Seeking Work Daily: Supply, Demand, and Spatial Dimensions of Day Labor in Two Global Cities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Day labor, the industry in which workers, primarily men, seek temporary employment daily in open-air street markets or curb-side hiring sites, is a burgeoning market in the United States and a historically important, but declining industry in Japan. Using data from surveys of day laborers in Tokyo and Los Angeles, we analyze the unique characteristics of these two markets, comparing and contrasting the workers, the demand for their employment, and the spatial dimensions of this industry. We find that day laborers in Los Angeles are predominantly young, recent immigrants undertaking varied jobs. In contrast, day laborers in Tokyo are aging and mostly native Japanese displaced from Japan’s slouching post-industrial economy. Demand for day labor is equally contrasting. In Los Angeles, employers are more diversified, associated with a network of industries, and a consumer base that is broad and elastic. On the other hand, employers in Tokyo are overwhelmingly in construction and day laborers only cater to sub-contractors or middlemen. We speculate on the future of day labor in both cities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".