Paper short abstract:

Witnessing extraordinary accidents or illness in waged work makes workers choose flexible daily wage jobs that they can refuse in case of fatigue or high risk. The paper shows how health and endurance is often sought through ordinary non-waged work in support of the need to legitimise the latter.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I discuss the trajectories through which workers come to do seemingly insecure and ordinary daily wage jobs of headloading or scrap collection in a working-class neighbourhood in Mumbai. Given how the memory of violent events often get embedded into ordinary lives (Das 2006), I show how witnessing extraordinary accidents, fires or prolonged illness in waged work shapes workers’ perceptions of themselves and their work. Despite the boundaryless nature of their current work – each day at a different site – they prefer that contracts negotiated daily give them the choice of refusing dangerous work or taking days off to care for tired bodies. The local waged work options of being an electrician, sweatshop worker or brick kiln worker expose them to persistent dangers of smoke inhalation, short circuit fires and machine malfunction. Based on an ethnography and interviews conducted in 2019, I take a life cycle approach to facilitate a dissolution between the boundaries of work done in the past, present and future. Adding to the literature on refusal of waged work (Millar 2014) and the circularity between formal – informal work (Mezzadri and Majumder 2020), this paper shows how good health and endurance are sought through rather than despite improvisational work. A focus on such acts of errantry (Glissant 2010) helps move away from the continued primacy of waged work, unanchor definitions of contemporary work from singular hierarchies of value and contribute to the growing call for recognition of ordinary work (Vicol, Monteith, and Williams 2021).