“It Is Worse in the Fields”: How Racial Capitalism Disciplines Latino Day Laborers in California’s Central Valley

Andres Arias, University of California, Merced

Latino immigrant day laborers in California’s Central Valley often experience poor working conditions and employer non-compliance with labor laws yet rarely report workplace abuses. This study situates rural day laborers’ experiences of labor and claims-making (e.g. reporting injuries and labor non-compliance), within the context of global racial capitalism. Drawing on 38 semi-structured interviews and six months of participant observation at two informal day labor hiring sites, this article analyzes how workers in rural geographies experience “subordinate inclusion” (De Genova 2013) in ways that discipline them to accept non-compliant working conditions. Findings suggest that workers’ legal status, socioeconomic status, prior work experience, and paternalistic relationships with employers, shape decisions against claims-making—processes intended to deter employer non-compliance. Instead, Latino day laborers rely on informal agreements and acts of care from employers–such as cash compensation or support during injuries—that reinforce paternalistic and co-ethnic ties, where loyalty, trust and shared migration histories discourage formal claims-making. Instances of overt racism by non-Latino employers, however, rupture this arrangement and may prompt formal reporting. While scholarship in the sociology of labor and immigration has often conceptualized the rise of low-wage, precarious labor with post-industrialization and fiscal austerity, this study illuminates how the persistence of pre-industrial work, through dynamics such as paternalism, carry forward and contribute to the global degradation of work under racial capitalism.

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 Presented in Session 45. Race, Labor, and Inequality in Modern Capitalism