UC Berkeley

Labor conditions and real wages in the United States have atrophied over the past thirty years, weakened by neoliberal governance, shifting business models, and the decline of private-sector unions. This dissertation examines the San Francisco taxi industry as a site of these changes, and uses archival research and ethnography to understand the emerging intersection of structural changes, political and legal activism, and worker identities. I argue that free market practices and new regimes of work have transformed not only the nature of work, but also the subjectivities of U.S. workers and the dynamics of collective worker politics.

Through a legal and historical analysis of how employment identities and work are constructed under U.S. law, my dissertation traces the bifurcation of worker classification into employees and independent contractors from the New Deal to the present. I show how the erratic legal analysis of who constitutes a state-protected employee has its origins not in an objective reality about the changing nature of work itself, but rather in shifting cultural meanings about the individual in relation to phases of capitalism. Drawing on court decisions and the political and legal history of San Francisco taxi drivers, my research situates the production of juridical precarity alongside the sociolegal construction of taxi drivers as working-class entrepreneurs.

Complementing this historical analysis, my ethnographic research examines the contemporary politics of work and work law amongst cab drivers and those who advocate on their behalf. I argue, contrary to existing labor law scholarship, that post-classification legal challenges to the independent contractor identity are ineffective; they reify the inequalities between "master" and "servant" by ignoring the subjectivities and desires of workers. My interviews reveal that for San Francisco taxi workers, legal work categories have become embodied cultural and political identities. Many immigrant taxi workers, for example, embrace their independent contractor status because it provides legal validation for their identities as aspiring entrepreneurs, propelling them closer to the possibility of upward social mobility. For my interlocutors, working-class entrepreneurship, even alongside material deprivation and poor working conditions, enables an affective freedom and re- affirms a working-class masculinity, lost amidst shifts in modes of capitalist production.

Building on these historical and ethnographic findings, my dissertation considers new possibilities of worker collectivities and a new politics of work law. I consider "worker centers" as sites for potentially radical work politics. Precisely because they function outside the context of existing and outmoded forms of labor law, worker centers, I argue, respond to the subjectivities and intersectional identities of contemporary immigrant workers and have powerful potential to compel a new politics of work and work law attentive to ever-shifting forms of labor.