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Who Keeps the Bridge?
What a hardware-store parking lot and two days with research administrators in Aarhus taught me about scaffolding, gardens, and the work of staying connected
Bedre et Æg idag, end en Høne imorgen.
(Better an egg today than a hen tomorrow.)
The men stood at the edge of the Home Depot parking lot, close enough to the exit to be seen and far enough from the doors not to be asked to leave. When someone came out with more lumber or drywall than one person could manage, one of them would step forward and say a single word.
Trabajo.
Some of the men were older and some much younger, and none had anything I would recognize as a retirement plan. As far as I could see, they were equal among themselves. If the answer was yes, one of them climbed into the back of the pickup truck. At the end of the day, he was paid in cash, and that was the whole of the arrangement.
I know the arrangement because my family was on the other side of it. We had the truck. A national survey of day labor in the United States, now twenty years old, found that the largest group of employers was “homeowners/renters (49 percent)” (Valenzuela et al. 2006, p. iii). That is us, in the data.
