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Working for God’s Chosen People: Gender, Race and Religion on a Brooklyn Corner

Mon, August 18, 2:30 to 4:10pm, TBA

Abstract

On any given day, women day laborers gather across a curved asphalt shoulder overlooking the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in the predominantly ultra-Orthodox section of South Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The women wait, rain or shine, in bitter cold or under broiling sun, to be hired mostly as domésticas in the homes of the local Hasidic Jewish community. While this Brooklyn corner was originally the domain of Eastern European immigrant women and a handful of mexicanas, in recent years it increasingly attracts Latinas seeking to break into this labor market niche and acquire work experience, skills and employer contacts. Given declining employment prospects in manufacturing, day labor provides immigrant women a chance to regain a foothold in the urban economy. For others, it represents an opportunity to earn an income when full-time employment is unfeasible given competing family obligations.
Like many lower-wage occupations, day labor has been characterized by routine violations of workers’ rights including wage theft and workplace safety concerns. However, New York-based immigrant advocacy groups have recently noted that women day laborers may be particularly vulnerable given the privatized nature of their work, its unpredictability, and the insular nature of the Hasidic community. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in this Brooklyn corner and a day labor program located in San Francisco, I examine some of the gendered assumptions that undergird the activism and extensive research on day labor. I argue that the day labor literature fails to capture how these experiences stretch unevenly across social space and occupy a variety of different forms.

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