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Labor Politics in Latin America assesses the capacity of working-class organizations to represent and advance working people’s demands in the era of globalization and neoliberalism, in which capital has reasserted its power on a global scale. The book’s premise is that the longer-term sustainability of development strategies for the region is largely connected to the capacity of working-class organizations to secure a fairer distribution of the gains from growth through labor legislation reform. Its analysis suggests the need to take into consideration the wider structural changes that reconfigured the political maps of the countries examined (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Venezuela), for example, globalization and its impact on democratic transformation in the region, operating within longer time frames. It is precisely this wider structural analysis and historical narrative that allows the book’s case studies to show that, even in the uncovering of substantial variation, what becomes evident in the study of Latin America over the last three decades is the overwhelming reality that for most workers in the region, labor reform—or the lack thereof —in essence increased precarity and informality and weakened labor movements.

Kelly Reichardt is the first book-length study of contemporary filmmaker Kelly Reichardt. This book argues that Reichardt’s process-based slow cinema captures the “emergent” quality of contemporary, neoliberal emergencies such as global warming and economic precarity. The book positions Reichardt’s filmmaking in relation to contemporary American independent cinema, the international slow cinema movement, and the tradition of European neorealism. Drawing from these lineages, Reichardt’s cinema emphasizes the local effects of global catastrophes and represents crises as everyday experiences that are slow in unfolding. In this way, the book argues that Reichardt challenges the cinema’s tendency to spectacularize disaster. She makes this critique both through her films’ pacing and her tendency to work with the traditions of genre film, only to deflate their most thrilling elements to reveal what has been termed the slow violence of our postindustrial moment. Additionally, the book considers Reichardt’s frequently thin characterization of her protagonists, arguing that the underdrawn and often unlikeable characters work to challenge audience identification and the expectations that victims of emergency should be especially deserving or empathetic. In chapters that examine Reichardt’s earliest film, her four Oregon-centric films, and her experimental short films, Kelly Reichardt establishes Reichardt as a crucial voice in American independent film, one committed to documenting the challenges of the twenty-first century.

This book proposes a new reading of contemporary art between 1958 and 2009 by sketching out a trajectory of ‘precarious’ art practices. Such practices risk being dismissed as ‘almost nothing’ because they look like trash about to be thrown out, because they present objects and events that are so commonplace as to be confused with our ordinary surroundings, or because they are fleeting gestures that vanish into the fabric of everyday life. What is the status of such fragile, nearly invisible, artworks? In what ways do they engage with the precarious modes of existence that have emerged and evolved in the socio-economic context of an increasingly globalised capitalism? Works discussed in this study range from Allan Kaprow’s assemblages and happenings, Fluxus event scores and Hélio Oiticica’s wearable Parangolé capes in the 1960s, to Thomas Hirschhorn’s sprawling environments and participatory projects, Francis Alÿs’s filmed performances and Gabriel Orozco’s objects and photographs in the 1990s. Significant similarities among these different practices will be drawn out, while crucial shifts will be outlined in the evolution of this trajectory from the early 1960s to the turn of the twenty-first century. This book will give students and amateurs of contemporary art and culture new insights into the radical specificities of these practices, by situating them within an original set of historical and critical issues. In particular, this study addresses essential questions such as the art object’s ‘dematerialisation’, relations between art and everyday life, including the three fields of work, labour and action first outlined by Hannah Arendt in 1958.

In June 2016, after 43 years as part of the European community, the UK people decided to leave. In March 2017, the UK Prime Minister officially started the process of Brexit – the UK’s withdrawal from the EU. While Brexit was decided by a relatively small margin of people, one issue was key in the debates preceding the EU referendum. This was migration. People have been migrating since the beginning of time but today the issue of migration has been elevated to a key national concern. It is now one of the most contentious and divisive matters in the UK. This book investigates EU women migrants’ perspectives on the Brexit vote in the UK. It presents accounts from EU nationals and considers the wider implications in relation to precarity and the British paid labour market. This book offers important insights into the world of the UK paid labour but from the point of view of EU migrants and more specifically Polish women whose livelihoods have been disrupted by the Brexit vote and the decision that the UK should leave the EU whilst any solid guarantees with regards to migrants’ rights are yet to come from the UK government. Through analysis of new data generated in qualitative interviews, this book makes an original and grounded contribution to understanding the significance and impacts of the result of the Brexit referendum on migrant workers from the EU resident in the UK.

This is a book about drift and drifters—about the ways in which dislocation and disorientation can become phenomena in their own right. Locating drift within social, political, and spatial theory, the book also situates contemporary drift within the contested politics of the present day. Here the book explores the ways in which contemporary arrangements of power both promote and police drift; it also explores the experiential and collective politics of drift as a form of resistance to power. The book, in turn, highlights a distinctly North American form of drift—that of the train-hopping itinerant—via historical analysis of the hobo and the hobo’s collective politics, and through the author’s own train-riding immersion in the contemporary world of gutter punks and train hoppers. In conclusion, the book considers drift as a methodology and epistemology attuned to the contemporary world. It argues that we can better understand the world that has emerged around us by abandoning traditional, slab-like approaches to social inquiry and, instead, by learning the theoretical and methodological lessons offered by drift. In this context, the book reconsiders the photodocumentary tradition and explores the potential of ghost method and ghost images, absences, aftermaths, ruins, residues, and mistakes.

This edited collection considers how conditional welfare policies and services are implemented and experienced by a diverse range of welfare service users across a range of UK policy domains including social security, homelessness, migration and criminal justice. The book showcases the insights and findings of a series of distinct, independent studies undertaken by early career researchers associated with the ESRC funded Welfare Conditionality project. Each chapter presents a new empirical analysis of data generated in fieldwork conducted with practitioners charged with interpreting and delivering policy, and welfare service users who are at the sharp end of welfare services shaped by behavioural conditionality.

This book confronts the persistent issues of youth unemployment and worsening socioeconomic precarity in the United States. While overall unemployment has declined, the unemployment rate remains nearly twice as high for young people 16–19 years of age and nearly three times as high for those aged 20–24. Millions of youth are neither in school nor working, and rates of unemployment and underemployment are nearly two to three times higher for black and Latino youth. Despite these glaring statistics, far more attention has been given to diminished social prospects facing young people in Europe than in America, and this is what makes this book so important. The volume’s Introduction places the issue in a global and national context, while suggesting a range of solutions and discussing the distinctive cultural ideology of the American dream as it intersects with young people's diverse experiences. Chapters in each of the book’s four sections explore structural and cultural causes of youth unemployment, their ramifications for both native and immigrant youth, and how both middle- and working-class youth across diverse races and ethnicities are affected within and outside the legal economy. Overall, the book insists that because the youth of today face greater insecurity than earlier generations, the time has come to address factors like technological changes, the rise of the 24/7 and “gig” economy, and the polarization between “good” and “bad” jobs; thus, the book features chapters on potential solutions including effective school-to-work models, shorter and shared hours, full employment, and basic income.

Founded in 1919 along with the League of Nations, the International Labor Organization (ILO) establishes labor standards and produces knowledge about the world of work, serving as a forum for nations, unions, and employer associations. Making the Woman Worker illuminates the ILO’s transformation in the context of the long fight for social justice. Before 1945, it focused on enhancing conditions for male industrial workers in Western, often imperial, economies, while restricting the circumstances of women’s labors. After WWII, the ILO—then a UN agency—highlighted the global differences in women’s work, focused on bringing women into “development,” began to combat sexism in the workplace, and declared care work essential to women’s labor participation. Today, it enters its second century with a mission to protect the interests of all workers in the face of increasingly globalized supply chains, the digitization of homework, and cross-border labor trafficking. The ILO’s treatment of women provides a window into the modern history of labor. The historic relegation of feminized labor to the part-time, short-term, and low-waged prefigures the future organization of work. How we treat workers in the next century will inevitably build upon evolving ideas of the woman worker, shaped significantly through the ILO.

This book confronts an enduring investment in the poetic vocation. It seeks to challenge a dominant cultural logic that frames contingent labor as a sacrifice that frustrates the righteous progress towards realizing that seemingly purest of callings: Poet. Incorporating the often overlooked or excluded workaday ephemera of three canonical U.S. Romantic poets—Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Hart Crane—it offers new archival insights that call for a re-examination of celebrated literary careers and questions their status as affirmatory icons of vocation. The poetry of Whitman the real estate dealer, Melville the customs inspector, and Crane the copywriter, does not constitute the formal inscription of a discrete poetic labor struggling against quotidian work towards the fulfilment of an exceptional individual career. Instead, the distracted forms of their poetry are always already intermingled with a variety of apparently lesser labors. Ousting poetic production from any sanctuary of privileged repose or transcendent focus, this book refigures the work of the poet as a living sensuous activity that transgresses labor’s conventional divisions and hierarchies. It consequently recasts the poet as a figure who unfastens and reimagines the “right of passage” vocational logic that does so much to reproduce the current political and economic paradigm.

This book explores an archive of modernist literature that conceives survival as a collective enterprise linking lives across boundaries of race, time, class, species, gender, and sexuality. As social Darwinism promoted a selfish, competitive, and combatively individualistic understanding of survival, the four modernists examined here countered by imagining how postures of precarity, vulnerability, and receptivity can breed pleasurably and environmentally sustainable modes of interdependent survival. These modes prove particularly vital and appealing to queer bodies, desires, and intimacies deemed unfit, abnormal, or unproductive by heterosexist ideologies. Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” opposes “survival of the fittest” doctrines and Progressive-era masculinity with a feminist-inspired cultivation of ecological humility and interspecies collaboration. Oscar Wilde develops an autobiographical form that expresses collective subjectivity in De Profundis, an epistolary testament to the constitutive role of suffering in queer community formation. E. M. Forster imagines, in Howards End, how queer ideas and intimacies survive courtesy of invitations that awaken both inviters and invitees to unexpected relational possibilities freed from conventional timelines of development and realization. In Forster’s A Passage to India, the pursuit of “queer invitations” models an evolutionary succession defined by careful attention to creaturely inheritance and by ethical responses to the countless lives, including those obfuscated by imperial privilege, required for the successful survival of any individual life. Finally, Willa Cather’s short and long fiction, including “Consequences,” Lucy Gayheart, and The Professor’s House, argues for suicide as a way of life as it transforms the impulse to throw life away into an ethical alternative to the greedy logics of capitalism.

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.