Abstract
Political theorist Paul Apostolidis has written an immensely important book in The Fight for Time: Migrant Day Laborers and the Politics of Precarity. Apostolidis’s theoretically dense tome is a Freirean foray into pressing politico-economic questions that position Latinx migrant day laborers in the United States as a “synecdoche”—that is, as both exceptional and paradigmatic cases of subordination and exploitation. The book’s themes include neoliberal crisis, precaritization, mobility governance, subalternity, and temporality, as well as radical hope and resistance. Apostolidis introduces us to the competing dimensions of temporality that play out in day laborers’ lives—a central theme in the book, given its thesis that migrant day laborers are out of time—and to important discussions about wage theft and what he describes as the theft of time.
Studies of day laborers are part of an expanding genre in migration studies, and it is important to situate Apostolidis’s text within this interdisciplinary literature. In contrast to these studies, however, while Apostolidis and his team of researchers spend a considerable amount of time in day worker centers in the US Pacific Northwest, they did not accompany workers on their daily search for work on the streets. The clearest example of this methodological oversight is an entire chapter on day workers’ quotidian struggles waged on street corners (Chapter 3) without Apostolidis or his researchers actually setting foot on a street corner, choosing instead to focus on interviews conducted at day worker centers and a documentary produced by one of these organizations. Most of this theory-heavy book is based on the “commentaries” of day workers gathered in worker centers—the term that Apostolidis prefers to describe the narratives and testimonies of these subaltern migrants over ethnography—in a Freirean exercise of pairing critical theory with generative themes, which forms the basis of the approach called “critical-popular” research.
In all fairness, Apostolidis’s book is not an ethnography but, instead, a theory-laden “sojourn” into subalternity that posits migrant day laborers as “cotheorists of social power,” and therein lies its strength (16). Apostolidis helps us see subalternity in the daily struggles of these “precaritized workers on the move” (71). By Chapter Two, we can see some of the book’s conceptual contributions that emerge from conversations with workers (i.e., the temporal pressures under which they operate), although certain methodological moves continue to add to the book’s omissions. For instance, the worker center staff’s understandable request that Apostolidis and his researchers not inquire about workers’ migrant trajectories in their conversations, given some workers’ precarious legal status, leads the author to overlook a key dimension of migrant temporality, as I discuss below.
In Chapter Three, Apostolidis continues to flesh out day laborers’ “embodied time” (125) and the different forms of “temporal” and “mobility governance” (128, 130) with which they contend—at times waiting endlessly for a job, at others working at a rapid-fire pace under unsafe conditions. In Chapter Four, we are introduced to worker vulnerabilities, or what Apostolidis calls the “time-scape of bodily endangerment” (p. 170). In a break with the book’s theoretical discussion, this chapter cites the staggering statistics of racial disparities in workplace injuries, accidents, and work-related deaths. It also begins to allude to the book’s political implications and praxis by pointing to day laborers’ “time of togetherness” and how this population can enter into cross-sector blocs for political action.
A united workforce is the topic of Chapter Five, where Apostolidis captures the “anticapitalist sociality” (189) among day workers and turns to how theory on the ground can be utilized for building cross-sector, intersectional social movement activism around migrant and labor rights. This chapter concludes by discussing the networks and social fabric of worker centers and the “communities of promise” they comprise (227), albeit without fully capturing their transnational dimensions.
In the final chapter, Apostolidis concludes with the admittedly utopian vision of worker centers for all laborers. However, he offers this proposition without fully engaging the real-world organizational strategies that transnational workers wage around their rights as laborers across borders. For all of this book’s important theorization about time, Apostolidis almost entirely leaves out an important temporal dimension in migrants’ work-life: transnational temporality. Even as Apostolidis and staff at the worker centers tried to steer clear of migrants’ transnational itineraries, statements of transnational time permeate worker commentaries. In one passing example, the author acknowledges the “emotional distress of being so distant for so long from loved ones” in the home country (201). Another example of transnational temporality, buried deep in the endnotes, is when one staff member feared that the criminalization of drug peddlers in the worker center’s vicinity may lead to cross-border repercussions for family members back in the home country. Indeed, transnational temporality haunts migrant subjects.
While Apostolidis’s “critical-popular” approach pairs migrant day laborers’ statements with the aforementioned generative themes throughout the book, migrant voices are at times lost in lengthy abstract discussions of Freire’s theory of popular education or neoliberal precaritization. Nevertheless, deploying the commentaries of subaltern migrants as the fuel for radical theory, action, and praxis is precisely what migration studies at its best does, and Paul Apostolidis’s The Fight for Time is a remarkable model of such “critical-popular” research. This theoretical tour de force is a must-read for advanced seminars in and students of political theory.