“She’s a Flagger, and I’m a Panner”: Exploring the Intricacies of Flagging, Panhandling, and Street Economies

ABSTRACT

For survival, unhoused community members develop creative and alternative means for generating income, given most are excluded from the formal labor market. Of the various informal activities they engage in, few are more publicly visible than panhandling. Drawing upon 66 interviews with marginalized and street-involved persons in Winnipeg, Canada, we explore participants’ narratives and varied experiences with two distinct begging activities, “panning” and “flagging.” We unmask why participants chose specific activities and illuminate these activities’ structures, norms, and social dynamics. We show that while panhandling is a primarily solitary behavior, flagging is a highly organized and intricate type of informal labor characterized by social networks, cohesion, conflict and control over space. Accordingly, we discuss how social and environmental structures, norms, and dynamics can support and constrict marginalized people’s informal labor opportunities.

Acknowledgements

This paper is dedicated to Christine, who kept us laughing while sharing her valuable insights. We will honor your words and never forget you. We express our sincerest gratitude to Winnipeg’s street community and all who invited us into their lives. We are also grateful for the anonymous reviewers at Deviant Behavior whose careful engagement with our work has illuminated new possibilities in witnessing, studying and writing about deviance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Note that not all who engage in informal economic activities are unhoused (see Estrada and Hondagneu-Sotelo 2011; Ferrell 2006; Mukhija and Loukaitou-Sideris 2014).

² Flagging occurs irrespective of whether drivers have their windows opened or closed (the norm during Winnipeg’s frigid winters); the expectation is that those who want to give money will roll down their windows when approached by a flagger, so flaggers are not deterred by closed windows.

³ Participants articulated this preference. This is consistent with our observations across the city, where flagging appeared more common than panning. Compared to our observations in the eight other cities where we have conducted fieldwork, Winnipeg had the most visibly prevalent flagging culture. This raises notable questions about whether/how local dynamics, street communities, nuances, and/or socio-environmental factors influence the micro-varieties of begging work, which we encourage scholars to consider in the future.

⁴ Via income generation, for example.

⁵ Unhoused persons in Canada routinely struggle to get and keep government-issued photo IDs. This is due to the strict documentation requirements to obtain ID, challenges with adhering to often long and complicated bureaucratic processes, the costs involved, and routinely losing or having their IDs taken or stolen, including by police). To illustrate, many provinces necessitate that individuals provide originals of birth certificates, passports, and/or Indian status cards, and proof of residency and permanent address (e.g., utility bills, bank statements, credit card bills) and charge a fee for processing (e.g., Manitoba Public Insurance 2024). These challenges make it difficult for unhoused persons to (re)secure and maintain identification.

⁶ Participants predominantly self-identified as drug users in public spaces, although not everyone panhandling and flagging consumes drugs.

⁷ Our data do not suggest that demographics (e.g., race, gender, Indigeneity, age) influence begging work, though they likely influence people’s experiences while begging.

⁸ See Patrick (2018:494–496) for how other service-providing panhandlers look down on “shaking a cup,” rooted in begging based on pity and charity. See also Lankenau (1999b:9) for an example of how a sign-using panhandler considers this less aggressive than those approaching others and verbally asking for money.

⁹ See Wallerstein (2022) for a discussion of how panhandlers seek to elicit pity during encounters.

¹⁰ Formal policing shapes flagging behavior and culture insofar as police, and more often auxiliary police may stop, ticket, or tell PEH to move on. However, negative encounters with police “disrupting” flaggers’ activities were neither routine nor consistent, with participants reporting varied experiences with police in the context of informal activities (ranging from positive to neutral/inconsequential and negative). Overall, participants’ narratives focused on informal policing (among PEH) as the most consequential in shaping their activities and the broader flagging culture in Winnipeg.

¹¹ Other “indecent behaviours” for those engaged in informal economy work on the street include urinating and/or sleeping on the sidewalk; the adjacent behaviors that may upset policymakers and law enforcement agents (Duneier 1999:159).

¹² See Duneier (1999:83) for a brief discussion about “men without accounts” competing for “good spots.”

¹³ This is consistent with research on the work of California street vendors, which finds “ … important segmentation and heterogeneity when comparing street vending sites,” such that the most disadvantaged venders are relegated to an area “ … surrounded by crime, poverty and exclusion” (Martinez, Rennie Short, and Estrada 2018:22).

¹⁴ Lankenau (1999b) also documented passerby’s spitting and assaulting PEH.

¹⁵ See also Wallerstein (2022:11).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council under Grant [435-2022-0590].

Notes on contributors

Marta-Marika Urbanik

Marta-Marika Urbanik is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Criminological Research, Department of Sociology, University of Alberta. She is an urban ethnographer, specializing in homelessness, gangs, and inner-city policing.

Kathaina Maier

Katharina Maier is an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Canada. She has published on issues pertaining to prison violence, prison masculinities, prisoner re-entry, urban poverty, social marginality and halfway houses.

Carolyn Greene

Carolyn Greene is an Assistant Professor in the Public Safety Department at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her research expertise lays in policing, youth justice, policy and reintegration.

Bilguundari Enkhtugs

Bilguundari Enkhtugs is a PhD student at the Centre for Criminological Research, in the Department of Sociology at the University of Alberta. Her broader research interests include victimization, community supervision, digital criminology, urban poverty, and social marginality and justice.