I am deeply grateful to Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson for their careful and generous engagement with my book. Their review effectively characterizes the crucial features of my argument: dwelling with day laborers’ particular circumstances even while viewing day labor as a synecdoche for widely encompassing processes of precaritization; elaborating a conception of precarity defined by contradictory temporalities of everyday work life; and grounding the project politically in reciprocal exchanges between myself and the organizations with whom I conducted fieldwork.

I also thank these scholars for raising probing questions about my book’s implications for “a politics of labour adequate to confront today’s financialized capitalism.” Mezzadra and Neilson are right to argue that this requires efforts of “organization and translation . . . across the subjective positions and experiences of figures in different global locations.” Discussions of such political relations on global and transnational scales are mainly speculative in my book. Certain passages do reflect on interchanges at worker centers between women and men and among ethnically varied groups of day laborers, grappling with questions about how to “build bridges” across difference. Yet the operations of capital unfold across the globe, precaritizing effects are felt worldwide, and hence the struggle against contemporary capitalism demands critical analysis with a more capacious geopolitical scope than my book provides. I think my interlocutors would agree, though, that sustained research like mine into granular processes of precaritized subject formation and political organization (oscillating with evocations of “diverse geographical scales”) beneficially complements their “wide approach” (enriched by references to specific social situations).

Mezzadra and Neilson also request further “concrete suggestions” for translating experiences and narrations of precarity among groups located in distinct time-spaces of capitalist activity. To me, their apt emphasis on the transmission of experiences rendered in language underscores the urgency of precisely those action steps that The Fight for Time recommends: vastly expanding the network of worker centers to incorporate workers throughout the economy and far beyond the United States and using this network to expand inquiries into multiple groups’ generative themes about precarious work life and to stage popular educational dialogues among the themes’ creators. The US day labor movement is moving in this direction by collaborating with activists in El Salvador to found worker centers in that country.

Lastly, I agree that although the idea of precarity does powerful analytical work, one concept alone cannot accomplish the political threading and binding needed to muster large-scale anticapitalist opposition. This term also has limitations as a mass call to action because “precarity” names a grievance but no radical alternative. Like Mezzadra and Neilson, I am pondering what the vexing temporalities of society-wide precarity and upsurges of anti-precarity politics at the extreme margins portend for a theory of class struggle today. To treat day labor as both exception and synecdoche vis-à-vis general syndromes of precarity is to invite questions about how to name and organize the social base of anti-precarity politics. One might imagine such politics as an effort to build cross-class alliances, perhaps under the banner of an expanded and diversified notion of the “working class.” Yet this would presuppose that classes can be readily enough distinguished from one another, and the spread of precarity has made this exceedingly difficult, for instance through the bleeding of work into uncompensated laboring time for people of all statuses. The more promising path lies in politicizing shared experiences of work—driven by capital’s system dynamics and materialized in its local operations—through organisations that coax forth expressions of such experiences by varied groups of working people, whether or not such groups define themselves in class terms. The Fight for Time records one electric moment of this sort, when volunteers at a Casa Latina workshop, including a nurse, a freelance writer, and others, felt shocking resonances between day laborers’ theme of facing “risk on all sides” and their own work-induced bodily vulnerabilities. A synecdoche, perhaps, for a work-based but not conventionally class-dependent politics?