“This is the Mexican Office”: Street Corner Work Strategies Among Latino Day Laborers in Colorado

• In Event: Work at the Margins of Neoliberal Latin American Economies: Resistance, Resilience, Innovation

Abstract

Every day about 25 Latino day laborers wait on each of four street corners or at a day labor in Denver and Aurora, Colorado, hoping to acquire work. Many have skills–such as center framing, roofing, painting, and landscaping–needed in the construction industry. As home-building leads Colorado's post-recession recovery, this industry is also the sector with the most wage theft violations. Day labor is an asset to employers in a volatile post-recession economy, since it offers employers the flexibility to readily augment or contract their labor force and costs. Day laborers also embrace a concept of flexibility that provides them a job niche; they can be a roofer one day and a mason the next. Yet this job flexibility may also lead an employer to strand a day laborer out of state without a means to return. Hence, flexibility is the day laborers’ source of livelihood but also vulnerability. To achieve financial security and dignity, they employ a range of street strategies, including blacklisting delinquent employers, demanding a wage floor, and insisting on being paid every day to avoid wage theft. However, street corner forms of agency also serve to maintain day laborers’ exploitability in a context that delegitimizes and profits from the presence of undocumented migrant workers. The street corner emerges as a crucial site of analysis that illustrates the complementarity between visible and invisible work, the formal and informal economies, and the legal and shadow economies. As day laborers assert, the street corner is “the Mexican office.”

Author

• Rebecca B Galemba, University of Denver