Theorizing and Uplifting Day Laborer Agency: The Impacts of Using “Wage Theft” as a Framework

By Abbey Vogel

Contextualizing the Discussion

As part of Rebecca Galemba’s Qualitative Research Methods class, four other students and I chose to accompany a Denver-based day laborer center’s Wage Theft Direct Action Team (DAT). El Centro Humanitario, located at the intersection of California and Park Avenue, seeks to promote policies that protect workers who accept short-term employment within the informal labor market. Normally, these day laborers, or jornaleros, find employers by waiting on street corners for small construction or landscaping companies to drive by requesting additional manpower for a short-term contract job. The workers who accept these positions are at high-risk for employer mistreatment in the form of wage theft, lack of protection from hazardous working conditions, and coercion or threats related to immigration status.

The DAT team seeks to get in contact with employers who steal wages from day laborers, using civil pressure to convince them to pay up. The DAT also spends some mornings each week visiting the street corners where jornaleros wait for employers. At these corners, volunteers and staff share coffee, donuts, stories, and information about the protections that El Centro Humanitario and the DAT offer to temporary and short-term employees, in addition to inquiring about experiences of wage theft, to identify individuals who may need the team’s assistance in recuperating compensation. As students in Dr. Galemba’s class, we participated in all aspects of DAT’s work, which ensured that we had the opportunity to speak to various organizers, long-term volunteers, academics, and staff that have worked with El Centro. In our conversations and observations, the theme of worker agency began to emerge as a controversial concept with many complex facets and tangible implications for how El Centro and the DAT approached their important work. This blog post seeks to put these various perspectives in dialogue with one another, and is the result of four short months of participating, observing, and listening as a member of the DAT and as a qualitative researcher in-training.

Implications of Identity

There are myriad conflicting narratives that coalesce in the body of the migrant. These narratives are constructed through the categorical identities applied to individual day laborers by national and international communities, and also through performance and self-labeling by workers in daily life. In these discourses, the agency of day laborers and migrants is frequently de-emphasized by both right-wing politicians and leftist activists alike, creating a “Mexican as illegal alien/Mexican as hard-working immigrant” dichotomy.[1] Thus, the multiplicities of workers identities as subjects, and as agents with some degree of power to exert influence on their social and psychological landscapes, are made invisible.

As Gloria Anzaldúa explains in her landmark text Borderlands, the identity of the migrant is expansive, heterogeneous, and dynamic. She explicates this complex identity from the starting place of her own Chicana, queer positionality:

Voluntary (yet forced) alienation makes for psychological conflict, a kind of dual identity...We are a synergy of two cultures with various degrees of Mexicanness or Angloness. I have so internalized the borderland conflict that sometimes I feel like one cancels out the other and we are zero, nothing, no one. A veces no soy nada ni nadie. Pero hasta cuando no lo soy, lo soy.[2]

This perverse modification of Descarte’s “I think therefore I am” does the work of reclaiming autonomy and agency for groups like migrant day laborers, by stripping some of the power away from the economic, geopolitical, and social forces that seek to label, essentialize, and marginalize the undocumented body.[3]  Anzaldúa’s intervention counterintuitively takes hold of these oppressive forces, and reimagines them as a process which produces an identity that can be, and should be, marked. Thus, it becomes possible for activists who are seeking to accompany day laborers or migrants, in solidarity, to talk about identity as more than defined by the systems that seek to define, limit, and oppress it.

Troubling Agency

A similar analytical posture can be applied to uplift the agency of day laborers working in harsh labor conditions, and amidst the capitalistic systems that seek to exploit and invisibilize them. In an interview with these authors, one Direct Action Team volunteer voiced concerns around the ways that the “wage theft” frame could have the effect of casting day laborers as victims. Once the identity of “victim” has been assigned, it becomes difficult to avoid stigmatization. It follows that the agency of the individual who is labeled “victim of wage theft” will oftentimes go unnoticed, because researchers, activists, and volunteers begin to then impose characteristics on the stigmatized identity, and these impositions are extrapolated and re-created until broad stereotypes are promulgated, and the agency of the individual becomes removed from social, political, and even academic discourse. Thus, the individual’s unique skillsets associated with navigating their complex work environment are portrayed as futile; the worker failed to protect themselves, and now requires the assistance of (usually) non-day-laborer advocates and allies. This framework could be problematic if not navigated very carefully, as it could emphasize workers’ vulnerabilities, making them feel excluded, unempowered, and victimized. Feelings of social acceptance and empowerment, in turn, “influence important life decisions such as whether or not [laborers] seek public social services, health care, or cooperate with the police.”[4]

Juan Thomas Ordoñez’s work Jornalero posits that “the nature of day labor precludes the consolidation of strong ties of solidarity on the street, making day laborers’ ability to organize and offer each other support virtually impossible.”[5] Ordoñez’s thorough ethnographic research supports his argument by demonstrating the brittle nature of informal day laborer community; while camaraderie can emerge in moments, these glimpses of mutual protection and collaboration are diluted by the harsh nature of laborer’s daily experiences. Thus, if an employer only requests one worker, or only has funds to pay one jornalero, Ordoñez argues that the alleged “community” among immigrant day laborers often breaks-down. Therefore, broader social and political impacts by the day laborers are highly unlikely. Ordoñez’s argument and evidence are compelling, but they also contribute to the perpetual discounting of migrant workers as actors whose agency, and expressions of solidarity, matter, even as they collide and are subverted by broader oppressive forces like capitalism and disenfranchisement, or are not able to be scaled-up to create effects that would be more notable to the academy or to policymakers. If Ordoñez’s argument is accepted, then the framing of wage theft does not carry much risk. Though stigmatization and victimhood could be its byproducts, the material gain of recuperating wages and learning about protective day laborer centers, no doubt, offset those concerns, within an Ordoñezian framework.

However, other scholars contend that emphasizing the agency of marginalized groups -- for example, calling even brittle or momentary communities “community” can de-center capitalist, western, and hegemonic conceptualizations of “agency,” to better support grassroots, inductive expressions of these ideas. While the latter process may produce slower, and uncomfortably inconsistent, results, it could also be more conducive to broader transformation of the experience of day laborers. Troubling the concept of “agency” could help shift the mindsets and worldviews of worker allies, by challenging the mutually exclusive categorizations of victim/agent. In this formulation, “agency is no longer something you possess or do not. Rather, it is something you maintain in relation to a social field...Agency is thus highly dependent on specific social situations.”[6] Mats Utas calls this kind of tactical agency “victimcy,” as a method of drawing attention to the ways that disenfranchised groups, put into impossible situations, will oftentimes utilize western categorizations and conceptualizations to affect their surroundings. Day laborers, specifically, negotiate the risks associated with being undocumented in creative ways, by conforming to social, economic, or cultural expectations, or by breaking those expectations based on unique, situational challenges and obstacles.[7] “Wage theft” as a frame can undermine this more nuanced formulation of agency, and could pose the risk of devaluing the negotiative skills of day laborers, who utilize diverse strategies to mitigate the threat of withheld or stolen wages.

In order to take advantage of the legal protections guaranteed to day laborers, it may be necessary to utilize the framework of “wage theft.” However, this technique may also limit the level of impact that a day laborer center can have. In her article “Synchronizing Meanings and Other Day Laborer Organizing Strategies,” Michelle Camou maintains that worker center volunteers in Denver tended to assume that they knew the needs and motivations of day laborers, which produced misguided advocacy. Allies mistakenly identified workers as motivated by ideology, rather than allowing the actions and wants of the workers themselves to guide the center’s policies and strategies of coalition-building.[8] This dynamic greatly inhibited the effectiveness of the center, and could have been overcome by humble listening and close observation of the organic agential behavior of day laborers. Instead, many volunteers made universal assumptions about laborer motivation, based on the projection of a western-oriented, solidarity-based ideology.

Bridging Theory and Praxis

Volunteers with the Direct Action Team, and the lawyers who provide advice and assistance to them, navigate the tensions explored above through creative negotiations that produce positive results, but rely less on victimization. Strategies include asking workers about their experiences with employers before introducing the term “wage theft,” including workers in the process of reclaiming wages, and encouraging workers to present their own cases and perspectives, rather than relying on legal counsel alone. There were many ethnographic vignettes that were shared by volunteers in interviews, and by day laborers on the street corner, which gesture to (both conscious and unconscious) subversion of problematic discourses that would otherwise discount or dismiss worker agency.

The volunteers we interviewed pointed-out that there is a significant level of “mistrust” between the workers and allies at first, particularly within the context of street outreach. Outreach involves arriving at street corners with coffee, breakfast foods, and a commitment to sharing information about the services available to day laborers through worker centers. One volunteer argued that many volunteers participating in outreach began by “asking very personal questions,” which often involved “pegging the day laborers as victims;” the volunteer went on to share that this strategy largely suffocated genitive conversation and meaningful connection.[9] In contrast, being “warm” to the workers and “talking to people to see what came up naturally” fostered trust, longer conversation, and increased receptivity.[10]

Other volunteers sought to make their outreach strategy more about “empathizing, rather than investigating,” where the topic of “wage theft” was approached circuitously by simply asking day laborers about “their experiences with employers.”[11] Still other interviewees argued, in the spirit of Camou, that centering the material necessities of day laborers is a way to uplift workers’ wants and desires as agents, rather than continuously measuring worker power by normative standards of political or policy-based impact.[12] One interviewer strongly cautioned against asking workers to contribute to broader goals of progressive politics by sharing that he has stopped pestering day laborers with the question: “When are we going to have this meeting to start the revolution?”[13]

Multiple interviewees also emphasized that the legal system should be a pathway of last resort, in partnership with Direct Action. For one volunteer, it was a material last resort, for workers who had tried every other method to recoup stolen wages.[14] However, another volunteer suggested worker agency as a possible reason for relegating the legal system to the position of “last resort,” explaining: “[the] legal system can be very time consuming, and there can be less ownership shared by the worker themselves;” this interviewee maintained that “small claims court might be better for the empowerment process” because it involves the workers representing themselves.[15] The volunteer went on to state that the most rewarding part of the wage theft process is seeing “them [the day laborers] avail themselves of the laws that are there to protect them.”[16] This interviewee portrayed her perspective as evolutionary; she began volunteering with the goal of offering legal service to folks who are ordinarily marginalized by the U.S. legal system, but she recognized through participation with DAT that worker-centered representation was not only more personally rewarding for her to witness as a volunteer, but was also a more effective tool for unlocking the worker’s potential as an agent.

Finally, a notable insight taken from participant observation emerged through the interactions between the DAT volunteers within an environment of teamwork and camaraderie. Though positive energy around a shared goal was a common feature of most DAT meetings, when minor changes occurred, including the presence of outside observers at meetings, the group dynamic notably shifted. New personalities emerged through minor power struggles and patterns of interaction that were slightly more antagonistic and hierarchical.[17] This transition is important because many scholars examining this occurrence may discount it as an isolated incident of deviant behavior from DAT norms. However, this same consideration is rarely given to day laborers like those explored by Ordoñez in his monograph. Researchers can tend to discount the import of contrarian behavior performed by agential, privileged bodies as a temporary deviance from the norm, but they sometimes do not approach behavior by non-privileged “subjects” of research with the same inclination for minimization. In the context of Jornalero, even if workers spent the majority of mornings building an environment of friendship, proportionally small instances of self-interest were granted more weight in Ordoñez’s analysis. If this same methodological approach were applied to the DAT’s patterns of interaction, our overall impressions of the team’s culture could be much more critical. However, having sampled a variety of meetings, it is apparent that occurrences of tension did not necessarily undermine or invalidate the much more frequent expressions of solidarity and shared leadership that characterized the team’s usual milieu.

The behavior of DAT volunteers demonstrate that many of the individuals involved in the wage theft process sense some sort of tension between assisting workers as victims of a crime and also validating day laborer agency. Though the Rapid Assessment Process research that we were able to conduct is highly limited, it has revealed an interesting avenue for further investigation. Working with members of the DAT to explicitly mark the ways that they have, consciously or unconsciously, chosen to negotiate tensions between agency and the wage theft framework could make day laborer centers’ strategies more equitable and empowering.

Theorizing a Different Kind of Revolution

Mainstreaming a pedagogy that is committed to amplifying, rather than minimizing, the agency of day laborers is important for both allies and the workers whom they seek to serve. More broadly, it is important for widening the discursive landscape around immigration status, to discredit a dialogue that would seek to always define the subject of “worker” in relationship to hegemonic forces like capitalism, nationalism, racism, and more. It also challenges dichotomous conceptualizations of worker identity as illegal aliens/hardworking immigrants, or passive/resistant poor.[18]

The discursive tactics explored above can help tune allies and workers into their power as a community to subvert institutions that would otherwise seem impermeable or all-powerful. Rather than reinforcing the idea that transformation always takes the form of progressive political action, agent-centered wage theft advocacy can be conceptualized as promoting a “quiet encroachment of the ordinary,” where seemingly unremarkable acts of negotiation are theorized as impactful examples of negotiation that point to the potential fragility of exploitative superstructures.[19]

[1] Gomberg-Muñoz, Ruth. “Willing to Work: Agency and Vulnerability in an Undocumented Immigrant Network.” American Anthropologist 112:2 (2010) p. 301.

[2] Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012), p. 85.

[3] Descartes, René. Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences (1637). p. 19–20.

[4] Quesada, James, et al.“‘As Good As it Gets:’ Undocumented Day Laborers Negotiating Discrimination in San Francisco and Berkeley, California, USA.” City & Society 26: 1 (2014), p. 34.

[5] Ordoñez, Juan Thomas. Jornalero: The Life and Work of Latin American Day Laborers in Berkeley, California. (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), p. 7.

[6] Utas, Mats. “Victimcy, Girlfriending, Soldiering.” Anthropological Quarterly 78:2 (2005), p. 407.

[7] Quesada, James, et al.“‘As Good As it Gets:’ Undocumented Day Laborers Negotiating Discrimination in San Francisco and Berkeley, California, USA.” City & Society 26: 1 (2014), p. 42.

[8] Camou, Michelle. “Synchronizing Meanings and Other Day Laborer Organizing Strategies.”

Labor Studies Journal 34:1 (2009), p. 40

[9] Interview Transcripts/Fieldnotes (2018). RedCap ID 41, p. 14.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Interview Transcripts/Fieldnotes (2018). RedCap ID 46, p. 33.

[12] Interview Transcripts/Fieldnotes (2018). RedCap ID 35, p. 37.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Interview Transcripts/Fieldnotes (2018). RedCap ID 42, p. 48.

[15] Interview Transcripts/Fieldnotes (2018). RedCap ID 47, p. 52.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Interview Transcripts/Fieldnotes (2018). Fieldnotes, p. 66.

[18] Interview Transcripts/Fieldnotes (2018). RedCap ID 43, p. 54

[19] Ibid.