The Fight For Time: Migrant Day Laborers and the Politics of Precarity (Studies in Subaltern Latina/o Politics)

In today's precarious world, working people's experiences are strangely becoming more alike even as their disparities sharpen. The Fight for Time explores the logic behind this paradox by listening to what Latino day laborers say about work and society. The book shows how migrant laborers are both exception and synecdoche in relation to the precarious conditions of contemporary work life. As unauthorized migrants, these workers are subjected to extraordinarily harsh treatment - yet in startling ways, they also epitomize struggles that apply throughout the economy. Juxtaposing day laborers' descriptions of their desperate circumstances and dangerous work with theoretical accounts of the forces fueling insecurity, The Fight for Time illuminates the temporal contradictions that define precarity today. The book taps the core intellectual current among day labor groups - Paulo Freire's popular-education theory - to craft an original "critical-popular" approach for understanding the points of connection between the ways that day laborers view their lives and scholarly analysis of precarious work-life writ large. The result is a temporally attuned and politically bracing perspective on neoliberal crises, the work ethic in the era of affective and digital labor, the intensifying racial governance of public spaces, the burgeoning deportation regime, and the growth of occupational safety and health hazards. The accounts of the day laborers in this book are rich with potential to catalyze social critique among migrant workers - and clarify the terms on which mass-scale opposition to precarity can occur. Such opposition would demand restoration of workers' stolen time, engage in a fight for the city, challenge the conditions under which aversion to financial risk puts workers into physical danger, and foment the refusal of work. We can look to the urban worker centers where this radically democratic politics of precarity is taking root to understand what types of organizations have the potential to wage the fight for time and enable broad mobilization in the face of precarity: worker centers for all working people. In this work, Paul Apostolidis asks what we can learn about social and economic precarity by considering the situation of Latin American migrant day laborers in the United States today. To do so, the author places Latino day laborers' commentaries in dialogue with critical social theory. Apostolidis sees these day laborers' circumstances both as exceptional and as synecdoches for precarious conditions that affect multitudes of workers. Through its combined approach to critical theory and field research with migrant workers, this text makes a case for a politics that is attuned to questions of time and advanced by precarious workers throughout society. Cover......Page 1 Series......Page 3 The Fight for Time......Page 4 Copyright......Page 5 Dedication......Page 6 Contents......Page 8 Acknowledgments......Page 10 Introduction......Page 16 1. Generative Themes: Freirean Pedagogy and the Politics of Social Research......Page 52 2. Desperate Responsibility......Page 88 3. Fighting for the Job......Page 130 4. Risk on All Sides, Eyes Wide Open......Page 164 5. Visions of Community at Worker Centers: From Protected Workforce to Convivial Politics......Page 202 6. Organizing the Fight against Precarity......Page 246 Notes......Page 268 Bibliography......Page 306 Index......Page 320