Waiting for Work: An Ethnography of a Day Labor Agency

This paper addresses the shifting temporal dimensions of work brought about by the flexibilization of employment. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork in a corporate day labor agency located in a West Coast city, I examine the way in which uncertainty is both produced and experienced in an effort to analyze the mode of domination captured by Bourdieu’s concept of “flexploitation.” Specifically, I examine the organization of the hiring and job allocation process, workers’ experience and understanding of this temporally uncertain employment relationship, and the way in which management manipulates this temporal experience as a technique of labor control. I argue that the enforced waiting period that is endemic in this industry is not only a strategy of externalizing risk (through “time funneling”) but of manufacturing a reserve army of labor that is highly disciplined

Employment Vulnerability of Formerly-Incarcerated Workers

Over the last decade, a robust body of scholarship has documented the barriers to employment faced by the formerly-incarcerated. This project complements that research by examining the actual experiences of the formerly-incarcerated on the job and at the workplace. Drawing upon in-depth, semi-structured interviews with formerly-incarcerated workers, this study aims to understand formerly-incarcerated workers’ vulnerability to degrading treatment and/or abusive conditions in the workplace. The project aims to furthermore understand the extent to which this vulnerability is exacerbated both for those on parole, who often face the extra-economic compulsion to document evidence of gainful employment, and during periods of economic recession

Dignity Strategies in a Neoliberal Workfare Kitchen Training Program

Welfare‐to‐work training (workfare) programs are designed to technically and affectively prepare marginalized people for jobs that are often routinized and dirty. They are expected to accept personal responsibility for their situation and demonstrate submission to bosses as means of “working off” their “debt” to society. Ethnographic observation at workfare training sites has tended to emphasize the indignities that trainees suffer, with less attention to how workers maintain dignity in the face of these experiences. Using ethnographic observation and interviews in a Chicago workfare kitchen training program, we show that neoliberal kitchen training work encompasses paradoxical expectations for trainee‐workers; they must demonstrate high levels of discretion and creativity required in professional kitchen work and demonstrate submission to charismatic authority as a means of getting kitchen work done and of affective compliance with the goals of the program. To combat the direct efforts of others to produce indignities, trainees developed two dignity strategies that are highly dependent on the structure of kitchen work: operating in a slipstream, and banking confidence that allows them to take liberties normally allowed for chef‐trainers. These findings contribute to sociological understandings of workplace dignity, a privilege that has been especially elusive for the poor under welfare‐to‐work programs

A Test of Sincerity: How Black and Latino Service Workers Make Decisions about Making Referrals

The author draws from in-depth interviews with thirty-nine black and Latino custodial and food service workers at the University of California, Berkeley, to determine how workers make decisions about making job referrals. Interviews were revelatory. Drawing from widely available and institutionalized scripts about what makes a good worker, jobholders assessed jobseekers’ orientation toward work as well as what effect this orientation might have on their own reputations on the job to determine whom to help and how much to do so. Because of ethno-racial differences in how unemployment was interpreted, Latinos were more likely than their black counterparts to help and to do so proactively. These findings suggest that theories of social capital mobilization must take into consideration individuals’ access to and deployment of cultural resources to fully understand the circumstances under which actors are mobilized for instrumental action