Paper short abstract:

I focus on life stories of municipal waste disposal workers – a precarious field of employment, using ethnographic research, examining urban spaces to uncover the relationship between waste and environment, labor relations and sustainability, through intersectional analysis.

Paper long abstract:

Spaces of waste disposal and dynamics of waste workers in Israel, are under-researched from the point of view of precarity and environment. This research focuses on life stories of municipal waste disposal workers and includes those involved in the chain of waste collection: truck drivers, bin preparers, and disposal workers. Some 8,000 workers are presently employed in waste disposal in Israel (Central Bureau Statistics, 2019). Similar to other sites around the world, this is a precarious field of employment (Housman, 1997; Rogers, 2000; Hudson, 2001; Hamilton et al., 2019), which is presently undergoing accelerated processes of privatization and is characterized by indirect employment (Benjamin, 2015). Literature dealing with the sociology of labor relations has included only a limited amount of inquiry into the perspectives of such employees. The waste collection process is documented using ethnographic research, examining urban spaces to uncover the relationship between waste and environment, labor relations and sustainability. The ethnographic documentation of waste disposal workers is from a perspective of intersectionality, which links gender, class, and ethnicity, as well as nationality and religion.

Therefore, the paper will focus on an analysis of low-status laborers through the prism of their over-lapping marginality, as I jointly discuss precarity through manhood, status, and other identity categories, through labor relations. I will offer an ethnographic analysis while demonstrating the ways in which working conditions deepen the marginalization of waste workers, arguing that the contemporaneous shift in the Israeli context is unique and complex due to the country's special ethno-national character, that already exist due to the neoliberal precarity reality and the state of the environment.