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Accepted Paper:
Precarious lives: daily labourers in Kyrgyzstan’s birzha
Eugenia Pesci
(University of Helsinki)
Giulio Benedetti
(Stockholm School of Economics in Riga)
Day labourers gathering at informal hiring sites can be found in almost all countries. They are unemployed, usually men, who gather on sidewalks, parking lots or other public spaces, waiting to be hired for casual jobs and receive a daily pay. In Central Asia, informal hiring sites known as mardikor bazaar (“day labourer bazaars”) or stikhiinaya birzha (“spontaneous labour exchange”) appeared already in the late Soviet period as a result of decollectivization (Galdini, 2021). In this paper, we look at how precarious daily jobs are linked to the gendered dimension and social reproduction of migrant labour (Kangas et al., 2022) through the experiences of women working at the agricultural birzha in Kyrgyzstan. Our aim is to explore how precarious workers, in particular women in migrant families, navigate informal spaces of precarious and casual labour. The birzha is inscribed in a wider work-life experience of precarity that reveals the multi-local lives of migrant families, who adopt informal strategies to navigate multiple spaces, sources of income, and household arrangements (Thieme, 2009). Adopting the lenses of precarious life allows us to go past the usual labour market and employment focus in the literature on precarity, and to blur the divide between formality and informality as it is often conceptualised from a state-centered perspective.