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A visit to a poultry slaughterhouse invariably entails encountering “jobbers”–?those often temporary employees with special contracts who are not part of the regular workforce. What is jobbing? An unusual type of work whose archaism will soon be a component of regular salaried employment? A new twist in unhinging job security and entitlements? A yet-unused, modern method to be paradoxically put into place in a rather old-fashioned, not very innovative industry? Scrutinizing the tasks given to these particular workers and observing the suspicion they engender on the part of other employees enabled the author to reconstruct how deeply ambivalent this kind of work is. An uncertainty that has to be kept in mind to understand how this outdated means of organizing labor is also the seed of a future ordering of work.