Terry Easton, Geographies of Hope and Despair: Atlanta’s African American, Latino, and White Day Laborers

The rise of temporary work in the 1970s, coupled with Ronald Reagan's fiscal and social policies of the 1980s, created particularly hard times for low-wage workers in the closing decades of the twentieth century.5 Increasing globalization and economic uncertainty in the 1990s and beyond promised that the wages, rights, and protections of low-wage workers would become even more tenuous.6 During this period, the Atlanta metropolitan region was transformed into a convention, tourist, and employment destination. The construction and renovation of office towers, shopping malls, universities, sports arenas, airports, hotels, homes, and venues for the 1996 Olympic Games significantly altered the size, shape, and scope of Atlanta's place in the national and international economies.

Saskia Sassen's research on cities in the late twentieth century demonstrates that in many large metropolitan cities with highly developed global processes (including rapid and mobile transnational financial transactions, access to multiple markets and administrative and production sites, and a large transitory immigrant population) the gap between the rich and the poor widened through the simultaneous development of a large low-wage informal or service economy and a high-income commercial or business economy. In these "transnational spaces within national territories," new socio-spatial economic configurations (including gentrification, suburbanization, and labor segmentation) increased inequality, especially in cities already devastated by manufacturing decline.7 Historically a transportation hub, Atlanta was never a major manufacturing center, but in this deeply divided, class-based social and cultural context, the growth of advanced producer services benefited only certain segments of the labor force, while increasing numbers joined the contingent workforce. Handsomely compensated financiers, technocrats, entrepreneurs, and other mid-to-upper-level professionals benefited from this contingent labor force in (at least) two ways: 1) By utilizing the as-needed labor force in the operation of their own business, and; 2) By utilizing the as-needed (low wage) labor force in their personal lives in the "production of lifestyle" through purchasing "services" such as child care, housecleaning, landscaping, home renovation, personal grooming, and dining out.

Sociologist Peirrette Hondagneu-Sotelo reminds us that globalization's high-end jobs breed low-paying jobs.8 Low-wage workers (day laborers among them) have a hand in the production of lifestyle. Such was the story in urban and suburban enclaves across Atlanta's vast landscape at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Economic, social, and political processes set the stage for the growth and development of a large, diverse, and geographically scattered day laboring population in Atlanta.Because of the sheer number of day labor positions and the diversity of methods for procuring employment, some contingent workers called Atlanta "day labor city." A primarily male population group, Atlanta's day laborers earned from minimum wage up to roughly ten dollars an hour depending on experience, skill, training, employer generosity, and luck. Hired and fired with relative ease in manual trades and industries that relied on flexible employment, these "disposable" workers often completed their work assignments under hazardous conditions without many of the workplace benefits accorded the "regular" employees alongside whom they sometimes worked.

Within the broad spectrum of contingent work, day laboring was characterized by low wages, dangerous or unpleasant working conditions, and lack of job-related benefits. Day laborers were generally the poorest and most vulnerable of all contingent workers. Homeless men, former prisoners, unemployed workers, laid-off workers, part-time workers, veterans, immigrants, undocumented workers, drug addicts, and other people on the social and cultural margins sought work as day laborers. Even though these workers were peripheral in their social status, their labor was not peripheral to Atlanta's growth and development. Day laborers seldom knew in advance how each workday would begin and end, and the dual contingencies of labor and survival unfolded while they attempted to find work at the margins of Atlanta's economy.

Most day laborers yearned for a full-time position with a regular schedule and benefits; a smaller number preferred the flexible employment arrangements associated with day labor. It was common for Latino day laborers to characterize their employment goals as such: "It's better to look for a stable job. Somebody does not come from Mexico to work for one or two days a week. They come to work for more than that. And this is really unstable and you can work for one day and not work for four and work for two days and not work for more." Working steadily for a company, he says, is better: "It's a secure job and if you get hurt they will help you out." 13

Trying to find good wages, safe and clean working conditions, and possibly a full-time position with a regular schedule and employment benefits, day laborers conducted their daily search for work by determining which employment strategy would most likely fulfill their particular employment goals. Atlanta's day laborers used for-profit temporary staffing agencies ("labor pools"), street corners ("catch-out corners"), and non-profit hiring halls to secure work. Experience taught the men that the likelihood of meeting all of their employment goals was unrealistic. Most knew that even if they wanted full-time, regular employment, finding it was possible but difficult. They also knew that they might find themselves working in an unpleasant or dangerous environment. Still they turned out each day (or whenever they could or wanted to turn out) and waited for the opportunity to work. By 2006 roughly thirty for-profit temporary manual labor staffing agencies, forty street corner-waiting areas, and two non-profit hiring halls existed in Atlanta.

Depending upon factors such as skill, training, experience, age, race, ethnicity, English language proficiency, and the particular day labor employment strategy deployed, Atlanta's day laborers were likely to be engaged to work at a construction site, conference center, sports arena, hotel, or private residence. At these work sites, day laborers performed some of the most dangerous and physically-demanding work in Atlanta: they operated machines, demolished buildings, dug ditches, tended lawns, moved stock in and out of warehouses, set up and took down special event seating, loaded and unloaded trucks, worked on assembly lines, and helped build homes, apartments, offices, and shopping centers. Some of these men lived in homes; others lived on the streets or in homeless shelters. Some found refuge in low-rent daily, weekly, or monthly rental units; and still others shared cramped quarters in apartments and sent money to their families in Mexico, Central America, and South America.