Conclusion: The Significance of Nightwork

On the whole, the book demonstrates the migrants’ experiences of courage, determination, joy, suffering and entrapment, and visibilises their hidden labour, under-the-skin precarity and the bodily experiences of researching nightwork. I portray and analyse their lived experiences to understand better how the somatic compliance works in this (as well as in other) sector where these workers learn to tolerate and internalise the kind of terror that turns these bio-automatons (halfhumans, half-machines) into obedient individuals. This chapter highlights the book’s key findings and its contribution to the debates on the demand for disposable migrants in post-industrial societies, from the glocturnal city as its exemplary site of investigation to the production of disposability and that of invisibility, which combined push nightworkers on the lowest level of precarity in the labour system. This throws light on post-circadian capitalism, foregrounding a temporal axis with which to think about the invisibilisation of certain forms of work, next to the spatial axis already employed to understand a similar process in the case of domestic labour. I expect that readers of this book will thereafter be more aware of the valuable contribution of such people to the modern capitalist societies. More, I desire that those in higher positions similar to the pecking order described in this book, will be moved in good ways and get motivated in improving or changing for the better working conditions and (immigration) policies that inflect negatively on the lives of those somewhat unfairly classed as unskilled workers.