The Labour of Liminality

WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society, 2012

An extensive body of research has documented the barriers faced by ex-offenders in the labor market. This article presents an ethnographic case study of an industry that actively recruits and makes profitable use of this stigmatized, yet abundantly pliable and easily exploitable, source of labor. In so doing, this article focuses on the qualitative character, as opposed to the quantitative (in)accessibility, of jobs available to the more than half of a million convicts streaming out of prison each year. Drawing upon extensive interviews and participant observation in the day labor agencies of Oakland and Baltimore—where poor, predominantly African-American and formerly incarcerated men clamor for a day’s work—the article documents day laborers’ experience of this precarious employment relationship as a kind of extended incarceration and enduring form of punishment, one that traps them in a forever liminal status. This study highlights the extraordinary vulnerability of formerly incarcerated workers and deepens our understanding of the interface between hyperincarceration and the restructuring of urban labor markets.

Anthropology of Work Review, 2019

This article focuses upon a previously overlooked aspect of the "flesh-peddling" day labor business, widely recognized as the epitome of the precarious regime of employment. By physically stockpiling surplus labor to meet their clients' immediate and unpredictable demands, day labor agencies inadvertently give rise to informal day labor markets outside their doors. Drawing upon ethnographic research carried out in the day labor agencies of Baltimore and Oakland, I examine how day laborers and agency dispatchers negotiate and navigate the practice of what I call "backdoor" hiring, wherein employers hire workers from, but not through, the agency. The struggles surrounding backdoor hiring not only challenge and complicate the binary division in the literature between formal and informal day labor, but reveal the dogged efforts of dispatchers to cultivate workers' dependency, restrict their mobility, and curtail their labor-market freedom. This article thus contributes to the growing debate within anthropology and related disciplines about the conditions exacerbating unfreedom at the bottom of the labor market.

Dialectical Anthropology, 2010

Temporary day labor agencies (commonly referred to as ''day labor halls'') are privately run companies external to the formal Prison Re-Entry Industry (PRI). However, they frequently provide entry-level employment for recent, frequent, and reformed felons. All spaces associated with day labor employment are rigidly controlled and caught in a visual contradiction. While laborers are completely visible to the day labor halls for the purposes of surveillance, observation, evaluation, and ultimately control, they are simultaneously rendered invisible and hidden from the view of society at large. For day laborers with felony records, the duality is intensified. Once released from prison, former prisoners enter spaces under the view and control of law enforcement within the formal PRI system. Further, their world continues to be viewed, restricted, and controlled by privately owned day labor halls where over 50% of potential workers are felons. By examining the spatialities of the daily working lives of day laborers and their (im)mobility as they navigate difficult spatialities, it is possible to comprehend some of the major hurdles of re-entry. The spatialities of the everyday life of felons continue as restricted spaces for a ''captive population'' even beyond the prison walls and beyond the formal systems of the PRI.

Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 2018

How does one make sense of a group of migrant men who spend much of their time together over several years, share a space as well as a social position, and behave in some respects like close friends, yet do not develop stable relationships of solidarity and collective forms of self-perception? What are the micro-foundations of these precarious communities? Drawing upon eight months of ethnographic fieldwork at three day labor sites in Los Angeles, this article explores three interlocking processes that sustain one of the most radical forms of marginality in contemporary the United States. It analyzes the economic, political, and cultural dispossession of day laborers through (1) market competition, (2) the embodiment of an undocumented status, and (3) the internalization of cultural exclusion. These individualizing mechanisms are argued to truncate basic forms of mutual solidarity, producing and reproducing the precarious communities of day laborers.

WorkingUSA, 2006

York metropolitan area. Day laborers are employed by construction contractors, landscaping companies, homeowners, and small businesses to undertake manual labor jobs for low pay. The work is precarious and steady employment is rare. In addition, the day labor market is characterized by routine violations of labor and employment laws, and workers are often exposed to unsafe working conditions. These conditions prevail, in part, because day laborers largely are disconnected from workers rights' advocacy efforts. However, the creation of worker centers aims to remedy this situation. Several community organizations in the region are now actively contesting abuses in the day labor market and increasing both accountability in and transparency of the hiring process.

Dialogo, 2011

Perspectives on Politics, 2020

Latin American Perspectives

Day laborers and open-air labor markets are not new in American history, but in the twentieth century, thanks to high employment and increasing job security, they almost disappeared. Now they're back, fed by heavy migration from Mexico and Central America, and a bone of contention in the U.S. immigration debate. For immigrant-rights activists, the increasing visibility of day laborers is irrefutable evidence of the demand for immigrant labor. Since most day laborers lack legal status, their advocates continue, they also illustrate the need for a comprehensive legalization program. For critics who wish to reduce immigration, in contrast, the resurgence of day labor is a sign that job markets are being flooded and labor laws are being ignored. Survey research tells us that most day laborers suffer from wage theft (Valenzuela et al., 2006), and anyone can do a head count of the local hiring corner, but becoming a participant observer on a day job requires trickier diplomacy than joining a labor force on a plantation or in a factory. As far as I know, no researcher has accomplished this except for Hans Lucht (2012: 42-49), who discovered that his Ghanaian buddy in Naples, Italy, was working for a retired policeman. Unless you can talk yourself into being brought along for the job as Lucht did, the next best thing is to hang out with men waiting to be hired. That's what Juan Thomas Ordoñez did for the better part of two years in Berkeley, California, along an avenue with 80-plus other day laborers. Anyone curious about day laborers will learn a lot from Ordoñez's ethnography Jornalero. The six men to whom he became closest were a disciplined bunch. Most were struggling to remit as much income as they could to families in Mexico and Central America. They shunned the alcoholics and drug addicts dwelling under nearby freeway overpasses, mainly ex-laborers who had succumbed to despair. Most day laborers say they want a stable job; for Ordoñez's friends, however, low minimum wages, legally required deductions, and inconvenient night shifts made day-by-day gigs for at least US$10 an hour and no tax deductions a better way to meet their needs-that is, if someone would roll up in a vehicle and hire them, which in 2007-2009 was often not the case. The Berkeley parada (stop) attracted day laborers from neighboring jurisdictions. The city's minimum wage was higher than elsewhere, and its employers had a reputation for being more considerate. Still, all the men had been cheated or worse by one boss or another, so they refused to get into a vehicle with anyone who aroused suspicion. Most claimed to have been propositioned by homosexuals, so they wanted nothing to do

Perspectives on Politics

Journal of Ethnic And Cultural Diversity in Social Work, 2011