WorkNets

Notes on informal work networks: how people find work, trade favours and organise without a firm or a union.

• Fishing crews on the southern Baltic: crews form by family and by boat, not by contract. A skipper "asks" and a man "goes". Payment is a share. See FishermanNotes.
• Day labour markets in southern Europe: a corner, a time of day, a set of unwritten rates. Newcomers underprice, then learn.
• Craft guilds that never quite died: the compagnonnage in France, journeymen still walking.
• "Work parties" for barn raising, threshing, hog killing in the American Midwest; food as payment; declining but not gone in Amish and Mennonite areas.

These networks are culture as much as economics. Add cases you know first hand.