11. An Anthology of Life Narratives of the “Excluded”: the Paradigmatic Case of Construction Workers

Abstract

The aim of this article is to disaggregate the daily life of subjects considered to be at risk of social exclusion. The information presented is the result of an ethnographic study during over a year in the city of Terrassa, in Barcelona. The purpose was to analyze the everyday life of construction workers. We will see that the notion of work is fundamental for our study group in order to organize many of their quotidian meanings. In this sense, through an analysis that considers work as a point of reference, we seek to achieve a double goal: first, to visualize—and denounce—the socioeconomic situation of a group of individuals who, in a few years, have gone from personifying the success of the middle-class model to integrating constant risk of social exclusion as one more element to cope with in their daily routine; and second, by using the in-depth description of the precarious daily life of our informants, to present the three-dimensional measurement model of risk of social exclusion proposed by Linares (2008: 146), and apply it to our case.