Habitus of Nightwork

This chapter completes the theoretical framework by providing the intellectual premise for an embodied study of precarity and incorporating the empirical material to argue for an anthropology of work within migration studies. This chapter explains how despite the worker’s intuitive knowledge on their body’s limits and capabilities, the lack of decent working conditions and harsh labour discipline results in the kind of precarity that is sedimented deep within the body. Using Bourdieu’s concept of ‘somatic compliance’, the four nightworkers introduced in the previous chapter are analysed to peel back each layer of precarity that these ‘bio-automatons’ (half-human, half-machine) experience. These workers learn and develop bodily management techniques to adapt and resist regimes of disciplines. Those bodies who do not develop such techniques are slowly and surely crushed by these methods of destruction. Work breaks them. In short, the habitus of nightwork forms and is then deployed as bodily knowledge by the many lower-paid workers in order to adapt and survive the nightshift, and by the few high-ups to make sure that the jobs get done. I call this ‘habitus of nightwork’.