The Effects of the Guaranteed Annual Income on the Occupational Careers of Longshoremen: A Pilot Study

摘要

The study describes changes that occur in the daily life of workers when they are separated from the workplace. The study explores how Brooklyn longshoremen on the Guaranteed Annual Income (GAI) maintain working class community. The GAI enables longshoremen with high seniority who have been displaced from full-time work because of automation who work rarely and yet receive a full annual salary. These senior longshoremen receive income without the obligation to work. This study demonstrates that longshoremen and workers in general can be better understood in terms of the dialectic of resistance and accommodation or in the same vein of informal versus formal resistance. For these senior longshoremen the GAI in place of work does not lead to apathy or degradation as social scientists expect but to the transformation of everyday community from workplace to its fringe in the hiring hall or beyond the workplace to the neighborhood.