Zombie Time, Over Time, but No Beach Time: The Temporal Challenges of Precarious Work

• In Event: 20206 - Sociology of Time Use

Abstract

This paper investigates how contingent workers confront unstable schedules. Scholarship has examined new employment structures such as platform work, but rarely compares temporal experiences of workers across different industries. How do workers outside stable organizational, temporal, and spatial boundaries experience and manage temporal instability from day to day? I draw on 120 interviews with four groups of such workers: agricultural and oilfield workers in Texas and adjunct instructors and on-demand delivery workers in NYC. Across these four groups, workers confront two time struggles: zombie time, gaps of unpaid waiting, and hectic periods of over time. I show how the two temporal experiences often fuel each other, and how workers actively manage them: minimizing zombie time, leveraging down time, and (re)interpreting over time. To capture this interplay of temporal constraints and time work, I offer the term heterogenous time and draw on Foucault’s notion of biopower to make sense of the seemingly opposing time struggles workers confront. As workers confront distinct puzzles of heterogeneous time, they enlist core parts of themselves into working or pursuing work, leaving little “beach time” outside work’s shadow.

Author

• Kathleen Griesbach, University of Texas-Austin