The Fight for Time is a timely and welcome intervention in a number of fields, ranging from political theory to labor and urban studies and from migration to Latino studies. It is a scholarly as well as a political intervention, written on the basis of a deep and prolonged collaboration with day laborers and worker centers in Seattle and Portland. The gambit of Paul Apostolidis’s book is to write an analysis of contemporary capitalism through engagement with and from the perspective of a particular subjective figure: the migrant day laborer in the United States. This is a challenging and important task that both pushes critical theory to an encounter with a wide range of material circumstances and invigorates the author’s approach in ways answerable to the experiences and conditions of the subjects at stake. Contemporary capitalism is usually investigated in critical debates with a privileged reference point to such questions as financialization, digital labor, or the communicative dimensions of neoliberalism. Apostolidis does not deny the relevance of such approaches. But he is convinced that the pains and joys, the desperation, and weird sense of responsibility cultivated by day laborers provide a particularly effective angle from which to grasp a more generalized dynamic of precarity that is reshaping labor and life in ways both subjectively embodied and objectively rooted. It is important to note that in so doing the author of The Fight for Time never forgets the specificity of the condition of day laborers. Rather, he uses the rhetorical figure of the “synecdoche” to register the wider resonances of his analysis and findings.

Without claiming the full depth of ethnographic immersion, Apostolidis takes seriously his engagement (along with two research assistants) with the daily operations of worker centers, with the messy environment of the “corner” where day laborers assemble to fight for a job, and with their conviviality and daily strivings. This approach means that the theoretical aspects of the book are enmeshed within practices of thick description and popular education that yield “generative themes” based in the workers’ own experiences and struggles. Thinkers like Kathi Weeks, Lauren Berlant, or Jodi Dean, as well as the panoply of autonomist Marxism, inform the analysis in ways that Apostolidis both embraces and pushes beyond. The tradition of critical pedagogy pioneered by Paulo Freire in Brazil provides a basis for the whole work and is dealt with extensively in the book’s first chapter. The constant interplay between theme and theory provides Apostolidis with an original and responsive means of conducting “militant investigation” on the basis of a radical political commitment. The politics of day labor that emerges from the book is shaped by the reciprocity of exchanges between the researcher and day laborers and a movement that is never linear and always remains conscious of the power relations at stake. Together, these elements constitute a method that at once allows the reader to grasp the specificity of the condition and movements of day laborers and produces the opening that is encapsulated by the figure of the synecdoche.

The book begins with a series of theses on precarity, which for Apostolidis offer a kind of bridge between the experiences of day laborers and the wider production of subjectivity under contemporary capitalism. The debate on precarity has been lively and wide in scope over recent years, with approaches ranging from an emphasis on structural dimensions to analyses of the remaking of class and to ontological and existential claims about the human condition. Apostolodis skillfully negotiates this maze of positions, staking out a focus on time as a means of grasping the salient characteristics of precarity and precarization. Precarity, in this book, is both an experience that encapsulates a wider condition and a process that displaces fixity by subjecting workers to a harsh regime of discipline and control. Time is both homogeneous and fragmented in an age of precarity, as the explosion of the unity of the working day combines with an ever-growing domination of the “empty and homogeneous” time of capital valorization and accumulation. As Apostolidis writes, “throughout the employment hierarchy working people are running out of time and living out of time” (p. 8, emphasis in original). For day laborers this situation mandates not only a condition of suffering that often turns into desperation but also a compulsion to always be on the move, instantiating in a very peculiar way the neoliberal notion of “employability.” Being migrants and often undocumented, they also have to negotiate the ghost of “deportability” (to use Nicholas De Genova’s term), which makes the “fight for time” in their case even more complicated, messy, and intense. This is an aspect that Apostolidis rightly stresses in his book.

This emphasis on time does not come without a converse interest in space and its production. The Fight for Time is rooted in specific urban contexts that exhibit the wastelands, dispossession, and precarization that proliferate within the wealthy landscapes of the American Northwest, more often pictured as the home of Boeing and Microsoft. However, the book’s engagement with Freire’s popular education and Apostolidis’s encounters with Latin American day laborers open his analysis to wider vistas of crisis, migration, and capitalist transition. If the empirical focus of the analysis remains rigorously local, the stories and propositions related in the book are always evocative of diverse geographical scales. For instance, his account of the struggles of workers to obtain work at the “corner” is informed by the notion of “corporeal excess” developed by Hagar Kotef and Merav Amir with respect to the situation in occupied Palestine. Characterized by an impossible but necessary switch between bodily immobility and movement, shaped by a “bipolar temporality” that moves between waiting and the frantic scramble for jobs, the “corner” is a spatial formation that Apostolidis investigates from the angle of the temporality of precarity. In these concentrated spaces of vulnerability and struggle, some of the most important themes at the center of the book take extreme and clear shape. What we can term a kind of subaltern vitalism oscillates between the acknowledgment of mainstream and even neoliberal rhetorical figures (such as the distinction between “good” and “bad workers” or the ethics of “responsibility”) and a push toward forms of refusal and solidarity. Apostolidis stresses the need to remain faithful to the dynamics of this space, where most day laborers do time, even as his research and political engagement is more formally directed toward “worker centers,” which often position themselves as an alternative to the “corner.”

“Risk on All Sides, Eyes Wide Open” is the title of a chapter on the occupational safety and health issues faced by day laborers. Here again we see both a tendency for these subjects to assume a personalized responsibility for their well-being on the job and the development of a critical attitude that registers the uneven power relations that absolve employers of accountability and obligations. For Apostolidis, these dynamics are driven by the need of day laborers to work “purely for money and out of sheer necessity” (p. 98). With pointed reference to the Marxian concept of “abstract labor,” he shows how the work of these subjects “loses all particularity and is reduced to a cash for time equivalence” (p. 98). This abstract element exists in tension with the embodied and lived experiences and struggles of day laborers. An emphasis on this tension enables a political reading that connects such experiences and struggles with those of other subjects within the contemporary composition of living labor and, at the same time, necessitates attention to the “difference” and specificity of a figure such as the migrant day laborer. Some of the most important challenges for a politics of labor adequate to confront today’s financialized capitalism arise here. Apostolidis advocates “a politics that merges universal ambitions to change history, which are indispensable to structural change, with responsiveness to group differences” (p. 14). The privileged organizational form for such a politics is for him the “worker center.” A demand for “worker centers for all workers” is indeed the concluding political proposition of The Fight for Time. These “quirky places” combine the management of the interface between day laborers and employers with the organization of political expression and action that address the imbalances and injustices shaping labor relations. They are places where, although under dire conditions, day laborers (as well as other subjects) can build a form of collective power.

Worker centers are indeed peculiar institutions of labor in the United States, where they have made in recent times outstanding contributions to a reinvention of social and metropolitan unionism. Such attempts are underway in many parts of the world, although they take different names and display different characteristics. At stake in all these efforts is the need to build bridges across the increasing heterogeneity of living labor, to negotiate a panoply of differences toward the making of coalitions capable of effectively transforming relations of power. Such “differences” are often to be found even among seemingly homogeneous conditions, as Apostolidis’s scattered references to issues of gender among day laborers demonstrate. This is definitely a point we would have liked to see more developed in his book, because it points to the more general question of a politics of “difference” and heterogeneity. Working through this terrain is for us a crucial and difficult political task that requires not only the multiplication of investigations such as the one Apostolidis makes by focusing on a single subjective figure but also a wider reflection on the conceptual language and organizational tools that allow the confrontation of such a task. For us, this political task is more than a matter of trading off depth for breadth in critical research on changing global conditions of labor and subjectivity. At stake is a question of organization and translation in political action and engagement that must necessarily work between and across the subjective positions and experiences of figures in different global locations. This is why we prefer to take a wide approach as opposed to Apostolidis’s focus on a single figure. It is not as if Apostolidis is unaware of the limitations of his focus or the need to join his work up both to the efforts of activist communities and other political thinkers. In the end, though, we need some concrete suggestions or initiatives that address how such articulation or translation can be accomplished.

The closest Apostolidis comes to such suggestions or initiatives is through the figure of the synecdoche that connects the subjective experiences of day laborers to wider conditions of precarity. We have earlier noted how he skillfully negotiates the debate on precarity that has been carried out in critical intellectual and activist work for quite some time now. Even if he productively relates the question of precarity to the more general one of time, we are tempted to ask whether the notion of precarity continues to provide us with a sufficient conceptual and political basis to build the bridges we mention earlier. Having ourselves used that notion, we sometimes have the impression that it has been stretched and squeezed to the point where its political utility has been tested. In addition to questions about whether the precarious worker can provide a class figure or precariat capable of drawing together diverse experiences of labor, exploitation, and dispossession, there is the issue of whether a politics of precarity can ultimately extricate itself from a politics that promotes the productivity of stable work. Although we definitely see a role for such a politics in negotiating the multiplicity of different subjectivities, times, and scales that make up the world of labor today, we do not think that one concept alone can bear the weight of the organizational task at hand. Nonetheless, there will always be a place for studies that approach the question of contemporary labor with the care, richness, and critical sensitivity that Apostolidis exhibits in The Fight for Time.