Abstract
Young, vigorous, mobile, and largely unattached, undocumented and documented homeless youth constitute a flexible labor force which is largely invisible, economically useful and politically disenfranchised. This chapter offers a labor analysis of homeless youth participation in multiple economies, an understudied area in the U.S. literature. Drawing on extensive participant observation with homeless young people, including unaccompanied minors, this chapter takes its foundation from qualitative, quantitative, and geospatial research conducted in Guatemala, the Mexico-US border, and the West Coast of Canada and the United States. This research includes two longitudinal participatory research studies: the Youth Trek study, a mobile health study addressing migration, work, and wellbeing; and the Labor Memoir Project, a mapping and journaling workshop on employment and income-generating activities. This chapter explores historic political and economic shifts that have resulted in deindustrialization and growth in informal sector work, and presents three key arguments. First is the twin phenomena in which informal sector work has become increasingly formalized, while formal sector work has become increasingly informal and less structured, with zero hours contracts and wages insufficient to meet housing costs. Second, laws governing minor rights of consent, including labor laws, limit the ability of homeless youth to seek a livelihood through traditional employment, increasing their vulnerability as a work force and reliance on the informal sector, including jobs doing day labor construction, domestic work, sex work, caregiving, and seasonal agricultural work such as in the cannabis industry. Third, local and international unions, youth worker organizations, nonprofits and NGOs are increasingly making efforts to empower and organize informal sector workers to contest exploitation and improve labor conditions.
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Acknowledgments
Special thanks go to the young people who took part in participatory research projects and participated in formal and informal interviews. The exacting editing skills and continuous support of Drs. Patricia and William Donovan were essential. For Fellowship support and mentoring, thanks go to Claire Brindis, Dr. P.H. at the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies at UCSF and to Pat Fox Ph.D. and Wendy Max Ph.D. at the UCSF Institute for Health and Aging. Some of the which led to this chapter comes from the Youth Trek Study, which was funded by a Technology Award grant from the NIH Supported CTSI Program (NIH NCRR UCSF-CTSI Grant Number UL1 RR024131). Jo Boyden, Ph.D. is much appreciated for her mentorship at the Oxford Department of International Development and for her patient and challenging review of drafts, and to Carmen Lucia Chiong, MBA for her ideas on illustrating the enormity of informal economies. The wisdom of John Sakowicz was much appreciated for his explication of different elements of the cannabis economy. Joan Vincent, Ph.D., Marjorie Robertson, Ph.D., Sylvia Israel, MFT, Jean Scandlyn, Ph.D., E. Cristin O’Keeffe J.D., Carol Leigh, and Slava Osowska all helped to lay the groundwork for this labor analysis. Jane Roberts and Les Scott provided proofreading assistance. Gratitude goes to Andrea Papanastassiou, M.A. for her rigor, enthusiasm, fortitude, and editorial guidance in this work. The Consortium of Street Children conference and the 4th International Conference Geographies of Children Youth and Families contributed to this work, especially with respect to the debates surrounding child labor and youth worker protections. Dr. Tatek Abebe was both gracious as a volume editor and encouraging.
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Blondell, A.D. (2016). Undocumented and Documented Homeless Youth in the US Labor Force: Economically Useful and Politically Disenfranchised. In: Abebe, T., Waters, J., Skelton, T. (eds) Laboring and Learning. Geographies of Children and Young People, vol 10. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4585-97-2_27-1
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