Simultaneously, day labor organizations deployed other tactics
to advocate for comprehensive immigration reform, including congressional
lobbying and internet-enabled mass petition campaigns.85 These groups’ work-
targeted initiatives have evinced a similar strategic versatility, tacking among First
Amendment–based lawsuits defending workers’ rights to solicit jobs in public
spaces, the patient assembling of urban coalitions to gain municipal funding for
worker centers, shoe-leather-on-pavement organizing to set wage floors at day
labor corners, and boisterous pickets outside the homes of employers who short
workers’ wages.86
Day labor groups’ organizational forms also hold provocative implications for
a politics of precarity, in ways that speak to the heated debates about this issue
among political theorists and social activists alike. At a time when the traditional
labor movement can no longer make even a dubious claim to represent the US
working class and even in countries where unions historically have achieved far
greater institutionalized power, the future of working-class solidarity depends
significantly on the growth of alternative workers’ organizations such as worker
centers. To be sure, unionism maintains or is even increasing its vitality in various
Introduction 27
places and industries, and some unions have built strong memberships among
precaritized workers despite their lack of a consistent employer or workplace.
Migrant workers have been motor forces behind not only the spread of worker
centers but also much union rejuvenation, as impressive campaigns among low-
wage security workers, hotel workers, janitors, and garment workers illustrate.87
Nonetheless, the exploding variety of work-arrangements, especially in terms
of work process and employment temporalities, spatial locations and fluxes,
and legal governance, demands fluid and inventive organizational responses.
Migrant workers have acted as innovators in this respect, too. The National
Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), for instance, surged in strength after its
2007 founding and a decade later counted over sixty affiliated organizations and
more than twenty thousand members.88 Pressured by the NDWA, California,
New York, Illinois, and several other states have passed “domestic workers bills
of rights” mandating minimum wages and establishing unprecedented fair labor
standards for these workers. Through transnational alliances in pursuit of global-
level institutional action, in turn, the NDWA and allied groups from other coun-
tries pushed the ILO to issue a first-ever Convention and Recommendation
on domestic workers’ rights in 2011.89 Migrant warehouse workers in Southern
California have accomplished similarly startling results through novel kinds of
worker organizations. Inventively mixing organizing along commodity chains
with direct action, lawsuits, and labor coalition-building in a campaign that
began in 2008, Warehouse Workers United brought Walmart to heel, forcing the
corporate giant to improve its workplace standards.90
Worker centers offer another response to the pressing need for organizational
ingenuity that brims with future promise. This book partly aims to demonstrate
how and why worker centers show such potential as organizational vehicles for
antiprecarity politics, particularly in the last two chapters and especially in ways
that day labor organizations manifest. Here at the outset, however, a few basic
considerations are worth noting. One is that worker centers have grown rapidly
in numbers and have established themselves as pivotal participants in the migrant
justice and workers’ rights communities in most major cities, in fairly short order.
In 1992, just five worker centers existed; by 2013, there were over two hundred.
The great majority of these organizations also serve and are firmly grounded
within migrant communities.91 In my reflections on the fifth thesis, I underlined
that countering precaritization demands spatially attuned, place-making politics
among working people who are perpetually “on the move.” Worker centers pro-
mote just this sort of action: they ground organizing in specific urban communities
and thus furnish essential local tethers for workers who are otherwise prone to se-
vere spatial, temporal, cultural, occupational, and personal dislocation.92 In addi-
tion, worker centers have been organized among a wide variety of ethnic-national
groups. Even though most people involved in US worker centers (and almost
all who attend Casa Latina or Voz’s MLK Center) are Latin American migrants,
large numbers of West African migrants populate the Casa de Maryland worker
centers near Washington, DC, Chicago’s Latino Union worker center has seen an
influx of Polish migrants,93 and influential worker centers exist in the Korean and
Filipino communities of Los Angeles.94
As day labor groups exemplify, worker centers also have built networks on
multiple geopolitical scales, thus striving to keep pace with capitalism’s global ki-
nesis, its fueling of worker transience, and its decimation of the union movement
in the United States.95 Worker centers have forged sturdy ties to “popular organ-
izations in the countries from which workers have migrated.”96 They also have
joined in global “movement building” through the Excluded Workers Congress,
which worker centers helped found at the 2010 World Social Forum and which
has brought day laborers together with domestic workers, farmworkers, restau-
rant workers, and other highly precaritized working people.97 Along with these
ventures, the day labor network has developed cooperative arrangements with
unions that have intensified traditional labor’s focus on workers who are “on the
move.” Increasing coordination between unions and worker centers in California
during the 1990s created momentum for the adoption in 2000 by the American
Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) of
an unprecedented resolution to promote immigrant rights and to prioritize
organizing migrants.98 By the time of the massive immigrant rights marches
of 2006, NDLON and the AFL-CIO had established a formal partnership.99
A 2015 report commissioned by the Labor Innovations for the 21st Century Fund
reaffirmed worker centers’ and unions’ commitment to “Building a Movement
Together.”100
Just as worker centers provide a politicizing form of grounding for migrant
workers on the move, so likewise, they furnish environments for grappling cre-
atively and politically with the myriad ways in which precaritized workers are
“out of time.” Again, this book makes the case at length in the later chapters that
these organizations operate this way for day laborers—and that worker centers
have untapped wellsprings of this sort for precaritized workers in general. To
begin this line of thought, however: one of the first curiosities that sparked my
enthusiasm for conducting research at day labor centers was noticing how these
organizations seemed to refunction the embattled time of everyday life for those
who attended. Workers congregated at Casa Latina and Voz’s MLK Center
during awkward pauses in their work activities and work searches, more often just
waiting around than expeditiously getting dispatched on jobs. Yet at the centers,
this waiting time could become something other than merely dead or suspended
Introduction 29
time. To be sure, I saw plenty of workers who just kept to themselves, seemingly
preferring to be left “on their own” as they sat in boredom with the slim hope of
hearing their names called in the job lotteries. Other workers, however, joined
in animated conversations about all sorts of topics, from World Cup matches to
free trade agreements, soup kitchen hours, and weather reports. Overlaying these
lively informal interactions were (loosely) organized activities: English classes,
arts projects, know-your-rights workshops on immigration enforcement, and
worker assemblies that usually featured vibrant debates and moments of humor.
Sometimes, a worker pulled out a guitar and began singing and playing, either
to himself or with others listening. In my very first visit to Voz’s MLK Center as
a volunteer English teacher, I was abruptly assigned a minor role in a slapdash
“theater of the oppressed” exercise that coordinators cooked up to prod workers
into reflecting on stubborn racial and ethnic tensions among them. As the ex-
ercise progressed, I heard and saw workers transition from play-acted griping
about the filthy habits of “peasants” from Guatemala’s highlands or Mexico City
“delinquents,” to accelerating hand-clapping in unison as the contrived character
of the exercise dawned on those assembled, to candid discussion about how to
combat unfair preconceptions that sapped the community’s power. What struck
me on this and other occasions was not only the diverse range of affects such
activities encouraged, and not just the fact that the centers seemed able, against
stiff odds, to nurture a common spirit and a sense of abundance among deeply
isolated, poor, and discouraged migrant workers. It was also how intentional,
improvisational, and informally connective activities emerged within mundane
time-gaps in the precarious work-economy—and then remade the time of eve-
ryday precarity into novel, unpredictable, and politically generative temporalities.
In sum, taking a sojourn among day laborers not only furnishes intellectu-
ally enlivening prospects for reworking critical theories of precarity while feeding
popular-educational efforts to ignite theory-on-the-ground among the oppressed,
but this apparently digressive journey also carries real political stakes for the fight
against precaritization. The stakes derive from day laborers’ crucial participation
in urban residential construction and home improvement economies, with their
multiple material and ideological vectors. Augmenting the need for this sort of
study are day labor organizations’ strategic ecumenism, tactical versatility, and
outsized influence in the worlds of public policy and migrant justice activism.
Signs also abound that worker centers and the day labor network have much
to teach, and a great deal to offer in practice, in the effort to develop dynamic
and sustaining time-spaces of political action for workers who are out of time,
on the move, and on their own as they suffer the effects of today’s precaritized
working world.
Stages of Critical-Popular Exploration

The chapters ahead pursue this critique of precarity in partnership with day
laborers and other critical theorists through a series of steps. I first develop
and justify my approach of critical-popular analysis in chapter 1, in dialogue
with Freire’s theory of popular education. Crafting a procedure for critical so-
cial research to participate meaningfully in social and political transformation,
this chapter reconstructs from Freire’s early writings a conception of fieldwork
among oppressed groups that sheds light on structures of power and names these
power formations in politically galvanizing ways. Freire calls such nominative
activity the articulation of “generative themes”; c hapter 1 elaborates the quali-
ties that enable themes to “generate” critical consciousness and political action
and suggests how researchers can recognize such themes in interview transcripts.
After specifying how such research can equip local groups of oppressed people
to tackle social-theoretical and political labors through popular education, this
chapter also takes on a further challenge: delineating a complementary process
of critical-popular investigation that discloses larger-scale opportunities for rad-
ical worker solidarities by staging encounters between particular groups’ genera-
tive themes and structurally oriented theories of social power. The chapter then
concludes by reflecting on how best to construe the relation between generative-
thematic inquiry and political action. Here, I argue that militant and receptive
affects stimulated through both Freirean popular-educational dialogue and
demand-politics, as conceptualized by Kathi Weeks, can reconstitute political
subjectivities in radically transformative ways within localized contexts. Critical-
popular insights, in turn, coax into view the broader-scope and audaciously uto-
pian implications of such mutations.
Three chapters then follow that take up day laborers’ major themes regarding
their circumstances of work and work searches, as voiced during the interviews.
Chapters 2–4 thus construct a differentiated account of contemporary precarity
guided by day laborers’ reflections in conjunction with resonant conceptions
drawn from recent social-theoretical writings. These discussions accentuate the
temporal, ethical, and corporeal dimensions of precaritized work-life as well as
the antiprecarity political priorities that various juxtapositions of theme and
theory bring to light. Each chapter also attends to certain masculine qualities of
the workers’ themes and considers how these gendered features limit the signif-
icance of day labor as a synecdoche for precaritization writ large. As I discuss in
each main portion of the analysis, other research often suggests how women mi-
grant workers—for instance, the domestic workers who are becoming increas-
ingly influential leaders and participants in worker centers and the day labor
network—would likely frame the temporalities, bodily constraints, and ethical
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The Fight For Time Migrant Day Laborers and The Politics of Precarity Paul Apostolidis Full Chapter PDF

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The Fight for Time: Migrant Day

Laborers and the Politics of Precarity

The Politics of Global Competitiveness Paul Cammack

Postsecular History: Political Theology and the

Bretons and Britons: The Fight for Identity Barry

Right Place, Right Time (The Pilsdale Chronicles Book

World Literature, Non-Synchronism, and the Politics of

Migrant Languages in Education: Problems, Policies, and

The Transnational Voices of Australia’s Migrant and

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

Several friends and colleagues deserve special acknowledgment for their

Ricardo Gomez, Katherine Gordy, Margaret Kohn, Joseph Lowndes, Keally

THE M AT U R AT I O N O F neoliberal capitalism has yielded a curious conun-

Thesis 1: Precarious Workers Are Suffering

Thesis 2: Precarious Workers Are out of Time

postmodernity by André Gorz and David Harvey, respectively, highlight some

Accelerations in turnover times in production, exchange and consump-

As subjection to such temporal compression, precarity signifies imprisonment

Thesis 3: Precarious Workers Are on Their Own

“responsibilization” furnishes key contours of the dissociative individualization

Thesis 4: Precarious Workers Are on the Move

Thesis 5: Precarious Workers Are Fighting Back

A Sojourn with Day Laborers

Popular Education and the Constellating of Theory

experimental dialogues informed by workers’ themes that confirmed my char-

of precarity, in particular, is their common ability to join day laborers in revealing

Day Laborers and Counterprecarity Politics

Militant researchers sought workers’ direct engagement in social research,

My effort to situate research squarely within determinate fields of political and

Stages of Critical-​Popular Exploration

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