Grounding the Regime of Precarious Employment

Abstract

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.

New insights into informal migrant employment: Hand car washes in a mid-sized English city

“…So connectivity between country of origin home-life and networks can limit labour market progression for migrants (MacKenzie and Forde, 2009). Intermediaries and wider social networks can contribute to the (exclusion and marginalization) difficulties precarious workers face in securing better jobs in either formal or informal employment (McCollum and Findlay, 2015: 430;Williams, 2009). However, the authority of this view is contested and precarious migrants may not be merely passive victims of their position in the market for bad jobs; rather they can use informal networks to promote job mobility and build skills to escape such jobs (Alberti, 2015;Hagan et al, 2011).…”

Work in Britain's Informal Economy: Learning from Road‐Side Hand Car Washes

“…So there are different types of migrant labour employed in HCWs. Some are reliant on intermediaries and wider social networks for employment which can confine precarious workers to less good jobs in either formal or informal employment (McCollum and Findlay : 430; Williams ). We found that a permissive UK legal environment created a ‘sub‐contract’ labour market populated by precarious and vulnerable labour unsure if they are an employee and who may not know the identity of their employer (Wills et al .…”