American Untouchables: Homeless Scavengers in San Francisco's Underground Economy

Abstract

An early morning at Bryant Salvage, a Vietnamese recycling business, finds a variety of San Francisco's scavengers converging to sell their findings. Vehicle after vehicle enters the yard to be weighed on the huge floor scale before dumping its load in the back; ancient pick‐up trucks with wooden walls, carefully loaded laundry carts, canary Cadillacs stuffed to overflow with computer paper, the shopping carts of homeless men, a 1950s ambulance carrying newspaper, and even the occasional gleaming new truck. The homeless men unload their towers of bottles and cardboard while young Latino van recyclers shout jokes across them. Middle aged Vietnamese women in jeans and padded jackets buzz around on forklifts or push around great tubs full of bottles and cans, stopping occasionally to help elderly people with their laundry carts. The van recyclers repeatedly honk their horns at the homeless guys to get out of the way. The homeless recyclers, silently methodical in their work, rarely respond.

The Workless Class? Economic Transformation, Informal Work and Male Working-Class Identity

“…However, the present research finds that for these individuals informal work may have become a generalised coping strategy that simultaneously helps to meet both financial and identity needs. The present research echoes Gowan's (1997) conclusions regarding homeless recyclers. Riach and Loretto (2009) have argued that older unemployed people strongly resist being stigmatised by drawing on past working identities or distancing themselves from stereotypes of non-workers.…”

“…Gowan (1997) conducted ethnographic work with San Francisco's homeless garbage recyclers. They distinguished between embellishment and fantasizing.…”

Coping strategies in developed and developing societies: the workings of the informal economy

“…While the scavengers may appear as autonomous self-employed workers, their activities differed little from Birkbeck's study (Birkbeck, 1979) of garbage workers in Columbia who ended up supplying large formal industries with signi®cant quantities of raw materials at a fraction of their market costs. Similar observations were made by Gowan (1997) who found that informal garbage workers in San Francisco were essential to the pro®t levels of the booming recycling industry in the area.…”

Design and art promoting socially responsible recycling: the analysis of a collaborative action to support waste pickers in New York City

“…Gowan (1997) points out that informal waste picking is a common practice also in many cities in the United States, stating that:…”