Texas Permian Basin, 2018 (PC: K Griesbach)
Selected Publications (for all publications, see my CV)
Karnes City, Texas, 2021 (PC: K Griesbach)
“Unequal Reach: Cyclical and Amplifying Ties among Agricultural and Oilfield Workers in Texas.” 2021. Griesbach, Kathleen. Work and Occupations OnlineFirst.
What kinds of ties do agricultural and oil and gas workers form in the field, and how do they use them later on? Why do they use them differently? Scholarship highlights how weak ties can link people to valuable information, while strong ties can be critical for day-to-day survival. Yet many mechanisms affect how workers form and use social networks over time and space. Drawing on 60 interviews and observations with agricultural and oilfield workers in Texas, I examine how both groups form strong ties of fictive kinship when living together in the field far from home—pooling resources, sharing reproductive labor, and using the discourse of family to describe these relationships. Then I examine how they use these ties very differently later in practice. Oilfield workers often use their fictive kin ties to move up and around the industry across space, time, and companies: amplifying ties. In contrast, agricultural workers renew the same strong ties for survival from season to season, maintaining cyclical ties. The comparison highlights how industry mobility ladders, tempos, and geographies affect how workers can use their networks in practice. While both agricultural and oilfield workers become fictive kin in situations of intense proximity, structural differences give their networks unequal reach.
“Algorithmic Control in Platform Food Delivery Work.” 2019. Griesbach, Kathleen, Adam Reich, Luke Elliott-Negri and Ruth Milkman. Socius 5: 1-15.
Building on an emerging literature concerning algorithmic management, this article analyzes the processes by which food delivery platforms control workers and uncovers variation in the extent to which such platforms constrain the freedoms—over schedules and activities—associated with gig work. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 55 respondents working on food delivery platforms, as well as a survey of 955 platform food delivery workers, we find that although all of the food delivery platforms use algorithmic management to assign and evaluate work, there is significant cross-platform variation. Instacart, the largest grocery delivery platform, exerts a type of control we call “algorithmic despotism,” regulating the time and activities of workers more stringently than other platform delivery companies. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of the spectrum of algorithmic control for the future of work.
Brownsville, Texas, 2021 (PC: K Griesbach)
“Dioquis: Being without Doing in the Migrant Agricultural Labor Process. 2020. Griesbach, Kathleen. Ethnography 21(4):481-505.
Being on call without being on the clock is an important but underappreciated source of insecurity among low-wage workers. Drawing on fieldwork with 20 agricultural workers of the Texas-Mexico border region, this paper identifies several stages where workers are made to wait without pay and links these stages to economic precarity. These intervals occur at the local bus station, a hub for recruitment and departure, at home in both the US and Mexico, during travel to distant work sites, and in seasonal lodging. Workers use the Spanish colloquial term ‘dioquis’, which they define as ‘being without doing’, to describe such uncertain periods of waiting which are required for them to work. Through dioquis, a liminal state, employers displace industry risk onto workers, leading to long-term instability. Expanding the implications of dioquis, the paper reveals the significance of temporal uncertainty for the marginalized across other contexts of work and waiting.
New York, 2017 (PC: K Griesbach)
Under Review
“Zombie Time and Overwork: Heterogeneous Time from Platform to Classroom. Revise & Resubmit.
How do workers without a stable schedule or workplace experience time? What do their experiences reveal about the capitalist time regime? Drawing on 120 interviews with four groups of workers who experience temporal instability in their work—agricultural and oilfield workers in Texas and adjunct instructors and on-demand delivery workers in NYC—I identify two distinct patterns of time struggle. First, many workers endure frustrating periods of unpaid waiting in the labor process that I call zombie time; second, they confront overwhelming bouts of overwork, struggles to contain work within available time frames. Zombie time and overwork, which create conflicts with workers’ life rhythms and require significant coordination work, are obscured in the framework of a bounded work day and linear career. I argue for a different framework, heterogeneous time, to center the slowdowns and speedups of the capitalist time regime. Examining old and new forms of precarious work through the prism of heterogeneous time reveals the ubiquity of both zombie time and overwork for increasing numbers of workers today, and the power imbalances they reflect and exacerbate.
“Double Framings: Accounting for Insecure Work.” Under Review.
While research highlights the negative impacts of temporal uncertainty, fewer examine spatial uncertainty, though work is increasingly untethered to a stable workplace. Previous research finds many workers individualize risk and uncertainty. This paper draws on 120 interviews with agricultural and oilfield workers in Texas and university adjuncts and on-demand delivery workers in New York City to ask, How do workers account for temporal and spatial instability, or positional uncertainty? How do the stories they tell, about work and identity, square with prevailing accounts of cultural individualism? Consequently, what are the political implications of these accounts? I find workers make sense of uncertainty through a double framing: they tell anchoring individualizing stories alongside critical stories pointing to refusal or highlighting structural inequities. Most stories ultimately sit between consent and refusal, acceptance and resistance, as workers struggle to settle on a narrative about themselves and knit a coherent story about how past, present and future fit together. I show how one’s configuration of positional uncertainty and position in social structure correspond to particular double framings. They imply greater political potential than previously emphasized, while illuminating the harmful consequences of insecure work for identity.
Texas Permian Basin, 2018 (PC: K Griesbach)