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Grounding the Regime of Precarious EmploymentHomeless Day Laborers' Negotiation of the Job QueueVanderbilt University, damian.t.williams{at}vanderbilt.edu This ethnography of day laboring contends that to better understand how the labor process situated within the industry is regulated at the micro-level, it is necessary to move beyond studies that limit their analyses of homeless day laborers—an important subset of workers who mediate and respond to this low-road industry's bottom line imperatives—to worker grievances or the strategies they use to combat anonymity. This article shows that the reasons homeless workers see day labor as a "sensible" income-generating strategy and the ways in which they comprehend and negotiate the job queue—the central, supply-side regulatory mechanism with which they contend each day—illuminate both the ways in which they coproduce the regime of workplace discipline that regulates the temporary-labor process and contribute to the reproduction of the industry's micro-foundations. By extending the concept of "reliable contingency" to include these supply-side processes, this analysis reveals that agency loyalty is produced by a divide-and-rule dynamic that emerges from and acts back on these interpretive and interactional dynamics, creating an informal regulatory structure embedded in the hiring hall.
Key Words: contingent labor market • day labor • homelessness • precarious employment • workplace regulation
Work and Occupations, Vol. 36, No. 3,
209-246 (2009) |
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