The Fight For Time

Abstract

In today’s precarious world, working people’s experiences are becoming more alike even as their disparities sharpen. This book unfolds a critique of the precarity phenomenon by setting Latino day laborers’ commentaries in dialogue with critical social theory. The Fight for Time shows how migrant labor on society’s jagged edges relates to encompassing syndromes of precarity as both exception and synecdoche. Subjected to especially harsh treatment as unauthorized migrants, these workers also epitomize struggles that apply throughout the economy. Juxtaposing day laborers’ accounts of their desperate circumstances, dangerous jobs, and informal job-seeking with theoretical accounts of the forces fueling precaritization, The Fight for Time illuminates a schema of precarity defined by temporal contradiction. This “critical-popular” approach, informed by Paulo Freire’s popular-education theory, elicits resonances and dissonances between day laborers’ themes and scholars’ analyses of neoliberal crisis, the postindustrial work ethic, affective and digital labor, the racial governance of public spaces, occupational safety and health hazards, and self-undermining patterns of desire and personal responsibility among precaritized subjects. Day laborers offer language redolent with potential to catalyze social critique among migrant workers. They also clarify the terms of mass-scale opposition to precarity. Such a politics would demand restoration of workers’ stolen time, engage a fight for the city, challenge the conversion of capital risk into workers’ bodily vulnerability, and foment the refusal of work. Day laborers’ convivial politics through self-organized worker centers, furthermore, offers a powerful basis for renewing radical democratic theory and imagining a key practical innovation: worker centers for all working people.