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.
Allen, J., & Henry, N. (1996). Fragments of industry and employment: Contract service work and the shift towards precarious employment. In R. Crompton, D. Gallie, & K. Purcell (Eds.), Changing forms of employment: Organizations, skills, and gender (pp. 65-82). London : Routledge.
2.
Anderson, N. (1923). The hobo: The sociology of homeless men. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
3.
Bartley, T., & Roberts, W.T. (2006). Relational exploitation: The informal organization of day labor organizations. Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society, 9, 41-58.
4.
Bourdieu, P. (1980). The logic of practice. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
5.
Bourgois, P. (1995). In search of respect: Selling crack in El Barrio . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
6.
Bourgois, P. (1998). The moral economies of homeless heroin addicts: Confronting ethnography, HIV risk, and everyday violence in San Francisco shooting encampments. Substance Use and Misuse, 33, 2323-2351.
7.
Burawoy, M. (1979). Manufacturing consent: Changes in the labor process under monopoly capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
8.
Burawoy, M. (2000). Grounding globalization. In M. Burawoy, J. A. Blum , S. George, Z. Gille, T. Gowan, L. Haney, et al. (Eds.), Global ethnography: Forces, connections, and imaginations in a postmodern world (pp. 337-350). Berkeley: University of California Press.
9.
Cook, C.D. (2002). Street Corner, Incorporated. Mother Jones, 27(March/April), 2.
10.
Duneier, M. (1999). Sidewalk. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
11.
Emerson, R.M. (2001). Producing ethnographies: Theory, evidence, and representation. In R. M. Emerson (Ed.), Contemporary field research: Perspectives and formulations (pp. 281-315). Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.
12.
Fairbanks, R. (in press). Statecraft, recovery markets, and urban informality in Philadelphia's recovery house movement. Ethnography.
13.
Freeman, H., & Gonos, G. (2005). Regulating the employment sharks: Reconceptualizing the legal status of the commercial temp agency. Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society, 8, 293-314.
14.
Gonos, G. (1997). The contest over employer status in the postwar United States: The case of temporary help firms. Law and Society Review, 31, 81-107.
15.
Gottfried, H. (1992). In the margins: Flexibility as a mode of regulation in the temporary help service industry. Work, Employment and Society, 6, 443-460.
16.
Gowan, T. (2000). Excavating "globalization" from street level: Homeless men recycle their pasts. In M. Burawoy , J. A. Blum, S. George, Z. Gille, T. Gowan, L. Haney , et al. (Eds.), Global ethnography: Forces, connections, and imaginations in a postmodern world (pp. 74-106). Berkeley: University of California Press.
17.
Gowan, T. (2003). The nexus: Homelessness and incarceration in twoAmerican cities. Ethnography, 3, 500-534.
18.
Hopper, K. (2003). Reckoning with homelessness. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
19.
Kalleberg, A.L., Reskin, B.F., & Hudson, K. (2000). Bad jobs in America: Standard and nonstandard employment relations and job quality in the United States. American Sociological Review, 65, 256-278.
20.
Kerr, D., & Dole, C. (2005). Cracking the temp trap: Day laborers' grievances and strategies for change in Cleveland, Ohio. Labor Studies Journal, 29(4), 87-108.
21.
Kneebone, E. (2009). Job sprawl revisited: The changing geography of metropolitan employment. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.
22.
Lee, B.A., & Price-Spratlen, T. (2003). The geography of homelessness in American communities: Concentration or dispersion? City and Community, 3, 3-27.
23.
Lloyd, R. (2006). Neo-Bohemia: Art and commerce in the postindustrial city. New York: Routledge.
24.
McMaster, S. (2008). Employment services for individuals who are homeless in Nashville, Tennessee (Report prepared for the Nashville Homeless Commission) . Nashville, TN: Nashville Homeless Commission.
25.
Mehta, C., & Theodore, N. (2006). Workplace safety in Atlanta's construction industry: Institutional failure in temporary staffing arrangements. Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society, 9, 59-77.
26.
Neckerman, K.M., & Kirschenman, J. (1991). Hiring strategies, racial bias, and inner-city workers. Social Problems, 38, 433-447.
27.
Pager, D. (2003). The mark of a criminal record. American Journal of Sociology, 108, 937-975.
28.
Peck, J. (1996). Work-place: The social regulation of labor markets . New York: Guilford Press.
29.
Peck, J., & Theodore, N. (2001). Contingent Chicago: Restructuring the spaces of temporary labor. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 25, 471-496.
30.
Peck, J., & Theodore, N. (2007). Flexible recession: The temporary staffing industry and mediated work in the United States. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 31, 171-192.
31.
Roberts, W.T., & Bartley, T. (2004). The wages of day labor: Homeless workers in the temporary help industry. Journal of Poverty, 8(3), 65-89.
32.
Rosenthal, R. (1994). Homeless in paradise: A map of the terrain. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
33.
Small, M.L. (2008). Four reasons to abandon the idea of "The Ghetto ." City and Community, 7, 389-399.
34.
Smith, V. (1997). New forms of work organization. Annual Review of Sociology, 23, 315-339.
35.
Snow, D.A., & Anderson, L. (1993). Down on their luck: A study of homeless street people. Berkeley: University of California Press.
36.
Snow, D.A., Anderson, L., Quist, T., & Cress, D. (1996). Material survival strategies on the street: Homeless people as Bricoleurs. In J. Baumohl (Ed.), Homelessness in America (pp. 86-96). Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press.
37.
Soja, E. (2000). Postmetropolis: Critical studies of cities and regions. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
38.
Theodore, N. (2000). A fair day's pay? Homeless day laborers in Chicago (Report prepared for Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, Chicago Interfaith Committee on Worker Issues, and Chicago Jobs With Justice). Chicago: Center for Urban Economic Development, University of Illinois at Chicago.
39.
Theodore, N. (2003). Political economies of day labour: Regulation and restructuring of Chicago's contingent labor markets. Urban Studies, 40, 1811-1828.
40.
Theodore, N., Meléndez, E., Valenzuela, A., Jr. , & Gonzalez, A.L. (2008). Day labor and workplace abuses in the residential construction industry: Conditions in theWashington, DC, region. In A. Bernhardt, H. Boushey, L. Dresser, & C. Tilly (Eds.), The gloves-off economy: Workplace standards at the bottom of America's labor market (pp. 91-109). Champaign, IL : Labor and Employment Relations Association.
41.
Theodore, N., Valenzuela, A., Jr. , & Meléndez, E. (2006). La Esquina (the corner): Day laborers on the margins of New York's formal economy. Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society, 9, 407-423.
42.
Valenzuela, A., Jr. (2001). Day labourers as entrepreneurs? Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 27, 335-352.
43.
Valenzuela, A., Jr. (2003). Day labor work. Annual Review of Sociology, 29, 307-333.
44.
Wacquant, L. (2008). Urban outcasts: A comparative sociology of advanced marginality. Malden, MA: Polity Press.
45.
Walter, N., Bourgois, P., Loinaz, M., & Schillinger, D. (2002). Social context of work injury among undocumented day laborers in San Francisco. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 17, 221-229.
46.
Western, B. (2006). Punishment and inequality in America. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
47.
Willis, P. (1977). Learning to labor: How working class kids get working class jobs. New York: Columbia University Press.
