Day labor and its discontents: Global labor power and the social regulation of the informal economy

This dissertation examines the social reproduction and social regulation of day labor markets through three separate but interconnected levels. First, using the 1999 Los Angeles Day Labor Survey as the primary dataset for this project together with GIS tools (complemented with economic and demographic census data), I look at the location of day labor sites in LA County in order to explore the geography of this sector. The data reveals that, among other things, day labor sites in Los Angeles are not randomly or evenly distributed, but that they are spatially constituted through polycentric clusters of informal economic activity.; Second, I also explore the wage structure of day labor markets using geographic information systems and exploratory spatial statistics. The findings reveal a good deal of variance in the wage structure of day labor sites. The data also reveal that there is no one single explanatory mechanism accounting for wages in this sector.; Last but not least, I develop the notion of 'global labor power' to ground on a firmer theoretical footing the necessity for contextualizing the reproduction and social regulation of the informal economy within broader critiques of capitalism. Drawing on Karl Polanyi's notion of embeddedness, on Henri Lefebvre's notions of reproduction and the everyday, together with Marx's notion of "social production", I argue that in order to understand day labor markets we must understand the complex interactions between the economy and the social, the local and the global, and between production and reproduction in constituting this subsector of the informal economy.; In summary, this dissertation makes a threefold contribution to economic and urban sociology: by introducing new empirical findings on the geography of day labor markets in L.A. County; by applying for the first time exploratory techniques in spatial statistics to day labor wages and demand; and by furthering our theoretical understanding of how day labor connects with broader social and economic processes.