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View of the Pacific Beach Employment Center. The sign shown here is not visible to most drivers on Mission Bay Drive. Photograph by Sean Crotty, October 2005.
Source publication
Recent debates surrounding immigration in the United States have brought renewed attention to day laborers. In their search for employment, day laborers temporarily occupy public and quasi-public spaces. The visibility of day labor and the appearance of day labor hiring sites raise new questions about public space and its ‘proper’ use. The establis...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... illustrate these points, we examine the micro-geographies of a formal day labor worker center in San Diego County, California (Figure 1). Micro-geographic studies focus on the details of groups' lived spatial experience, the daily spaces in which most personal and group interactions take place, or what Percy-Smith and Weil (2000) call 'encounter spaces.' ...
Context 2
... second sign is by far the largest sign identifying the site. This sign is painted on the concrete wall between the site and the Rose Canyon drainage ditch (see Figure 1). Unfortunately, the sign is located much lower than the road it faces and is therefore relatively ineffective at drawing new employers to the site. ...
Citations
... These centers are one mechanism to impose formal regulation of the informal market, providing a space and resources to the workers that can increase their security as the operate as 'entrepreneurs' of their own labor [39]. The success of these centers can vary based on a variety of factors, like location [40], funding, and worker engagement [41]. Frantz and Fernandes[42] argue that worker center funding model is critical to the organization's ability to serve day laborer needs. ...
Immigrant day laborers routinely experience exploitative behaviors as part of their employment. These experiences are understood in the context of their immigration histories and in the context of their long-term goals for less precarious labor and living situations. Using mixed methods, over three data collection periods in 2016, 2019, and 2020, we analyze the work experiences of immigrant day labors in Houston and Austin, Texas. We report how workers judge precarious jobs and respond to labor exploitation in an informal labor market. We also discuss data pertaining to a worker rights training intervention conducted through a city-sponsored worker center. We discuss the potential for worker centers to be a convening and remediation space for workers and employers. Worker centers where immigrant day labors meet employers offer the potential for informal intervention into wage theft and work safety violations, by formalizing the context where laborers are hired.
... Capitalist labour configurations, especially labour discipline and the naturalization of low social status alongside low-wage work, play a crucial part in forming racial and ethnic categories (Bourgois 1988, Treitler 2013. Geographers concerned with labour, ethnicity, and race emphasize their entanglement and co-construction within and alongside work spaces (Chari 2000, Braun 2002, Crotty and Bosco 2008, Cabezas 2009). Others have argued that it is impossible to distinguish between occupational and ethnic hierarchies, as they define and reproduce each other in specific social, historical, and geographical contexts (Bourgois 1988, Mallon 1995. ...
Following Tenzing Norgay’s historic ascent of Mount Everest, western mythmaking transformed Sherpa ethnicity into a signifier for a labour category, a place, and a set of cultural characteristics. Westerners have come to link Sherpa-ness with stereotypes of superhuman strength, mountain skill, and loyalty. However, most labourers in the Everest industry are not Sherpas; they are upland ethnic minorities who migrate seasonally from the lower hills to the high Khumbu. Many of these ethnic minority labourers also pass as Sherpa. Becoming “situationally Sherpa” is a common practice, but little is known about how, why, and with what effects claims to Sherpa-ness are formed and deployed. This paper explores how and why this identity practice emerged alongside new labour geographies in the Everest region. The case of “situational Sherpas” reveals how racial, ethnic, and labour hierarchies intersect and blur to produce new experiences of oppression, and new possibilities for resistance.
... Other formerly incarcerated Black Americans learned Spanish to improve their chances of joining all Latino immigrant landscaping crews. The process of racialization and criminalization renders all day laborers "illegal Latinos," regardless of race, nativity, or legal status, with consequent effects on their economic outcomes (Crotty & Bosco, 2008;Herrera, 2016;Hiemstra, 2010;Valenzuela, 2003). ...
With the advent of globalization, neoliberalism, and immigration policy reforms that enlarged the non-White workforce in the United States, precarious employment—work that is contingent, risky, and socially stratified—has increased dramatically. The 2008 Great Recession exacerbated labor market uncertainty, deepening the demand for precarious labor. These same structural forces have conditioned a rise in precarious entrepreneurship in the informal economy; yet little is known about how precarity is experienced among “survival entrepreneurs” or its effects on their entrepreneurial outcomes. This study uses unique ethnosurvey data collected between 2012 and 2018 on 116 street corner day laborers in Texas, a state in the Southwest region of the United States, to investigate these relationships. In the context of a more precarious economy, findings reveal that undocumented Latino immigrant men continue to dominate day labor activity; however, the expanding supply and demand for day laborers has resulted in a more diverse day labor pool that includes legal permanent residents, naturalized citizens, and U.S.-born citizens, including Black and White Americans. At the same time, day labor remains a “bad job” characterized by exploitive and abusive working conditions and low hourly income. That said Latino immigrant day laborers are subject to a distinct process of criminalization and racialization that conditions a lower hourly income for this group, regardless of legal status. Findings suggest that day labor is a form of precarious entrepreneurship that is polarized by race and nativity.
... Their argument presupposes that all of the workers who use a center are illegal immigrants; this is, in fact, not the case. The demographic and legal status of labor populations in the U.S. varies regionally, between hiring sites in a given metropolitan area, and even depending on the time of day at a specific site (Crotty 2015;Crotty and Bosco 2008;Valenzuela et al. 2006). Thanks to the popular understanding of day-laborer as synonymous with illegal immigrant, this argument still holds political sway . ...
... The mere physical presence of local police or other law-enforcement agencies can also alter space. 4 In San Diego County, the most common method of discouraging day-labor congregation is increased police presence and focused ticketing for petty crimes which are often a necessity of actually seeking work as a day-laborer: jaywalking, loitering, obstructing traffic, public urination, etc. (Crotty 2016;Crotty and Bosco 2008;Eisenstadt and Thorup 1994). ...
Day-labor hiring sites are found in more than 120 municipalities across the U.S., there is limited research examining the specific drivers that generate direct interventions into the day-labor market, nor is there any research examining the effectiveness of day-labor management policies. In what follows, I draw on examples from the San Diego Metropolitan Area (SDMA) to address this gap in policy-research. The findings demonstrate the pervasiveness of neoliberal ideology in day-labor management, from policing strategies to social service provision. In each case examined, local governments only took direct action when they believed day-labor activity threatened local commercial activity or when residents' fear of “illegal immigrant” day-laborers made them question the state's ability to control space effectively. In each case, I also evaluate the effectiveness and cost of the management strategy. The results of this analysis clearly demonstrate that attempts to eliminate day-labor activity are costly and expensive while efforts to formalize day-labor cost less and have a higher success rate.
... In these conflicts, the battle for the right to the city is fought through the occupation of public spaces in defiance of physical or regulatory actions meant to remove particular groups from the shared spaces of the city. Understanding the role of everyday occupations and constant negotiations in determining access and control of space is crucial for understanding how groups exercise their right to the city (Crotty and Bosco 2008;Low and Smith 2006;Mitchell 2003;Swanson 2007Swanson , 2010. The increasing importance of indirect forms of governance in the neoliberal city has drastic implications for right to the city research because when governmentality practices are successful, individuals choose to avoid particular spaces on their own. ...
... As a group, laborers draw on nontraditional resources that other stakeholders in negotiations for control of space simply cannot, or will not, match. Need, time, and cooperation are particularly important resources for laborers in their struggle to maintain access to preferred spaces for congregation (Crotty and Bosco 2008). ...
... However, laborers' self-segregation within day-labor spaces is often caused by less obvious processes. In some cases, the divisions between laborers are the result of geographic or structural factors, as was the case at site 27, where three distinct groups of laborers used the day-labor space to somewhat different purposes (Crotty and Bosco 2008). In other cases, divisions are the result of differences in access to particular resources. ...
In cities across the United States, groups of mostly men congregate in public and semipublic spaces in hopes of being hired for short-term work. The particular spaces where laborers congregate each day are crucial to their economic and social fortunes, yet to date, there is limited research examining the spatial organization of these sites. In this article, I draw on relational perspectives on the production of space and governmentality practices to examine day-labor hiring spaces in the San Diego Metropolitan Area. Drawing on more than seven years of mixed-methods research, I argue that laborers collectively employ strategic visibility: a set of spatial practices that reduces the potential for conflict and ensures laborers’ continued access to the particular spaces on which their survival depends. This analysis suggests that laborers’ site-selection and spatial practices are driven by pragmatic, economic concerns, rather than fear of interactions with policing agencies and/or anti-immigrant residents.
... Day-labor researchers have not left jornaleros' employment-seeking strategies entirely unexamined. Recent work has documented a variety of behaviors meant to improve jornaleros' employment outcomes: (1) laborers often vary their effort on jobs depending on the their belief that the current job could lead to future employment (Doussard, 2013), (2) many laborers maintain an active cellular telephone (and consistent phone number) to allow employers to contact and rehire them directly, thereby avoiding competition at the hiring site (Crotty & Bosco, 2008), and (3) in some cases laborers leverage ethnic or friendship-based referral networks among laborers who frequent the same hiring site regularly (Turnovsky, 2004(Turnovsky, , 2006. Each of these studies certainly has geographic implications. ...
... This type of negotiation produces particular types of spaces for informal activity. These sorts of personal relationships between formal sector vendors and day laborers are also an important part of jornaleros' efforts to maintain access to particular day-labor spaces (Crotty & Bosco, 2008). ...
... Each type of site has particular characteristics that make the space "work" for particular groups or "types" of laborers. Understanding the likely composition of laborers at a particular site can aid with organizational efforts by allowing day-labor advocates to identify potential cleavages within the day-labor population at each site-by race, nationality, documentation status, or housing status -before organizers arrive (Camou, 2002;Crotty & Bosco, 2008;Fine, 2005Fine, , 2006. Finally, the typology provides insights regarding the potential for community conflict. ...
Day-labor hiring sites are common features of the contemporary North American landscape. These are public and semi-public spaces where mostly male residents congregate daily in hopes of being hired for short-term work. Research on contemporary day-labor markets in the United States to date tends to be policy-oriented, intended to reduce the injustices that are a common part of life as a day laborer. Unfortunately, very little is understood about the spatial organization of day-labor markets. Drawing on more than five years of mixed-methods research in the San Diego Metropolitan Area (SDMA), this paper takes two important steps toward a spatial understanding of day-labor hiring sites. First, it demonstrates that informal hiring sites are established in locations that maximize laborers chances of finding employment. Second, it establishes a geo-spatial typology of hiring sites for the SDMA that can be used to better tailor day-labor support efforts and policy to site-level context.
... Ethnographic accounts of the lives of day laborers from the past decade uniformly demonstrated the social and economic struggles of jornaleros, as well as their ingenuity and resourcefulness in adapting to periodic shifts in labor demand (Crotty and Bosco 2008;Malpica 2002;Turnovsky 2004Turnovsky , 2006Wakin 2008;Walter et al. 2004). The economic crisis caused by global financial institutions engaging in exceedingly risky investments generated severe shifts in labor demand and extraordinary circumstances to which jornaleros in San Diego had to adapt. ...
... Every morning, each laborer makes a decision regarding where he will wait for work, in hopes that employers will also be looking to hire laborers at the same site that day. Despite the range of sites that are potentially accessible to laborers, most choose to wait at the same site each day (Crotty and Bosco 2008, Turnovsky 2004. Some laborers, however, choose to look for work at multiple sites. ...
... Almost all the day laborers at the Point Loma Home Depot have a mobile phone, which they use to keep in contact with employers. Previous research has noted that for day laborers, mobile phone ownership reflects an investment in repeated and long-term employment (Crotty and Bosco 2008). This is still the case today; however, the importance of maintaining contact with recent employers is ever more critical considering the lack of employment opportunities overall. ...
The roots of the recent global financial crisis, popularly known as the “Great Recession,” are firmly entrenched in the United States housing market and in the financial techniques invented to drive growth in that sector from the late 1990s through the mid-2000s. The housing boom of the early 2000s did not create an equivalent formal-sector growth in construction employment. Rather, the construction industry underwent a large-scale reorganization that can be generally understood as “flexibilization” within the neoliberal context (Theodore 2007, 251). Informal day labor, a type of low-wage contingent employment, grew considerably during this time period as a result of increased demand for labor in residential construction (Valenzuela et al. 2006; Doussard 2013). This was certainly the case in the San Diego Metropolitan Area (SDMA), where forty-five informal hiring sites were used by approximately one thousand men looking for work each day. The nature of day-labor work requires these men, known as day laborers or jornaleros, to adapt quickly to changing employment circumstances. During periods of high employment, they may work for five different employers in a week on five or more different projects. The Great Recession, however, caused profound shifts in labor market circumstances, and fundamentally restructured day-labor markets in the SDMA.
The macro-scale problems caused by the Great Recession are well documented (Harvey 2008; Elsby, Hobjin, and Sahin 2010). There is a disconnect, however, between the macro-level analysis in these studies, and an engagement with the grounded effects of the downturn on individuals, families, and communities. Macro-level analyses are weakened by their inability to link discussions of structural economic issues with the grounded effects of those issues in a meaningful way. This disconnect between macro-level analysis and intensive qualitative research is a common and unnecessary weakness, in critical geographic research (Fairbanks and Lloyd 2011). In this paper, I draw on data collected during a five-year research project to demonstrate how a mixed-methods approach can generate a more-robust understanding of the impacts of the Great Recession in the SDMA.
My first and most important goal is to highlight the role that day labor spaces play as part of the survival strategies employed by individuals who were perilously poor even before the “Great Recession.” By telling their stories and highlighting their individual and collective agency, I connect empirically grounded accounts of people’s economic struggles to structural processes that generate inequitable social and economic outcomes—both across the globe and on the street corner. It is my hope that these connections strengthen the growing body of ethnographic research that situates observations within critical analysis of neoliberal ideology (See Fairbanks 2011; and Fairbanks and Lloyd 2011). The research should further demonstrate the effectiveness of mixed-methods research for scaling findings up, from the microgeographic to the regional scale. Drawing on more than five years of mixed-methods research on day labor in the SDMA, I present a qualitative typology of day-labor sites in the SDMA, and use that typology as a framework to analyze the effects of the economic downturn on day-labor markets in the region.
Day labor is one type of low-wage contingent employment that has grown in the past thirty years as neoliberal economic reforms have become entrenched in the North American economy (Theodore 2007; Valenzuela Jr. 2003a). That undocumented immigrants comprised roughly seventy-five percent of the United States day-labor population in 2004 reflects the fact that undocumented immigrant laborers, primarily from Mexico and Central America, were and are the preferred workers for employers hoping to cut costs through wage reductions and “flexibilizing” their work force (Theodore 2007, 251). Employers often accomplish further cost savings by avoiding health and safety regulations, violating labor law, and in some instances simply failing to compensate employees for their labor. In the pursuit of profitability, employers in a variety of sectors take advantage of undocumented immigrants’ unwillingness to report labor abuses and violations for fear of deportation (Harvey 2005; Theodore 2007). Labor and human rights violations are quite common in the contemporary day-labor market, regardless of documentation status. The systematic rollback of labor protections that grew from the mid-twentieth...
... As most day laborers are men, Purser (2009) has focused on the day laborer's perception of himself as agent of his own destiny, as well as on the gendered aspects of day labor. Crotty and Bosco (2008) analyzed through observation and semi-structured interviews the role of race in the social geography of day labor, and the relevance of perception to the usefulness of formalized day labor centers. ...
... Day labor sites are considered by some to be a "promising" policy response to the problem of unregulated day labor markets (Valenzuela et al., 2006). However, how the workers perceive the experience of day labor obtained through formalized day labor centers, and whether benefits to such an arrangement exist have not been sufficiently studied (Crotty & Bosco, 2008). The perception by the laborers of the benefits provided by formal day labor centers may be an essential element in determining whether established centers are utilized (Purser, 2009). ...
The purpose of this exploratory, qualitative study was to identify key issues in the daily lives of day laborers and to ascertain the perceptions laborers had of day labor centers. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 25 day laborers at two established day labor centers in Houston, Texas. Grounded theory and open‐coding qualitative methods were used to identify key themes. Three main themes emerged from the interviews. The first theme was that the day laborers' lives were filled with both practical difficulties due to lack of resources and emotional pain due to the separation from their families. The second theme was that day laborers frequently encountered injustice, in the form of lower pay or unfair treatment on the job, due to their illegal status. The third theme was that day laborers found day labor centers to be safe places where not only jobs but also other resources could be accessed to help ease the difficulties of their daily lives. This study provides social workers and other service providers with an improved understanding of the perceptions and needs of day laborers. Implications: Insights from this study indicate that day laborers benefit from services provided by stable day labor centers.
Immigrant day laborers routinely experience exploitative behaviors as part of their employment. These day laborers perceive the exploitation they experience in the context of their immigration histories and in the context of their long-term goals for better working and living conditions. Using mixed methods, over three data collection periods in 2016, 2019 and 2020, we analyze the work experiences of immigrant day laborers in Houston and Austin, Texas. We report how workers evaluate precarious jobs and respond to labor exploitation in an informal labor market. We also discuss data from a worker rights training intervention conducted through a city-sponsored worker center. We discuss the potential for worker centers to be a convening and remediation space for workers and employers. Worker centers offer a potential space for informal intervention into wage theft and work safety violations by regulating the hiring context where day laborers meet employers.
Purpose:
Latino day laborers are male immigrants from mainly Mexico and Central America who congregate at corners, that is, informal hiring sites, to solicit short-term employment. Studies describing the occupational environment of Latino day laborers traditionally measure jobsite exposures, not corner exposures. We sought to elucidate exposures at corners by describing their demographic, socioeconomic, occupational, business, built, and physical environmental characteristics and by comparing corner characteristics with other locations in a large urban county in Texas.
Methods:
We used multiple publicly available data sets from the U.S. Census, local tax authority, Google's Nearby Places Application Programming Interface, and Environmental Protection Agency at fine spatial scale to measure 34 characteristics of corners with matched comparison locations.
Results:
Corners were located close to highways, high-traffic intersections, hardware and moving stores, and gas stations. Corners were in neighborhoods with large foreign-born and Latino populations, high rates of limited English proficiency, and high construction-sector employment.
Conclusions:
Publicly available data sources describe demographic, socioeconomic, occupational, business, built, and physical environment characteristics of urban environments at fine spatial scale. Using these data, we identified unique corner-based exposures experienced by day laborers. Future research is needed to understand how corner environments may influence health for this uniquely vulnerable population.
