This dissertation traces the material experiences of low-wage workers and the unemployed in Los Angeles over the course of the Great Depression in the 1930s, in particular examining how they found work, sustenance, and shelter, how they navigated social welfare systems especially as New Deal programs rolled out, how they organized to cope with an unstable labor market, and how they met with resistance from the local elite. Accordingly, this dissertation reveals how unequal power relations in Los Angeles influenced political and economic responses to the Great Depression, and more specifically, how those power relations shaped New Deal policies at the local level. As unemployed and underemployed Angelenos searched for work and developed survival strategies by utilizing relief programs or through collective organization to cope with the ravages of economic crisis, local business and political leaders often interpreted their existence and their activities as a threat to the status quo. While these leaders, many of whom were employers and growers, required an ever-present labor supply, during times of mass unemployment, the presence of a large labor pool grew problematic. Accordingly, they sought to discipline, control, and occasionally expel members of the labor force through legal, political, and sometimes questionably constitutional means.Ultimately, this dissertation historicizes the intersections of relief and the labor market and reveals the ways in which those in power used entitlements and welfare as blunt tools to control laboring bodies. It also underscores the contradictions between the construction of the New Deal state and a historically unstable labor market on the developmental fringes of the American economy. However, it also seeks to lay bare the fact that the unemployed, the underemployed, and low-wage earners during the years of the Great Depression were not simply passive victims who wallowed in misery and hunger. Rather, people took action, whether this meant challenging low relief payments at the local welfare office, taking to the streets to protest vagrancy raids and exorbitant employment agency fees, developing alternate economic systems by organizing production-for-use cooperatives, or simply traveling in search of work.