Fight For Time

In today's precarious world, working people's experiences are strangely becoming more alike even as their disparities sharpen. The Fight for Time explores the logic behind this paradox by listening to what Latino day laborers say about work and society. The book shows how migrant laborers are both exception and synecdoche in relation to the precarious conditions of contemporary work life. As unauthorized migrants, these workers are subjected toextraordinarily harsh treatment - yet in startling ways, they also epitomize struggles that apply throughout the economy. Juxtaposing day laborers' descriptions of their desperate circumstances and dangerous work with theoretical accounts of the forces fueling insecurity, The Fight for Time illuminates the temporalcontradictions that define precarity today. The book taps the core intellectual current among day labor groups - Paulo Freire's popular-education theory - to craft an original "critical-popular" approach for understanding the points of connection between the ways that day laborers view their lives and scholarly analysis of precarious work-life writ large. The result is a temporally attuned and politically bracing perspective on neoliberal crises, the work ethic in the era of affective anddigital labor, the intensifying racial governance of public spaces, the burgeoning deportation regime, and the growth of occupational safety and health hazards. The accounts of the day laborers in this book are rich with potential to catalyze social critique among migrant workers - and clarify the termson which mass-scale opposition to precarity can occur. Such opposition would demand restoration of workers' stolen time, engage in a fight for the city, challenge the conditions under which aversion to financial risk puts workers into physical danger, and foment the refusal of work. We can look to the urban worker centers where this radically democratic politics of precarity is taking root to understand what types of organizations have the potential to wage the fight for time and enable broadmobilization in the face of precarity: worker centers for all working people.

"In The Fight for Time, Paul Apostolidis explores how marginalized workers are more than just subjects who suffer and survive-they seek out solutions to what they recognize as the unjust conditions of their lives. Exploring the democratic energies and solidarity networks of day laborers and worker centers, Apostolidis offers readers a rich analysis of how unauthorized, mostly Latinx working men are gathering together and enacting new political and economic possibilities. Analyzing issues of mobility, citizenship, capitalism, deportation, and climate change, The Fight for Time is a powerful reminder of how precarious times can birth new worlds."-Cristina Beltrán, New York University "In this innovative and compelling book, Paul Apostolidis links theory and practice in a way that political theorists often advocate but rarely achieve. Apostolidis enables us all to learn intellectual and political lessons from the experiences, perspectives, and ideas of migrant day laborers who are struggling both to resist and to transform the precarious conditions in which they find themselves."-Joseph H. Carens, University of Toronto " The Fight for Time is a marvelously original and timely contribution to both the critical study of work and to democratic theory and practice. Paul Apostolidis approaches the case of immigrant day laboring in the U.S. as at once exceptional and paradigmatic, as a singularly difficult way of making a living and as an exemplar of the growing precaritization of work and life in the contemporary economy. With his carefully attentive analyses of the methodologies, epistemologies, and politics of co-research, Apostolidis offers the field of political theory a compelling new template for politically engaged knowledge production."-Kathi Weeks, author of The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries

Paul Apostolidis is Professor and Judge & Mrs. Timothy A. Paul Endowed Chair of Political Science at Whitman College. He is the author of Breaks in the Chain: What Immigrant Workers Can Teach America about Democracy.