Laura Orrico’s masterful book, ‘Making Precarity Work: Life on the Edge of Venice Beach’ is a five-year ethnographic study of art vendors at the busy Venice Beach walkway that explores how unemployed people have created a community of mutual social and economic support. The vendors who work on the Venice Beach walkway have built what Orrico calls a “subversive safety net,” an array of supports that are not offered by the limited job opportunities available to them (mostly low-wage jobs in restaurants or stores) . . . Orrico is quick to point out the downsides of this life. The subversive safety net is not available to all comers; outsiders are chased out or consigned to less-trafficked areas until they can prove they fit in . . . Nevertheless, it is remarkable how the vendors of Venice Beach have managed to build a community of mutual support that is 100 percent transitory (the walkway is torn down every evening and rebuilt every morning). Making a living is still hard, especially for the homeless, but it is perhaps less bleak than normally depicted in the sociological literature. And this is the main point: sociologists should not prejudge precarious workers as inherently and entirely hopeless . . . the vendors on Venice Beach have built meaningful lives out of precarious work.

Work and Occupations